“Leaving town”
By Rev. Michael Stonhouse
Meditation – Wednesday, April 3, 2024
Luke 24:13-35 (Forward, p. 65) CEV p. 1097
I have often wondered about all that was going on in the minds and emotions of those two disciples on the Emmaus Road that first Easter afternoon. Certainly, they were bewildered and despondent and without any sense of hope. In a sense, I don’t blame them for wanting to ‘leave town’, wanting to leave Jerusalem. Previously, it would have had warm and precious memories, but now, with the execution of Jesus so fresh in their minds, they couldn’t wait to put that city, and those memories, behind them. I can quite understand where these two men were coming from. Sometimes we too, after our times of sorrow and great upheaval, feel a need to make a clean break of it, and get away from it for a while.
So, as might well be expected, these two men, as they were walking along, were trying to process it, trying to make sense of it. I often feel this way at the conclusion of a murder mystery on TV when things just don’t ‘seem to add up.’ The problem often is that I am missing some pertinent information, sometimes because I didn’t pick up on it, or sometimes because the writer assumed it but didn’t mention it outright. That was exactly the problem with these two disciples. They were missing some crucial information that would serve to make sense of it for them. Two things probably happened. First, as we often heard in the gospel accounts, the disciples simply didn’t ‘get it’ when Jesus predicted His death and resurrection. But then, just who would have ever ‘got it’, got something quite so unbelievable, quite so ‘out of this world’? Nobody, just nobody, expects three-day old corpses to return to life. And secondly, who would have ever assembled, put together, the Hebrew Scriptures for them to lead them step by step to this conclusion?
But it was exactly the latter that Jesus did for them as they walked along. He opened the Scriptures to them, systematically from start to finish, to explain why He’d ‘had to die before entering into His glory.’ But even then, they didn’t realize who it was who’d joined them on the road. It was only as He joined them for a meal and had blessed the bread in His characteristic manner that their eyes were opened. And so, buoyed up by this, they simply had to return to ‘the scene of the crime’, Jerusalem, the city they’d been avoiding, to tell the others. Once so despondent and sorrowing, they were now full of joy. And, should not this be our sentiment as well, even
though at times we are faced with our own sorrows and calamities? Jesus is alive, alive for ever more, in our lives and in our world. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Forward notes: “Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread” (verse 35).
“In a particularly difficult period during my college years when I was struggling with questions of mortality and belief about the afterlife, I made an appointment to meet with the rector of the church I was then attending. He didn’t present himself as an expert in these matters but considered himself a fellow seeker.
“Together we explored the resurrection narratives and, in particular, Jesus’s encounter with his disciples on the road to Emmaus. As we read about the Risen Christ’s encounter with his grieving friends, the priest looked at me, almost in astonishment, and said, ‘Something real happens here.’ We re-read the passage, and I saw it myself as if for the first time: Jesus’s story does not end in death.
“When I am struggling with questions about mortality and the afterlife, I return to that encounter with my past, the disciples, and Jesus. It is different every time but always: something real happens here.”
Moving Forward: “Where and how do you find support when you are struggling spiritually?"