SUNDAY 10 APRIL 2005 : Third Sunday of Easter
Acts 2: 14a, 36-41; Luke 24: 13-35
I think I owe a small apology to a couple of members of the congregation. It arises from the service of ?´Prayer Around the Cross?? in St Michael??s Roman Catholic Church in the evening on Good Friday. I had arrived immediately before the service began, just as people who had sat further back in the pews had been invited to move forward closer to the cross. I spotted some St Lukans moving forward and sat between them. Then, for the rest of the time and leaving afterwards, I didn??t acknowledge them at all. I??m sorry for that.
I realised in retrospect that, apart from a couple of alt.worship occasions in St Lukes, that service was the first time this year, and indeed many months longer than that, that I had been to church just to go to church, for myself, with no responsibilities at all for anything in the service. And I found that I was feeling overwhelmed by the story of Good Friday. It had become personal.
Six days earlier, when during the Palm Sunday service I read aloud a longish portion of the Passion narrative from Matthew??s Gospel, and then again on Good Friday when I read aloud the end of John??s Passion narrative, I felt like I was reading these very familiar stories for the first time. They had a sense of immediacy, a sense of them narrating something that had only just happened. Some of you may have noticed that at a couple of points on both occasions there were catches in my voice.
And then on Good Friday night with the candle-flickering silences, the shroud-draped cross and the Taiz?à chants, I felt like the writer of that most poignant of hymns, "My song is love unknown." "Here might I stay and sing," the words went through my mind. "This is my friend, / in whose sweet praise / I all my days / could gladly spend." In one of those inexplicable actions of the mind, Prayer Around the Cross on Good Friday was about "my friend" whose life had just been cruelly and prematurely taken away. I didn??t want to talk to anybody just then. A friend??s death can make one withdraw into oneself. I know that from experience ?± too many friends died of Aids-related illnesses in the 90s, some of the brightest and wittiest, the loveliest and most promising people I have known.
A couple of days again when I began preparation for today, I came to read the story that Luke tells, a story repeated nowhere else in the Bible, of two disciples withdrawn into themselves. I felt I was among kindred spirits. The narrative, described by John Spong as an "elegant gem of a story", portrays two disciples walking the seven miles to a village named Emmaus on the third day after the crucifixion, the day of resurrection. They talked together as they walked, and were so lost in themselves and their grief that they did not notice another traveller on the road, and did not recognise him when he spoke to them.
He asked what they were talking about. "They stood still," Luke simply writes, "looking sad." We know "sad"; we see that expression on the faces of families and close friends at funerals, especially funerals that are untimely. And we also know the feeling that these two expressed, "?ñwe had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel." That hope had come crashing down in the act of the crucifixion. I thought of some of my 90s friends, of John, and Rudi, and Mark, for instance, and of the dashed hopes as a promising cartoonist, one of ?´Classic Hits?? best DJs ever, and a respected journalist each went through their Calvary of harrowing death. I could identify with these two erstwhile followers of Jesus in their emptiness and loss. The Emmaus road story was becoming personal, too.
Luke masterfully uses the narrative to portray the risen Christ himself as the one who opened the Scriptures, including "Moses" ?± that is, the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures ?± the prophets, and the Psalms so that all were seen to point to Jesus as the crucified and risen one. This was unquestionably a major preoccupation of the first generation or two of Christians. They searched their Scriptures for clues as to the meaning of what they had experienced in Jesus?? crucifixion and then their experiences of his ongoing, empowering presence overcoming the fact of his death.
The gospel-writer that tradition calls Luke had a strong sense of the divine necessity that led to Jesus?? cross. The story of the suffering saviour, Luke believed, was attested to in the Scriptures. It was inescapable. Luke, whose gospel was written some twenty to thirty years after the apostle Paul wrote his various letters, in this narrative in particular, gives substance to the earlier conviction of Paul whose faith in the lordship of Jesus resided in the conviction that these things had occurred "in accordance with the scriptures".
What Luke narrates as happening on one evening, with Jesus teaching a couple of disciples while walking along a road to a village some seven miles away from Jerusalem, is a symbolic telling of what happened over a number of months and years. The dejected and scattered followers of Jesus worked through their sense of deep loss and shattered hopes, and also the bewildering, vivid experiences that many of them had of the ongoing living and lively presence of Jesus with them. Paul, who writes of Peter, and the twelve, and over five hundred followers of Jesus having such vivid, overwhelming, transformational experiences, describes even himself having such an experience ?± some three to five years after all the others, and he hadn??t even known Jesus in the flesh.
What did all this mean? The only thing to do was to look for clues in the Scriptures. As they searched and spoke together and clarified their experiences and insights, they found many clues ?± enough for Paul to be convinced that both death and resurrection were "in accordance with the Scriptures." Enough, in fact, for those "ah ha!" moments of insight and knowing to be described by Luke in these two symbolically representative disciples as "our hearts burning within us".
What was it that gave them that "ah ha!" moment? "When he was at table with them," Luke wrote, "he took the bread and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognised him; and he vanished out of their sight?ñ And they rose that same hour and returned to Jerusalem?ñ Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he was known to them in the breaking of bread."
By the time Luke??s Gospel was written, the church??s common meal was apparently in some unique sense thought to be the meeting place between the believer and the Lord of life. In the year 56, three decades before Luke wrote, Paul had written in his first letter to the Corinthians of a tradition handed on to him, that on the night of his arrest Jesus had taken bread, blessed it, broken it, and given it to his disciples to eat. Take?ñbless?ñbreak?ñgive ?± already a liturgical action associated with the death of Jesus, was also expressed by Luke as an action associated with his risen life. In a symbolic first Easter Day narrative Luke uses words which are generally recognised as the highly developed technical words of early Christian liturgical actions. Take, bless, break, give?ñ
The fourfold formula appears on a number of occasions in the Gospels besides the three Last Supper narratives and the Emmaus narrative. In the stories of the feeding of the multitudes in the three Synoptic Gospels ?± Mark and Matthew each have two accounts, one of feeding five thousand "men", the other of feeding four thousand "people" ?± Jesus is described as taking bread, blessing and breaking it, and giving it to be eaten. John??s Gospel has the same story, but here is only taking, blessing and giving bread. John has no Last Supper narrative, but he has a long and complex section where Jesus describes himself as the "bread of life", and for John that bread is broken once, on the cross at crucifixion.
Although there is no other reference to this action at meals, sharing food was such a feature of Jesus?? ministry ?± in a table fellowship which knew no restrictions, no limits ?± it is not unreasonable to assume that take, bless, break, give was a very familiar action among those who knew Jesus first-hand. Clearly, by the final three decades of the first century when the Gospels appeared, the regular use of take, bless, break and give in the church??s common meal resonated with the early Christians as moments when they and the risen Jesus were particularly close.
It was in the, by now, familiar taking, blessing, breaking and giving, Luke ?± writing in the 80s ?± asserts, that the eyes of the two disciples in Emmaus were opened. Eyes being "opened" is a term used in both Testaments to describe a "seeing", a "knowing", a "realising". It is as we might say when not having grasped something, then finding we do understand it, "Oh, now I see what you mean." It is, obviously, a metaphorical "sight", not a literal blindness, being removed. Rather, it is an awareness of an Other, of a Presence mediated by familiar ritual linked with profound stories about Jesus.
For almost two thousand years, when bread has been taken, blessed, broken, and given in the liturgical action we call Holy Communion, or the Lord??s Supper, or the Eucharist, or the Mass, eyes have been opened. Not every time and not in every place, maybe not for everyone and certainly not in the same way for all people. But here and there, from time to time, because of circumstances, or because someone was in a receptive frame of mind, or for no logical reason that anyone could suggest, the taking, blessing, breaking, and giving of bread have, even for a brief moment, caused the veil between the temporal and the eternal to lift, and the Christ was "seen" to be truly present with his people.
Just as I found the Good Friday narratives this year becoming personal, so this post-Easter story becomes personal. It will resonate also for others, times when the fourfold action of take, bless, break and give have opened eyes, and given an awareness of something more precious that just ritual words and actions. I think of some of my own experiences.
I think of some experiences with only three or four others just prior to or just after a death; I think of coming upon a service of Holy Communion quite by accident in the Galilee chapel in the ruined crypt of Glastonbury Abbey, a place where supposedly the Holy Grail was once hidden; I think of a little country church with a handful of farming families during a particularly vicious winter; I think of being on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, around about the spot where John??s Gospel says the risen Christ prepared breakfast for his disciples, at precisely the same moment as the General Assembly in New Zealand was voting on sexuality and ministry. I think of times when I have been in church as a worshipper, and of times when I have been presiding; I think of times when I have been with those I particularly loved; I think of times when I have been with those whose theology is opposite to my own and who wish me and my kind out of ministry; I think of those moments I have had of awe and wonder that I am permitted to do what has been done for centuries, ever since people saw bread being taken, and blessed, broken and given by one whose presence transformed their lives.
I think of all that this fourfold action has meant to countless millions of Christians down the ages, in countless different circumstances from before the beginning of a life to after a life??s ending. And very soon, we are going to be doing it again, with the prayer that in the breaking of bread we will recognise the Christ once again in our midst.