Luke 24 v28-35
Part of our Easter series working through Luke chapter 24.
This week: Encountering Jesus in the scriptures and by breaking bread.
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Transcript
You join us this afternoon as we’re about halfway through the season of Easter. In the calendar of the church, Easter doesn’t last only for one day, it’s a fifty day feast. I know that it feels hard to celebrate at the moment. In many ways this is a season to lament what we are missing. But the season of Easter is a gift as it refocuses us and reminds us again and again that Jesus is alive. He is risen. The grave could not hold him.
Here at SBD we’re working through Luke Chpt 24 in our sermon series. The chapter narrates the story of two disciples of Jesus who are on their way out. They are leaving Jerusalem for Emmaus, and their geographical journey mirrors what’s going in their hearts. They are distraught that Jesus has died as it seems to be the end of all that they hoped he would accomplish.
And yet an encounter with the risen Jesus turns them around. Rather than sadly trudging away from Jerusalem, the disciples are suddenly sprinting back. Rather than lamenting their shattered hopes, they are bursting with new hope and assurance.
As we explore the return journey, let me start with this. Does being a Christian mean that we have to have blind faith? After all, we can’t see Jesus.
Some years ago the artist Mark Wallinger produced a piece called ‘Angel’. The piece is a short film in which the artist wears dark glasses and carries a cane, the kind that might be used by someone partially sighted. He’s appearing as a character called Blind Faith. Walking on the spot at the foot of the escalators at Angel underground station, Wallinger repeats over and over the first five verses of John’s gospel. ‘In the beginning was the word…’ He’s asking questions about seeing and sight, and whether things really are as they appear.
There is something strange about Luke’s account of the Emmaus story. Jesus is seen by two disciples, yet they don’t recognise him. Then, when they do recognise, he disappears from their sight. Something’s going on about seeing and beliving, or perhaps not seeing, and believing. And the result of it all is that two broken hearted disciples are restored and filled with fresh joy.
We don’t see Jesus today, but we do encounter him.
In the narrative, there are 2 openings that Luke tells us about.
SCRIPTURE IS OPENED
First, Scripture is opened. Vs 32, the disciples describe what happened on the road when Jesus joined them. They say ‘he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us.’
We saw last week that Jesus started to reveal himself to the disciples not through discussing what happened in Jerusalem, or even by reminding them what happened when he was with them teaching and preaching and healing.
He opens up the Scriptures, the Old Testament so that they can see who he is. And we saw last week that he makes a claim that would have sounded extraordinary – all of the Scriptures are about him. They all cohere, find their meaning, in him.
One of the features of lockdown life in our home at the moment is jigsaw puzzles. We’ve got one of those wasgij puzzles – do you know those? They’re really difficult because the picture on the front doesn’t match the final picture. It’s more like a clue, and you have to use your imagination to figure out what comes next.
That’s a small picture of what is going on here. The Scriptures make sense of Jesus – we wouldn’t understand what he came to do without them. And he makes sense of the Scriptures – we won’t understand them unless we read them in the light of all that he came to do. We need to know the story of Israel, and we need to know how that story is taken up and reshaped around Jesus.
He is the Messiah, the anointed one. And he is the King who sits on the throne of David. And he is the suffering servant prophesied by Isaiah. All of the OT types and shadows find their fullness in him.
But there is something more. The disciples say that their hearts burned within them as Jesus opened the Scriptures. If we’re honest, it often doesn’t feel like that when we open the Scriptures. And I think there might be two reasons for that.
The first is that we might separate Jesus from Scriptures. You could call it the President Bartlett fallacy. In the West Wing TV series there are a couple of episodes where the characters set the OT and NT against each other, as if the God of the OT is a vindictive monster, and the God of the NT kind and compassionate and loving.
I don’t want to say that there aren’t hard and difficult parts of Scripture. There are. But Jesus won’t let us simply ignore them, cut them out of our Bibles. If we want to take him seriously, we must take seriously what he says about the Scriptures – without them, we don’t really have him.
But equally, there is a way of reading Scripture that never gets to Jesus.
It’s perfectly possible to read the Scriptures as if they are about all sorts of things – a guidebook for life. A manual for how society should be ordered. Some stories to give us hope in hard times.
Now it does have important things to say to all of those areas. But it’s only when the Scriptures lead us to Jesus that our hearts will burn within us.
Let me ask you this afternoon – how do the Scriptures shape and affect the journey that you are on? Could it be that we don’t encounter Jesus as we might because we don’t search for him in the Scriptures, or we search the Scriptures for the wrong thing?Maybe not, but it might be worth asking the question.
EYES ARE OPENED
But it’s not only the Scriptures that are opened in this narrative. The disciples’ eyes are also opened. Vs 31 tells us that after Jesus took bread, gave thanks, broke it and gave it to them, their eyes were opened.
The gospel writer Luke loves to present Jesus eating and drinking with other people. I read somewhere that this meal is the 8th that Jesus shares in Luke’s gospel.
What’s going on here? Why is at this point that the disciples recognise Jesus? I don’t think it’s that they see the nail marks in his hands and feet – Luke seems to make more of that in the following scene, when Jesus meets the rest of the disciples. Something else is going on.
There is one other place in the Scriptures that a meal is shared and someone’s eyes are opened. It’s back in Genesis 3, after Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree. They eat the fruit and their eyes are opened. At that meal humanity is brought low, it’s an opening that leads to loss and blindness, separation from God and being banished from his presence. That meal, that opening, leads to death.
But this meal is the first of the new age. The new creation. The disciples’ eyes are opened to new life and new creation. To glory and wonder. The beginning of the new story of humanity. Restoration and recreation. The disciples’ eyes are opened.
And then Jesus disappears from their sight.
Commentators are divided at this point about whether Luke is making a comment about the nature of the Lord’s Supper in this scene. Some argue that his emphasis is on the opening of the Scriptures, others say that the important moment is the breaking of bread.
It seems to me that Luke holds both together. If the supper at Emmaus tells us anything, it is that the risen Jesus meets his followers. They encounter him. It’s not just that the disciples receive a history lesson over a meal. As the Scriptures are opened, as bread is broken, they encounter Jesus.
And so for us, although in different ways, we encounter Jesus both through the Scriptures, and through breaking bread together.
We may not see Jesus face to face today, although one day we will. But he does sustain us with his risen presence, he gives himself through the word and at the table.
And as he does, our hearts burn within us and we find fresh hope and new assurance and joy.
PRAY/SING