strangers on a road

 

SERMON PREACHED at St ANDREW’S, CROMWELL

and at St. COLUMBA’S, WANAKA           

SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER (April 23^th) 2023

 

 

READINGS:

 

Acts 2:14a, 36-41

Psalm 116: 1-4, 12-19

1 Peter 1:17-23

Luke 24:13-35

 

 

Some stories from the scriptures are so well known that were it not for protocols I would be tempted to say that you know the story, let’s move right along. I suspect I’m not allowed to do that, protocols forbid. Still: a) I am under strict instructions from your vicar to keep it short, and b) short is exactly what I want to do. So here’s a compromise. 

So basically let us believe for a moment that we’re hearing this story for the first time. First we could ask how the story sounds to Luke’s first, intended audience in the first century, then how it sounds to us,  his accidental audience, hearing it for the first time today.

I don’t know you well enough to encourage an interactive sermon on this occasion, but it would be lovely to hear your feedback sometime about these first impressions regained, as it were, from a too familiar story.

For me the clue is often taken from a wonderful literary scholar whose approach to works of literature was simply to say “if something strikes you as strange then it is probably designed to have you take a second look.” So, because we can’t really be interactive, I will just give you a couple of my responses based on that methodology.

Firstly, there’s nothing particularly surprising about a couple of travellers walking along a road. Twelve kilometres was not a particularly arduous walk in the first century, roughly the distance from my house to the CBD in Dunedin, a walk I take from time to time. Walking and talking are not particularly unusual or mutually exclusive activities, even for allegedly multi-task challenged males. Actually I happen to believe one of the walkers was female, but that’s another story.  Admittedly as an introvert I don’t encourage strangers to start talking to me as I walk, but it is one of those things that happens. I am reminded of the fellow passenger on a bus across outback Australia who once asked me, “is that an interesting book you’re reading?” I can think of few more depressing opening lines.

I do think there is a little embellishment, probably from the author Luke himself, when the travellers ask the stranger, with some surprise, whether he has not heard of the things going on in Jerusalem recently. I believe it’s a literary tool that Luke uses to add dramatic emphasis to the story, which you may remember, he was writing at least ostensibly for someone called Theophilus. Luke just wants to add some dramatic emphasis to his story.

The response of the stranger however is a little unusual, and it is unsurprising that later the travellers will speak of their hearts being on fire as he unpacked the story that they themselves had told. I kind of like it too when gaps in my knowledge I fleshed out by a vivid co-conversationalist.

Then, it is true, things become a little surreal. There is nothing particularly surprising about asking the traveller to stay for a meal. It is a little more surprising that he disappears in a puff of unreality leaving the travellers, Cleopas and possibly Mrs Cleopas, somewhat bewildered. Apart from anything else I think Luke is telling us that it is okay if somethings don’t fit into our minds.

More important is that the travellers’ eyes and ears have been suddenly opened in the breaking of bread and wine. Overwhelmed by the sense of the risen Christ and his presence in this simple rite, they rushed the twelve kilometres back to their friends to join in a fellowship of resurrection joy, and to acknowledge that the women who were after all the first witnesses to the impossible event, were right after all.

And that is pretty much where I would like to leave story except that, were I hearing this for the first time and deciding to make a movie or a stage play out of it, I would probably have those women roll their eyes meaningfully at the formerly sceptical followers of Jesus, who had refused to accept their testimony that divine love will conquer even the deepest darknesses if we only get it, if only we let it, and seek the power of God to help us be grasped by this new reality.