He's BESIDE You - Sermon 26th April 2009
Luke 24
Willie Beattie (our Session Clerk) and I were talking this week about what it’s like for a Minister to come to a new congregation. It’s hard to credit that I’ve been here over six years, and I had to think back a bit, but coming to a new congregation is something I’ve done more than once, and I’m awfully glad that the first time I did it, I’d already been pointed in the right direction. Rule number one – find out where they’re going!
When the Rt. Rev. Peter Nott was about to be enthroned as Bishop of Norwich, in the 1980s, someone did him the favour of taking him to one side, and telling him “There’s only one way of leading Norfolk people – find out where they’re going and walk in front of them!” Good advice, for the first few months anyway.
I don’t know if you remember, but when I arrived here in December 2002, I made only one immediate change. Possibly it was so small that you missed it. I changed the way in which I take Communion. Instead of my giving it to the Elders first, and then, before the elements go out to the congregation, having two of the Elders give me communion, I continued my own practice since my ordination of taking communion myself, first, from the elements I’d just consecrated.
Why did I do that? What did it mean? I’ll tell you – but at the end of the sermon!
Once again we find ourselves looking at the story of the Emmaus road. It’s a road – if you’ll pardon the recycled pun – that we’ve been down many times together!
We usually picture the two disciples as being completely alone on a lonely country road, but they’re within seven miles of Jerusalem, at the height of the festival season, with a huge additional population in the area because of the Passover. It’s unlikely in the highest degree that there was nobody in sight, and it’s possible, as some people speculate, that they were in quite a thick crowd of people all walking back to their lodgings just as the two of them are, they might even be being jostled a bit. And yet the crowd doesn’t figure in our imaginations, and that’s entirely right. In the middle of the crowd, these two are utterly alone.
This is only underlined when the mysterious figure joins them – because he, too, is completely shut out. They are bound together in their grief and shock, deeply traumatized, withdrawn from the world. Everything has stopped. The life of the world, for all that they can relate to it, is going on light-years away from them. If they have any awareness of the crowd, it’s the shocked awareness, that they can make no sense of, that while for them everything has stopped, the world around them doesn’t seem to know what’s happened. People who have been through a traumatic experience, or have suffered a terrible loss, often say that one of the eeriest things is the way the world just carries on – as though no-one knows what has happened, that is filling their universe with pain.
Even so, in this case, people do know. Actually, everyone is talking about it. Maybe that makes it worse – that what is a matter of life-shattering awfulness for the two disciples is a matter of talk and speculation for the people around them, who maybe wondered about this Jesus, perhaps even had hopes of him, and what he might do, who and what he might actually be... Yet they didn’t know him as – well, as him...
And that, you see, would explain the vehemence of the response when a stranger comes up to them and asks them what they are talking about – and, by implication, why they are so glum.
"Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?"
The Stranger acts – apparently inadvertently – as a lightning-rod. But there’s nothing inadvertent about what he does next. He gets them to talk. I don’t know... Tell me about it...
And they do – and he starts interacting with them, drawing them out, even suggesting different ways of looking at things. Luke is very interested in the positive things that the Stranger has to say, but it’s clear from the shape of the story that he also lets them exhaust themselves in talk. They feel better.
And they suddenly realize that they are at journey’s end – which means, unless they do something, the parting of the ways.
He appeared to be going further, but they constrained him, saying, "Stay with us, for it is toward evening and the day is now far spent." So he went in to stay with them.
Now all of this is told, and the whole passage is structured, in such a way that we know from the beginning what the two protagonists don’t. Apart from anything else, Luke telegraphs the ending to us from the start of the story, at verse five:
While they were talking and discussing together, Jesus himself drew near and went with them…
So we are in on it. And it isn’t a disrespectful comparison at all to say that the dynamics of the story, the way it holds together as Luke is telling it to us, turn on this in the same way that the dynamics of Panto do. We know what the protagonists don’t. We are on tenterhooks wondering how and when they are going to discover what we already know. In pantomime, of course, this leads to the audience feeling cleverer than the protagonists – but that’s built on a different, and more basic, feeling that’s simply that we know more… Yet that feeling, that we know more, is absolutely central to the way the Resurrection narratives work. We saw it last week, when we looked once again at the story of Thomas. Thomas wasn’t there the first Sunday, so he didn’t see what the first disciples saw. But also – and this is crucial – Thomas doesn’t know what we know. That “Christ is risen, he is risen indeed…” And that’s why the actual figure of Thomas, what the actual story of Thomas means in terms of his faith, is so easily overlooked. Because the way the story works, these things are of less importance than our faith, and of what we know. Thomas may have seen – Thomas may also have touched and felt, and as I’ve told you before, I’m one of those who believe that the meaning of the story is that Thomas did touch and feel.
But Thomas doesn’t know what we know. Up to that moment Thomas is in ignorance where we are not. We know that Christ is risen, he is risen indeed. And in fact, when Thomas confesses “My Lord and my God!”, he is just arriving at the point where we, the audience, have been all along.
And so it is with the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus. If I can risk using the analogy of Panto again, we’re all watching this story unfold before our eyes from a situation of knowledge. We’re virtually on the edge of our seats – and any audience of children being told this story will be in a high pitch of excitement – such that it wouldn’t take much to have us all shouting, not “He’s BEHIND you!!”, but “He’s BESIDE YOU!!!”
And still they don’t see. And still they haven’t got to where we are, a position of a particular kind of knowing which we call faith. And as the tension is ramped up, and – just as in a Panto – we find ourselves wondering when and how the penny will drop, so our minds are concentrated on that huge question: how do you come to faith? For that matter – how did we come to faith? The two disciples haven’t got to where we are yet – but how did we get here? Or to put it in a more challenging and unsettling way – how do we get here?
So what makes the penny drop – not just for the disciples, but also for us?
Well, here’s a hint. We pause and sing, seated, a hymn we all know. We sang it with the children earlier in the service. It’s number 351, Jesus’ hands were kind hands…
BREAK for Hymn. “Jesus’ hands were kind hands…”
So what was it exactly that tipped off the two disciples that this was Jesus? Luke’s account seems straightforward – and in the important respects it is. It says something very specific, that we mustn’t lose sight of.
When he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them.
And their eyes were opened and they recognized him; and he vanished out of their sight.
In other words, as the two disciples report when they get back to Jerusalem:
Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread.
Now the Breaking of Bread here clearly has a double meaning that it wouldn’t have had if Jesus hadn’t been doing the breaking. On the one level, it means the start of a meal , with the host inviting everyone to “get tore in” by tearing into the loaf himself. Even that is significant. Remember that Jesus was the guest of our two disciples – and now he’s the host. But that just points to a deeper meaning to all of this that only emerges because Jesus is now presiding. The whole meal is transformed. The breaking of the bread becomes what it is when we do it in Church. This is Communion. The meal in which Christ is in the midst, at which he presides…
In other words, what makes the penny drop for the disciples is what makes it drop for us. Christ in the midst. Christ met in the worship of the Church – not the building, of course, but the people.
But we can take this a stage further, too. We’ve asked what it was that made the penny drop for the two disciples that this was Jesus. We noted Luke’s answer. He was known to them in the breaking of the bread. But we can still ask – and maybe the narrative hints that we should ask, even though it doesn’t have an answer – how was Jesus known in the breaking of the bread?
Maybe the two disciples had been present at the Last Supper – or some other meal Jesus had presided at. Maybe they suddenly recognized the posture, the pattern of gestures. That’s plausible, but not stated. Maybe it was simply that they’d heard tell of the Last Supper, and in an imaginative leap they joined up the dots, the way people do. Made a guess that was right – and immediately confirmed.
And their eyes were opened and they recognized him; and he vanished out of their sight.
Or maybe…
If you wear long sleeves, particularly on a capacious robe, they will hang down and largely conceal your hands. Certainly they will until you bring up your hands to do something – but if that something is something like taking bread and tearing it…
You see how the hands and wrists are exposed…
There is a suggestion that what the risen Christ does in tearing the bread is that he exposes the marks of crucifixion on his hands and wrists; you’ll remember that the nails of crucifixion were driven in through the wrists, not the fragile palms, so as to support the body’s weight as it hung. And you’ll also remember – and this is something that is so central to our faith that we need to be absolutely sure that we grasp it and don’t forget it – that the humanity that Jesus of Nazareth wore from birth to death, the complete, bodily humanity which is ours, with all its vulnerability, fragility, limitation and smallness, is the same humanity he wears to all eternity. The Son of God took flesh in time and space, so the Church teaches, but Jesus Christ wears this humanity, this enfleshed, corporeal humanity to all eternity. The marks of what he did, and what was done to him, are still on him. That, by the way, is what it means to say “God understands…” (And the story of the Emmaus road suggests that what it means to say “God doesn’t understand…” is pretty much what it meant when the two disciples said “You don’t understand…” to the one who’d just been through it all, and was, by the way, just then walking the road with them and inviting them to lay all their pain and trauma on him.)
So – did the two disciples recognize Jesus’ hands?
The ancient practice of the Church of Scotland is that the Minister consecrate the elements and then take and eat for himself first. Over the last couple of hundred years - a blink of the eye in historical terms - here arose the practice (and it seems to have been particularly strong in the Free Church) of the Minister instead serving the Elders first, and then having the Elders serve him. There’s a discussion of this in several places in the work of the great Presbyterian liturgical scholar W.D. Maxwell. Now liturgical discussions – discussions about worship, and whayt you should do when conducting it - are often anoraky and geeky to a phenomenal degree – there’s an old joke that runs “What’s the difference between a terrorist and a liturgical scholar? ANSWER: You can negotiate with a terrorist. “
But this particular liturgical point is very important. Maxwell says that many Ministers ask Elders to serve them at Communion out of a sense of solidarity, and courtesy, of us all being the same before Christ. And that sounds great. But Maxwell makes a devastating point against that way of thinking. He says: you can only change the arrangements if you are the host. But the Minister at Communion isn’t the host. Christ is. It is Christ who presides. Therefore the Minister, from whatever good and Christian motives, has no place asking someone else to take communion before him. The Minister takes first because she is standing next to the newly-consecrated elements. The Minister does not take first because she is the host. She takes first because Christ is.
And likewise, says the Congregationalist theologian Nathaniel Micklem, when we sit in the pew, we receive the elements as from Christ himself. We receive from the hands of the person next to us as from Christ’s hands. And so we see and know that Christ stands in the midst and presides. And so we know, from the hands that serve us, that Christ is risen, he is risen indeed.
You’ll all have seen what I wrote in the Onward, about my being rescued by the kindness of strangers at the Car Wash in Paisley, when my tyre burst. They saw that I was driven to the funeral I was going to, saw that the tyre was changed when I got back, even saw that the dogs were comfortable with open windows on a warm day. There’s nothing trivial about that little story. Hands that disclose the presence of Christ as the meaning of our existence.
Take my hands, Lord Jesus,
Let them work for you…