Luke
24:13-34
February 16, 2014
Now on that same day
two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from
Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened.
While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with
them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. And he said to them, ‘What
are you discussing with each other while you walk along?’ They stood still,
looking sad. Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, ‘Are you
the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken
place there in these days?’ He asked them, ‘What things?’ They replied, ‘The
things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word
before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and leaders handed him
over to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was
the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day
since these things took place. Moreover, some women of our group astounded us.
They were at the tomb early this morning, and when they did not find his body
there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels
who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and
found it just as the women had said; but they did not see him.’ Then he said to
them, ‘Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the
prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer
these things and then enter into his glory?’ Then beginning with Moses and all
the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the
scriptures.
As they came
near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going
on. But they urged him strongly, saying, ‘Stay with us, because it is almost
evening and the day is now nearly over.’ So he went in to stay with them. When
he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it
to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished
from their sight. They said to each other, ‘Were not our hearts burning within
us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures
to us?’ That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found
the eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying, ‘The Lord
has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!’
Okay,…seriously,… how could they not have known that it
was Jesus who with them? I realize that these two weren’t really disciples of
Jesus. I’m not sure who Cleopas was, nor the other man, but what is clear is
that they were followers of Jesus who had known him well. As followers, they
would have been taught by Jesus, trained by Jesus, eaten with Jesus, and served
Jesus. He had been their leader, mentor, friend, teacher, and lord. They had
committed their lives to him. How could they not have known it was him who was
with them?
I’ve read what a lot of scholars have said about this
passage, and how they’ve tried to explain their ignorance. Some scholars have
simply said that Jesus clouded their eyes, their recognition, so that they
wouldn’t recognize him till the right time. Others have said that he must have worn
his hood down low, and turned away when they looked directly at him. Still
others have suggested that they simply didn’t have enough faith. I think that
there’s a simpler answer: Jesus was dead,
so there was no reason to expect that the man they were talking to was Jesus.
Think about this for a moment. Have you had anyone
close to you die? Were you there when she or he died? Did you go to the funeral
and see the person in the casket? Did you see the body lowered into the grave?
If you have, would you conclude that a person you saw a few days later was this
dead loved one? Would you have automatically concluded that this familiar
person was your dead father, your dead sister, your dead friend, or your dead
teacher?
If this is the case, then the two with Jesus on the road
to Emmaus are much like us spiritually. We tend to only see what we expect to
see, which means that God could be right in front of us, but if we don’t expect
to see or experience God, we’re likely to miss it. Let me give you an example
of what I mean.
Have you ever seen a Bev Doolittle painting? She’s an
artist from the southwest U.S. who loves to paint nature scenes of spring and
fall in the Rockies. Here favorite it so paint ground where the snow has begun
to thaw so there is an interplay of snow, rocks, earth, and aspens. Here’s an
example of one of her paintings below:
This is one of my favorite Doolittle paintings. What
makes her paintings interesting is not just what you see, but what you don’t
expect to see. Did you see the bear in the brush on the left? She often hides nature
within nature. In many ways the spiritual is very much like this painting. We
often see and experience only what we expect to see and experience.
We’ve developed such a scientific perspective in our
culture ; a perspective that says that the only things that exist are things
for which there’s tangible evidence. But what happens when there’s no tangible
evidence for something, and it’s still there? We live in a culture that strives
for evidential certainty—for believing only in what can be provable—but even
scientists who demand empirical evidence often believe in things for which
there isn’t empirical evidence.
For example, do you know what “dark matter” is? Physicists
and astronomists believe that most of the matter that makes up the universe is
not visible. It neither emits nor absorbs light. They can’t measure, see, or
prove it. But they believe in it because there is an obvious gravitational pull
on light and radiation that can’t be accounted for other than by some form of
dark matter. A similar example of belief in things that have no direct proof
comes from scientist’s belief in other planets. They now say that there are
many, many planets like ours in the galaxy. They say that most stars have many
planets orbiting them. But they can’t see them. What they see is gravitational
pulls and wobbles in stars. So they believe in them, even though they can’t
prove they exist.
In some ways, the way God works in our lives is like
dark matter. We experience the effects of God, but don’t usually have direct
evidence of God. As someone once said, we discover God in the rearview mirror,
not the front windshield. We don’t get evidence of God in the immediate moment,
but often it comes in reflection on the past. That’s where we discover God has
been in our lives. We look back and realize that we had an experience of God.
Our passage for today is a great, great example of how
often with God what we see isn’t always what is there, and what we don’t see
often is. Over the course of my ministry I’ve been with so many people who have
been despondent and felt hopeless because they didn’t FEEL Christ with them
when they were going through a difficult time. They’ve struggled with an
illness, a broken relationship, the loss of a job, the loss of someone close,
the loss of a sense of purpose, or something else. In the midst of their
struggles, they called out for God to do something, but nothing seems to
happen. They don’t feel as though God is doing anything, so they lose hope. The
problem isn’t that God isn’t doing anything. It is that they feel like God
isn’t doing anything, regardless of what God is doing.
When they talk to me about it, I often share an insight I
gained when I was despondent and felt hopeless back in 1983 during my 16-month
period of unemployment. During that time I got frustrated because I kept
praying for God to get me a job and help me get out of my funk. I kept
complaining that God wasn’t doing anything. Then an image came into my mind of
railroad tracks. I imagined that I was traveling along through life like a
train along a set of tracks. I realized that whatever it is that God is doing
in our lives is much like what is going on upon another set of railroad tracks
that will eventually meet up with ours. Until they meet, we can’t see the train
on the other tracks carrying our cargo. It may be coming from the south or
north, east or west. There may be mountain ranges, lakes, or forests between
them and us. We both may be speeding to our rendezvous, but we can see it. But
just because we don’t see what’s happening on another track doesn’t mean
nothing is happening. It only means that what God is doing is moving toward us,
and we have to be patient and wait for it to get to us. Just because we don’t
feel Christ, see Christ, sense Christ doesn’t mean that Christ isn’t doing
anything. It only means we’re not feeling, seeing, or sensing what Christ is
doing.
I later came to realize that this insight is one that
many, many Christian mystics have written about throughout the centuries. One
of the best known of these is a man named John of the Cross. Most modern
Christians haven’t heard of him, but he did a lot to help Christians understand
those times when it feels like God is absent, and to discover how God is
present.
John of the Cross lived in the mid-1500s, and was a
member of the Roman Catholic Carmelite order in central Spain. He, along with a
woman named Teresa of Avila, tried to reform the Carmelite order to root it
back in prayer and devotion to God. They believed that the order had become too
focused on ritual, and not enough on prayer, scripture reading, and trying to
imitate Christ. He and Teresa began to transform their movement, their order.
Like many reformers in any endeavor, John was opposed
strongly, and even violently by those who wanted to maintain the status quo. Some
brothers at monasteries in Toledo decided to travel to John’s monastery and
convince him by force to give up his reforming efforts. On December 2nd,
1577, they broke in, abducted him, and imprisoned him bound and blindfolded in
their monastery. For weeks they beat him, demanding that he renounce the
reforms as well as Sister Teresa. He refused. From that point he was confined
to a 6 by 10 foot cell, with only a slit for light and air. He was fed a diet
of bread, water, and occasional sardines. He wasn’t allowed to bathe or change
his clothes for 9 months. And at least once a week he was subjected to
“circular discipline,” which was a flogging where monks stood in a circle, and
each one took turns flogging him so that the beatings circled around John,
leaving him defenseless. It is amazing how cruel these people could be over
reforms that were intended to open people back up to God. But sometimes that’s
how people are. They become more focused on their rituals, rites, and routines
than on God.
It was during that period that John began writing about his
experiences in poetry. John is best known for coining a term that many people
misuse today, which is the term “dark night of the soul.” There are a lot of
people who use the term to describe depression or difficult times, but when
they do they fail to capture what he really meant. For John, the dark night of
the soul is a period of time in which we fail to sense, feel, or experience
God, and we have no choice but to go on faith. In his famous poem about the
dark night, he basically says that these are times that are meant to teach us
how to have faith without evidence. And John discovered the dark night through
his own experiences. He may have been deprived, neglected, and beaten, but he
never gave up his faith. He never sat around and wondered, “If God is so good,
how could God let this happen?” He understood that his experiences were from
humans, not God. But still he struggled in his faith. He realized that he had
to trust in God based on past experiences and future hopes, rather than on a
present sense of God. This became his dark night, his period of trusting in God
despite the lack of evidence.
He originally wrote about his experiences from memory,
composing and memorizing the words in his mind. Later, a caring guard gave him
paper and pen, and he wrote his poems down. In them he wrote about the period
of the dark night, where it seems as though God is absent, and we have no
choice but to go on pure faith. His conclusion is that if we can get through
the dark night, we eventually come out the other side with a deeply mature
faith that senses God no matter what befalls us.
John eventually escaped from his cell, and returned to
Avila to continue his reforms. His poems, which were published afterwards,
inspired not only Roman Catholics, but also Protestants, and are still read
today, 450 years later. I think Teresa of Avila captured perfectly the idea of
the dark night in a poem she wrote about her own dark night. She wrote:
Let
nothing upset you,
let
nothing startle you.
All
things pass;
God
does not change.
Patience
wins
all
it seeks.
Whoever
has God
lacks
nothing:
God
alone is enough
Basically, the point of this is that we need to
understand that just because we don’t feel, see, or sense Christ with us,
doesn’t mean that he isn’t with us. It just means we have to have the maturity
to trust God in faith, especially if we don’t feel God. True faith means
putting aside the question, “Where is God?” and instead trusting in God no
matter what. This is what St. Patrick discovered. As Rev. Frierson said last
week, St. Patrick, back when he was just Patrick, the slave of the Celts, had
his own dark night watching sheep, living in deprivation, and being beaten by
his master. But it was in that time that Patrick deeply and truly discovered
God. He discovered God through pure faith.
The whole challenge of dark night experience is the
dividing line between whether we will go into the depths of life, or just stay
in the shallow end. The truth is that nobody gets out of life alive. This is
part of the whole gist of St. Patrick’s prayer when it says, “Christ
beside me, Christ to win me, Christ
to comfort and restore me,…”
It is a prayer of faith, not evidence.
Whether you sense it, see it, or feel it, Christ is
always with you, within you, behind you, before you, beside you, winning you,
comforting and restoring you. It’s not a matter of whether you feel it; it’s a
matter of whether you live it.
Amen.
