Luke 24:13-35                                    Susan J. Barnes
St. Matthew’s,    Austin                                14 April 2002

Why didn't they recognize him? To their dying days, whenever the disciples recalled those times after Jesus' resurrection, they wondered:why didn't they recognize him right away?

It was the same for all of them: Mary Magdalen at the tomb, those gathered in the upper room, then Peter and the group who went fishing, the two on the road to Emmaus. It was baffling. They were the people who knew and loved him best, who had lived with him for months on end, hung on his every word, mourned desparately his parting. They longed to see him. But when they did, at first they did not recognize him.

The two who went to Emmaus turned it over and over again in their heads. Of course they had been in shock, exhausted, when it happened. None of the disciples had slept for days--not since Jesus' arrest. (Bitter irony: the last sleep they had was while he asked them to keep watch in the garden.) When they set out, leaving the community of disciples, they were dazed. So dazed and disoriented as they walked along that road, that they couldn't even remember when the stranger joined them. But once he did, all they talked about was Jesus. They told him about those dreadful days: capture, trial, crucifixion. Then about puzzling, news that the Marys had brought of his appearing. The women said that he had risen! He was alive!

All that time on the road, he was with them! Why hadn't they known that it was Jesus himself? They should have recognized him in his words at least, his insight into scripture, into the meaning of the Messiah's suffering and death. The disciples shuddered everytime they recalled that they had almost let him go on alone! Fortunately, they didn't. They were so comforted by his presence, so enlightened by his teaching. At the last moment they had invited him in with them. Thank God! Then, at the breaking of the bread, they saw him!

And, then he was gone. But they had seen. They believed. They rushed back to the community to share the good news.

The Emmaus story is an analogy of my faith journey, and it may be for yours. Like those two disciples, I left the safe harbor of my childhood faith community to travel out. Many of us do the same. We may just wander away aimlessly. We may go in pursuit of some goal which turns out to be a false God: independence, wealth, power, prominence, security. Some--like me—may be gone for years, decades even. But in retrospect the lesson of Emmaus is clear. Wherever we go, Jesus is there beside us. Jesus travels with us, however unperceived. Jesus blesses us with wisdom, insight, companionship--with many good things. Even if we don't recognize him. Jesus stays with us. That's the most breath-taking thing, isn't it? Incomprehensible to mere mortals. God loves us so much, respects our free will so much that God waits. God abides, loving us, and doing everything possible to help us even before we recognize or turn toward God. Then, by grace, the day comes when we make a choice to move toward God--perhaps unconsciously, as I did, instinctively. We reach out. We open ourselves for some reason. For me it was the yearning for meaning that I had not found in the world. It brought me back into an Episcopal church in Dallas Texas.

And, then, as to the disciples at Emmaus, Jesus was revealed to me in the breaking of the bread. Jesus came all at once with grace, acceptance, forgiveness, and all of the healing, redeeming power of his love.

I would love to say that since that glorious day God and I have been in blissful union--happily ever after. But that's not the way it happens. For a couple of days, I lived in a state of rapture and of God's presence that I cannot describe. It was ecstatic--a presence, a union stronger than any love I knew before or since. But it was also disturbing, because it shed a new, blinding light on every word, every assumption, every behavior in my life. It was more than I could bear. And I let it slip away. I let the world come back in. My life was turned around definitely, and I had glimpsed a new center in God, but I had moved away from that pure place and taken a safer distance back in the world

Those are William Butler Yeats' words from "The Second Coming." Richard Rohr, the great spiritual writer and speaker, uses them to begin his discussion of Center and Circumference in Everything Belongs. His point is that God is at our very center, there with our real selves. God dwells not in our minds, but in our emotional, spiritual center. There, as Rohr says, we bear "all of the mystery of God's suffering and joy." But most of us do not to abide there. Instead, we choose to live on the circumference, we circle at the edges. Like Yeats' falcon we take flight. We flee into the world of "affluenza", the spiritually toxic environment of distractions, of consumption, of busy-ness, of self-centeredness. We are told as we are sold the idea that these occupations are "living", but as Rohr points out, real living is recognizing God's presence in our everyday joys and our brokenness. Those "real" emotions lead us back to the center, to the core reality "where we meet both our truest self and our truest God." To find God, we do not have to travel. We do need to seek God, though, in regular times of solitude and silence. God is here, waiting to be found--again and again.

Jesus said to his disciples "in a little while the world will no longer see me". The world never has. The world never will. Jesus continued, "but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live." But Emmaus shows how we can. God is always with us, waiting. If we will stop our wandering, be still, open ourselves, we will see Jesus. We will live. And we will rejoice in Jesus’ life-giving presence.