Do You See Me?

Luke 24:13–35 NRSV

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!” Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

In the summer between completing my undergraduate degree and the start of my masters degree I was having a bit of a crisis of faith. It wasn’t that I was losing my faith, it was a struggle with making sense of my Bible, in particular making sense of what we commonly call the Old Testament. This holy Hebrew text was something that I had a really hard time trying to understand. I feel like you might relate.

Now I loved my time as a theological undergraduate, but what I’ve come to realize as I look back is that I was really only exposed to one line of thought when it came to the function of the Bible, and particularly the role that the Hebrew Scriptures played.

I think what got me the most confused was that I pretty much just learned that the Old Testament was a means of showing us how messed up Israel and the rest of the world was, and how much we needed Jesus.

Which like I’m not in disagreement about. That’s an important point, but why should I read 39 very long books about that when I can just walk out my front door on any given day and experience it?

So I began to read books by some Old Testament scholars and listened to probably 200 hours of podcasts that focused almost entirely on the Hebrew Scriptures and how they find their culmination in the person of Jesus Christ.

And there was a complete shift in my attitude. A light went off. All of a sudden I was hungry for the Word again. I signed up to learn Biblical Hebrew in the spring semester and I got incredibly excited to start taking this class so I could understand these scriptures better. And then 1 month into my Hebrew Class the pandemic shut down the world.

But my class continued on… in a distance learning format. I can not recommend trying to teach yourself an ancient language less. It was the most time consuming and soul crushing experience of my educational career. I would just sit for hours doing flash cards over and over hoping to embed vocabulary into my brain. And that was the easy part.

The grammar is so hard to learn without someone holding your hand.

Then there was this speaking thing. I had to record myself reading scripture and send it to the professor. It was torturously slow.

But I’ve told you that I don’t really do things halfway. I was determined to become some kind of Hebrew Scholar. So halfway through the semester I signed up for 2 more Hebrew classes that summer.

And something happened in the first few weeks of that summer semester — It all began to click. Like when you watch kids begin to master their english. A light went off and I began to be able to actually use this thing I had struggled with so badly.

And I tell you all of this because I think that this is the kind of story that we encounter when we read the Emmaus Road story. It is a resurrection story of the relationship that these disciples had with their scriptures and therefore their Lord Jesus Christ.

We are in the midst of a sermon series call “Resurrected” and we are seeing how the encounters that ordinary people had with the risen Christ changed their lives forever, and how that resurrection power is still avaliable to us today.

So in our story, we find two disciples of Jesus — now these are not like inner circle disciples, they aren’t part of the 12 famous disciples — walking down the road away from Jerusalem on the night of the very first Easter.

Now they have heard that the tomb was empty and they are trying to make sense of what all of this means. And now they are approached by a strange man that they don’t recognize, and they tell him all that they have experienced. And they are kind of stuck. Trying to figure out how to make sense of the death of Jesus, the Jewish Messiah.

They likely held to the common understanding of the role of the Messiah — to be a king who liberated Israel from Rome and restored her to her former glory.

So how does Jesus dying make any sense? Was our Bible untrue?

Jesus’s response is to walk them through the Hebrew Scriptures and show them how it was actually necessary for the Messiah to suffer. He’s like “your scriptures and your traditions are actually a story that leads to this moment right now, where the messiah enters into his glory… a glory beyond some human ruler in Jerusalem. This is a story of a cosmic king.”

And they start to get it, but they still do not recognize that this person speaking to them is Jesus of Nazareth. They’ve got head knowledge, but they still haven’t gotten a full understanding. They still are not able to see Jesus. They know his story, but they can’t connect it to their present moment. Yet.

It isn’t until the disciples sit at the table with Jesus and watch him break bread, just as he had at the last supper, that they truly saw and recognized Jesus.

And then it hits them why their hearts felt that fire that we only feel when the divine revelation of God is given to us while they spoke with Jesus on the Road to Emmaus. In that moment they felt something, but it could not be understood fully until they sat with Jesus and truly experienced his resurrection.

The disciples experienced what we all want to experience — a profound encounter with Jesus that radically alters our perception of our lives and our world.

But the disciples also experienced what I and probably all of you have experienced when you’ve tried to reconcile what the Bible says with what you see in this world and experience in your life. I’ll go out on a limb and guess that if you’ve read the Old Testament that you’ve got a lot of questions about why God seems so angry at times and unlike the person of Jesus you find in the New Testament.

The problem is that our understanding is so deeply limited by our own experience and our own education and our own upbringing.

Like everything in this world we grow up with some kind of relationship to scripture. Perhaps it’s a relationship that is non-existent, a relationship that we really only experience by hearing what other people say about the Bible.

One of the defining attributes of the United Methodist Tradition, which dates all the way back to an Anglican Priest named John Wesley is that we understand that we all are interpreters of Scripture, whether we know it or not.

We all bring to the text our own tradition, reason, and experience — whether we mean to or not.

tradition means the relationship to Scripture that we are raised with: Be that a very high view of scripture as God’s literal word dropped out of heaven, a very low view of it as a means of exerting control over human populations, or any of the different places along the road between those two points. This means that we also bring to scripture all of the things that our particular Christian tradition has developed as dogma — this is really a strong part of our catholic and eastern-orthodox siblings.

When we talk about reason, we are talking about our own personal philosophies and understandings of the world and the human condition. This is why folks that vote differently can read the same Bible and feel very convicted that the Bible supports their checkbox at the polls. But this is also really important because reason is what frees us from trying to literally apply a lot of the things in the Bible to today’s culture. You would not want to live in a place that tries to follow the laws in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers.

Finally we all bring our own experience to the text, meaning that we read it and interpret it in light of how we have experienced the world around us and our own personal journey of faith.

And the point of me telling you all of this is that this is where we find the disciples on the road to Emmaus. They are trying to make sense of their Bible in light of the fact that nothing seems to have gone the way that they were told it would go by their tradition, the way they expected it to go using their reason, and the way that they felt it should go based on their experience with Jesus’s earthly ministry.

It wasn’t until Jesus came and met with them to show them how to read their Bible that they really understood the Gospel message that they had proclaimed back to him. But even then — all they had was head knowledge. In order for this head knowledge to become heart knowledge they had to sit at the feet of Jesus and share in the bond of community over bread.

What this means for us is that if we are yearning to have our relationship with Jesus resurrected, to really truly see him for who he is and what he has done for us then we have got to break out of the either/or type of Christianity that has plagued our nation for the past 50 years.

Polls show that large portions of our society believe they can read their Bible alone, apart from the community of faith and live out the Christian life because they have a “personal relationship with Jesus.”

Even more staggering of a figure is the number of people who go to church that admit that they never read their Bible. They just expect people like me to give them everything that they need.

This is not how this thing works friends. We are meant to read scripture and to live in community together. We are meant to read scripture in community together because when we read scripture together we are able to come to a more full understanding of God and of one another as we connect our stories to God’s story and learn what our communal story is becoming.

Then and only then, will our eyes be truly opened to the presence of Jesus in our midst. And ya’ll you deserve to experience that outside of just Sunday morning. You deserve to experience that gift every day of your life.

This can look like reading the Bible together with your family or your spouse, with friends, or a formal bible study. It can be as easy as reading the daily scripture on our facebook page and then having a discussion online about what is being revealed to you.

There is one thing that is true: we can’t be Christians without the Bible, but we also can’t be Christians without each other. If you want a resurrected relationship with Jesus, it begins with investing in your relationships with both scripture and the community of faith. When we invest in these things, we will see him.