Luke 24:13-35
April 10, 2005
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
A group of farmers gathered in a country store when a young stranger walked in. “Looks like a little rain,” the stranger said. No one spoke. After a time one farmer asked, “What may be your name?” “Jim Goodwin, my grandfather used to live just a mile up the road.” The farmer said, “Oh, Ezra Goodwin—Yep, it does look a little like rain.”
Not just farmers or people in small towns fear strangers, but people in Chinatown do too. It is human nature to be wary of strangers. We are not naturally open to people we do not know. So we have developed this courtesy of introductions. It’s “knowing someone you know who knows someone else” to go from being strangers to becoming acquaintances.
In the Chinese, it’s “guy sell.” When Peter Chong, the outgoing director of the Chinatown YMCA took the time and offered the grace to introduce me to the acting director, Cari Lee by paying for our waffles at Capitol a couple of months ago, he was “guy selling.” Cari Lee was once a stranger to me is now a coworker with me in Chinatown.
Recognizing Jesus
On Easter Sunday, we proclaimed the resurrection of our Lord by looking at the passage in John when Jesus appeared on the beach while the disciples went back to fishing. At first they didn’t recognize it was Jesus who was telling them to cast their nets on the other side of the boat. And even when they were having freshly caught fish for breakfast around a campfire, none of them dared to ask Jesus who he was.
Last Sunday, Thomas wouldn’t believe that Jesus is risen because he couldn’t justify his understanding of what is reality until he was able to put his finger on Jesus’ nailed hands and on his wounded side. Thomas wouldn’t recognize it was really Jesus until he had empirical evidence.
Today we have another incident when Jesus appeared to his disciples and once again they didn’t recognize him. Jesus could have used someone to introduce (to guy sell) him to the disciples.
On the same day of the resurrection, two of them were leaving Jerusalem and going to the village of Emmaus about seven miles away. They were talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and travel along with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him.
It is no accident that in many languages “stranger” and “danger” are linguistically close. Jesus is mistaken for a stranger, a resident alien, someone dwelling outside his home country. So Jesus comes into the company of Cleopas and his friend as a stranger; but notice that he is a stranger who can make sense of the tragedy they have just endured.
On the road, Jesus engages in a Bible study with these two disciples. Jesus asked them what these things that have taken place in Jerusalem are. So the disciples described how Jesus of Nazareth was a mighty prophet; how he was betrayed, arrested, condemned and crucified. They shared how their hopes were dashed when Jesus was crucified because they thought he was the Messiah to redeem Israel. On top of all that have happened, today some of the women of their group went to the tomb where they laid him and found it to be empty. And following the women, some of the men in their group also went to the tomb and verified that it was true.
Now Jesus changes from a seemingly ignorant stranger to a prophetic teacher, though still not identifying himself to the disciples. He calls them unbelieving disciples by saying that they are “slow in heart.” They are lazy in their thinking, which is what the Bible means by “slow in heart.”
They are “slow of heart” because they were unwilling to believe that it was necessary for the Messiah to suffer these things before entering into his glory by doing God’s will. Jesus then took the time to teach them the entire salvation story beginning with Moses and all of the prophets leading up to the purpose of his own life on the cross.
After this extensive, thorough and perhaps comprehensive interpretation of God’s plan in the world, it seems like the disciples still didn’t recognize Jesus. Cleopas and his friend may have asked him, “Do we know you?”
Strangers in Our Midst
We demonstrate our fear of strangers and foreigners by our clumsiness when meeting someone of a different culture, color, or religion. It is universally human to be awkward with people different from us—you might think that’s the reason why I have invited my CE class students to be here today so that you can be strangers to them!
Jesus tells us that we need to believe “all that the prophets declared,” not just that God blesses our nation more than others or for that matter, blesses any nations at all. We humans are all burdened by our irresponsible hopes; hope that our group will rule over others, our children will be better than others’, hope that we will make more money than our neighbors.
When we study the Scriptures we adjust our hope to a biblical standard, and we become more humble about ourselves and our nation. We find that sin is to be presumptuous with God, thinking that God likes our kind better than another kind or that God likes our nation better than another nation, perhaps thinking that God must love the United States more than God loves Mexico, because the United States has more money.
When we study the Scriptures, as Jesus directs, God comes along and says, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways…For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.” It’s as though God says to every age, culture and religion, “I am God and I reserve the right not to be the servant of your whims. I reserve the right to surprise you by being gracious to people who are different from you.”
Jesus does the same thing God does. As Jesus walks with his two disciples that first Easter evening he surprises the two disciples by insisting that they see the Messiah from a different viewpoint than their narrow interest only for Israel. They had hoped that Jesus would free Israel; but the only way to understand the Messiah or the Christian scriptures is to see God’s love and concern expanding to all people, a direction in which God will never stop, even when God must suffer for us.
Becoming Friends
We need someone to free us from our irresponsible hopes, someone to conquer the sin that claims that we are better than others, the sin that estranges us from God, the sin that makes us strangers even to our family members. So, in Jesus, God chose a new and surprising way to make sense of life’s confusions and to overcome our strangeness.
God chose to become our friends. God must be the one who makes us friends, not because God has the power to do so, but also because God is the ultimate stranger. Jesus was not merely a stranger on the evening of his resurrection. His words and deeds were strange to people all his life. No one understood him. His parents didn’t understand him. The religious authorities didn’t understand him. Even his closest friends couldn’t believe what he was saying. Yet this man, so alien, so much a stranger became the person whom God established a friendship with us.
The passage said, “As they came near the village to which they were going, he (Jesus) walked ahead as if he were going on. But they (disciples) 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.”
These disciples who saw Jesus as a stranger, an alien and perhaps a threat to them on the road to Emmaus became so familiar with Jesus that they invited him into their own home. Right on the side of the road, Jesus the stranger helped them to become friends with him. These disciples who were sad, who had their eyes looking down and didn’t recognize Jesus are now able to see this stranger as a person whom they so trust to invite home.
All of us were once strangers but we all became friends. Most of my class students have never been to our church but with a hearty breakfast at Joe’s Café and your love for Christ, you have made them our friends. When Joy and I came to serve with you almost seven years ago, we didn’t know many of you but because of your love for Christ, you have welcomed us strangers into to this church, to this community, and into your homes.
There are many more strangers in our lives than there are friends. Everyone out in that big world whom we have not recognized as children of God is still in need of becoming our friends.
Last week seventeen of us went on a field trip to Animal Place in Vacaville. This was a part of Lauren’s senior project on “animal theology.” At this animal sanctuary where farm animals were rescued from abuse and neglect, we became keenly aware of the reality that these animals do have personalities, feelings, and thoughts. I learned that at night the pigs and the chickens all go inside their own sheds to sleep. They know when to go to bed and the only thing that the keepers need to do is to close the door at night. I learned that a particular turkey liked to be closed to people or that goat needs special attention because of what may have happened to him in the past. Most of the time, we don’t recognize the role that farm animals play in our creative and diverse world because we haven’t had the opportunity to know them in this way. On that field trip, I became better friends with the animals that we have taken much to be granted. We recognized these animals for what they are: also members of God’s creation.
Do I Know You?
An explanation for the disciples not recognizing Jesus on the road to Emmaus is because they were more concerned about their own hopes being dashed than to see God’s bigger plan for the world. Their hope of a Messiah to redeem Israel was now crucified. Now there were stories swirling around that someone has taken his body from the tomb.
But when these disciples became friends to Christ, welcomed him into their home, and even invited Christ to serve as their host by blessing and breaking bread for their dinner, is when they finally were able to recognize who the stranger was. “Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.” Recounting Scriptures was not enough for them to recognize Christ. It is in the breaking of bread that we see Jesus, and to recognize his blessed presence.
Let’s try an experiment. I want you to look at one another and think about what gives you the ability to recognize one another. Have you ever seen or heard a characteristic walk, or heard a laugh, or turn of phrase, or felt a touch that triggered a sense of recognition, or reminded you of someone you know or love? Have you ever longed to see a loved one who had died, and conjured up a mental image of the voice, the expression, the style of that one? Have you ever heard someone in a crowd, and thought the voice was that of a departed loved one? Surely we have all had these experiences. These are the most distinctive traits that unmistakably identify another. They may differ from person to person.
For Jesus, the most distinctive way to identify Jesus was when he broke the bread. Before the disciples knew it, Christ vanishes from them leaving them with such powerful emotions as “burning hearts within us.” Instead of a “slowness of heart” the disciples now have inside of them “hearts burning.” Now they can’t wait to walk another seven miles back to Jerusalem to tell the other disciples what they have seen and how Christ made himself known to them by breaking bread.
We are strangers to God, yet God comes to us, loves us, wipes out the sin that kept us apart from God and from one another. As Ephesians proclaims, “so then, you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.”
Although we are strangers to God and slow in heart to understand that God loves everyone (especially those who are different from us both humans and animals), Jesus greets us upon the roads of life, welcomes us to God’s family, and invites us, strangers that we are estranged from God and one another, to enter and sit at the table that suddenly becomes his.
Here, in the breaking of bread, we recognize genuine life in Jesus. Here at the table of Jesus, the stranger, we realize and experience that we are set right with God. Here in this house of worship, we can look at each other and call one another sisters and brothers. Through Jesus we are no longer strangers. Starting at this table, we no longer treat anyone as a stranger.
I like the point that Luke makes in this passage that “As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on.” We like the disciples would want Jesus to stay with us so that we can keep on recognizing his face. We want to always know him and not forget him. But Jesus was ready to go on, to go ahead, expecting us to follow. We find ourselves singing, “Open our eyes, Lord, we want to see Jesus,” but all Jesus lets us see most of the time is his back for he invites us to follow him.
Only when we do this, we would learn how to follow in Jesus’ steps, learn what his distinctive characteristics might be in his walk or in his deeds. And along the way, on the road to Emmaus or to San Francisco or to San Jose, wherever we might be on the road of life, we will begin to see more and more of God’s people and animals and instead of saying, “Do I know you?” we will be saying, “Yes, in the name of Christ the risen one, I know you because God first loved you.”
Let us pray.
Blessed Lord God, come into our lives once again as Jesus did to his disciples and show us how to obey your commandments and to fulfill your plan for the world. Show us how to recognize you in every day of life in the people we meet. Call us to not be afraid of strangers but that it was in your new and often strange message of hope, love and peace that we are beginning to believe for ourselves. Lord, may we know you as the risen Savior, redeemer, and the stranger in our midst who made us become friends. We pray in his name. Amen.