Eating together as enacted promise (Luke 24) #1
The Crowded House hosted a conference for people interested in missional church and church planting tied to the book Total Church. This is the fourth talk that I gave at the conference:
1. We live between Good Friday and Easter Sunday
One of our problems is that we know the end of this story so well. We know how it resolves. We know that Jesus is risen. And so we find it hard to enter into the disappointment, grief and personal loss of these disciples. Yet many people today are following their own version of the Emmaus road. They are walking away from the place of hope, they are walking in disappointment.
Christ does not begin with a resurrection pronouncement. He begins with a question: ‘What are you discussing together as you walk along?’ (Luke 24:17) He gives them space to tell their story, to share their pain, to speak their disappointment. Luke captures the drama of it. ‘They stood still, their faces downcast’ (Luke 24:17) They have to pause before they can begin. We need to be people who begin our interaction with people with a question. Only as we enter into the struggles of other people, only as we are honest about our own struggles, will our message have meaning and connection for people. We must not fear the pain – theirs or ours – for Christ is with us even it he we do not always recognise him.
We need to be willing to engage in an act of imagination that place us alongside these broken people as they retreat to the countryside, escaping from the scene of the holocaust that has shattered their faith in God and his Messiah and left them facing a future without horizons. When we begin at this point, then this familiar narrative starts to resonate afresh in our contemporary historical and cultural situation. Millions of people in our world at the start of the third millennium find themselves walking a pathway that brings them very close to the lonely two on the road to Emmaus …
Christian mission, and in particular the practice of evangelism, has often ignored the order I am suggesting here, wanting to reverse the sequence in this story by beginning at the end, declaring the triumph of the resurrection without listening to the indications of pain, doubt and anger of those who have turned away from Jerusalem. The result is that the message declared by Christian is simply unbelievable for people whose emotional and spiritual experience renders them incapable of receiving such a message while their gapping would still require healing.[1]
But it is not just individuals who are walking their own version of the Emmaus road. Our world is between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
Jacopo Bassano (Italian), Supper at Emmaus, c. 1538
What do you notice in Bassano’s painting? Look at the feet. Look at the clothes. Jesus and the two disciples are dressed in first century clothing (or at least a sixteenth century perception of first century dress). They sit round a table with bread and wine (symbolising communion) and eggs (symbolising resurrection). But the servant is in sixteenth century dress. Perhaps Bassano intended to convey the resurrection as a contemporary reality. The risen Christ is present today just as the cat and dog are present under the table. Except that the servant seems indifferent. He looks bored. The event of resurrection does not interest him.
We live in a world in which the biblical story seems out of place. It seems anachronistic. It has been replaced with other stories – the stories of scientific progress, humanistic achievement, Islamic fulfilment or the multiple stories of postmodern relativism and apathy. People are not interested in our message. Christianity is passé.
We live in a world in which God is dead. That was the cry of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche claimed, not only that ‘God is dead’ but that it is we who have killed him. For Nietzsche this is the triumph of human freedom. We no longer need God to make our way in the world. The story of Western thought is that we have now grown up so that we no longer need the faith in God that primitive people or children need. We can live without him. And so public discourse takes place without God. Our culture is on the Emmaus road, heading away from Jerusalem.
Velázquez (Spanish), Kitchen Maid with the Supper of Emmaus, 1618
Jesus and the disciples are portrayed in the top left corner. But all our attention is on the kitchen maid. Notice the look on her face. She has realised that a dead man has just eaten her food. The meal is hinted at, but it is all washed and tided away. The central item is a piece of rag. The eschatological world has collided with the ordinary world.
Compare that to this contemporary Mexican icon:
I would quite this if it was a painting. But this is an altar. This is not an event in ordinary life. This is a stylised Christ, a religious Christ, a distant, cleric-like Christ.
But what is really interesting about Velázquez’s painting is that sometime after it was finished, the painting was altered by its new owner. A few centimetres were cut from the left hand margin (that’s why one of the disciples is missing), the maid’s headdress was altered and the Emmaus scene was covered over entirely. The original version was only rediscovered in 1933 when the painting was cleaned. This is what we have done. Our culture has removed the eschatological, the transcendent, the divine (‘myth’ would not be my chosen word) and we are just left with the washing up. We are left with rags.
And yet this is where we belong. Christ’s resurrection is the promise of a new world. It is the first eschatological act. It belongs to a new age. But our world, our history, has not yet been redeemed. It remains under the sign of the cross. We live in a godless world and godforsaken world (a world under God’s curse). As Christian we have resurrection life, but we have it to live the way of the cross. We live between the cross and resurrection; between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
For now Christ is incognito. He is what the Reformers, following Paul, called ‘the hidden Christ’. Paul says: ‘For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.’ (Colossians 3:3-4) The return of Christ is more often described in the New Testament as a manifestation. The reign of Christ is now hidden. But one day it will be revealed. All the earth will see his glory and every knee will bow.
For now, though, we live as disciples of the cross. We must not be like James and John asking for positions of glory without the sacrifice, suffering and service of the cross. We should embrace obscurity, hiddenness, weakness, marginality, smallness. This is God’s way. His kingdom grows unseen by the world. It is yeast in dough. It is a seed that grows unseen. It is through the cross that Christ reigns in the world. And so we walk alongside people on the Emmaus road not as victors, not as people with all the answers, but as fellow human beings, fellow sinners, fellow strugglers. Unless we do that the rumour of resurrection will always sound incredible or glib.
There’s a lovely twist in the story. In verses 18 they imply that Jesus is ignorant. but when Jesus opens the Bible for them he begin: ‘How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken’ (Luke 24:25). They had read the Bible, but they had mis-read it. ‘We had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel.’ (Luke 24:21) They had domesticated God, making him just the God of Israel. And they had looked only for glory and missed the note of suffering. They had wanted his blessings, but they had not wanted God. They had wanted his blessings, but they had not reckoned with their sin and their need for atonement. Let’s not make the same mistake. Let’s not look for success without suffering. Let’s not look for blessing without God. Let’s not look for glory that ignores sin.
We are living at a unique time in history. Christianity is no longer dominant in our culture. We are living post-Christendom. We live in a secular culture. The Bible story seems out of place and archaic to most people as it was in Bassano’s painting. Or people have written Christ out of their worldview as someone did to Velázquez’s painting.
But do not despair. This is moment is a moment of opportunity. It is an opportunity to rediscover authentic apostolic Christianity. The glory, power and wisdom of Christ, says Paul in 1 Corinthians 1, are seen in the shame, weakness and foolishness of the cross. And they are seen in the cross-centred lives of those who follow Christ. Our life, that is our conformity to Christ’s resurrection, is hidden in our conformity to Christ in his death (2 Corinthians 4:10-12). We make God known to a post-Christian world by revealing him in cross-centred discipleship.
[1] David Smith, Moving Toward Emmaus: Hope in a Time of Uncertainty (SPCK, 2007), 4-5.
