A sermon on Luke 24: 13-35 by Nathan Nettleton

Acknowledgement
This sermon is greatly indebted to the writings of James Alison on the Emmaus story, the most extensive of which is the second essay in his book Jesus the Forgiving Victim.

One of the things that church people fight over most often is how to properly interpret the Bible. Even when we are fighting over other things, like homosexuality or pacifism or even theories of the atonement or the second coming, sooner or later the arguments always come back to differences over how we interpret the Bible. And one of the most frequent accusations in those debates is that our opponents are reading the Bible in a biased way from their own perspective. But the trouble is, there is no such thing as a perfectly unbiased reading. No one can read the text without looking at it from a particular viewpoint and through their own eyes. It is possible to choose to try to look at it from other perspectives, but those are perspectives too. The question is whose perspectives are most going to get us to the truth of what God is trying to reveal to us.

Questions about how to interpret the Bible are far from new. Many of Jesus’s debates with the religious teachers and leaders of his day were grounded in differences of perspective in interpreting the scriptures, and those debates had been running for a long time before Jesus got involved in them. The story we heard from Luke’s gospel tonight about the appearance of the crucified and risen Jesus to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus is one of the most subtly and brilliantly crafted stories in the gospels, and it directly addresses these questions of perspective and interpretation.

Early in this story, Luke alludes to a well known story about interpretation from the Joseph stories in Genesis, but you probably didn’t pick it up, because it is really only apparent if you’ve been reading Genesis in the Greek version of the scriptures (the Septuagint) which most Jews read in those days. When Luke says of the two disciples that “they stood still, looking sad” or downcast, he is echoing the description of Pharaoh’s baker and cup bearer who are sharing a prison cell with Joseph, when they have both had dreams that they are unable to interpret. So, as in the Emmaus story, we have two men who are discussing things they are unable to interpret or make sense of, and in both stories, a third person appears who sees things from a different perspective and proves capable of being the authoritative interpreter. Take note, Luke is saying to his readers, this story will be about whose perspective and interpretation can lead us to God’s truth.

The other thing Luke is doing as he sets this story up is inviting us to imagine ourselves as participants in it. One of the two disciples is named, but not the other. The named one, Cleopas, is not one of the inner circle of the twelve disciples, but is probably one of the 72 — a member of the Apostolic B team if you like. But not naming the second one is probably Luke’s way of inviting you to imagine that its you. It is you and Cleopas, as two members of the wider circle of Jesus’s followers who are walking along, trying to make sense of how Jesus has ended up dead and what that all means. And to add to the sense that it could be anyone and anywhere, Emmaus is such an insignificant and nondescript place that if you go to Israel today, there are at least four different places all vying for the honour of being the original Emmaus. I’m not actually from Nar Nar Goon, but my parents moved there just after I left home and lived there until recently, and my daughter recently showed me that Nar Nar Goon appears in the dictionary as meaning “any small insignificant place”. In the first century Israeli version of the dictionary, that would have been Emmaus. Whoever you are, and wherever you are, Luke is inviting you to see yourself on the inside of this story.

So, what’s going on once we are inside the story? Well, for starters, sad and downcast is almost an understatement. We’re devastated and shattered. And confused and conflicted. Luke doesn’t just say that we are discussing what has happened. He says that we are arguing over it. Which of course can happen after a tragic and unexpected death. Our desperate attempts to try to sort out what happened and perhaps even apportion blame lead to anguished and irrational arguments. And in the midst of our anguished argument, a stranger appears. As the readers, we know it is Jesus, but we are invited to imagine that we are not recognising him. He is stranger, and judging by his accent, he’s not from around here. He’s an outsider. He probably wouldn’t understand. But he presses us for details of what we are trying to sort out, and so we tell him. You heard all the detail of the description earlier, so I won’t repeat it all now, but the crux of the issue is that we had invested huge hopes and expectations in Jesus, and now he’d gone and got himself killed, so everything we had begun to believe and hope for was crushed.

Now the reason this has to do with interpretation is that these hopes and expectations that we had invested in Jesus were all hopes and expectations grounded in and fuelled by the scriptures. We had thought and hoped he was “the one”, the anointed one promised in the scriptures, the one to redeem Israel and set the nation free from the foreign occupation forces that were humiliating us. Surely “the one” would be crushing the oppressors and driving them from the land. But now all those hopes have come to nothing haven’t they? The hated powers-that-be have won again, and all our dreams have been crushed. There is nothing left to do but argue over what went wrong and how we ever came to believe that this Jesus was the type to crush armies. Where did we get it so wrong? Did we misinterpret Jesus or get the wrong perspective on the scriptures?

But after telling our story of woe, this yet unrecognised stranger who is in fact the dead man we are talking about, cuts in and begins to tell us that we’ve missed the point. “Didn’t you realise that the anointed one would have to suffer these things in order to achieve what he was setting out to achieve?” Well, no, we didn’t actually. And neither did anyone else, which is of course, the point of the story. And so, Luke tells us, “beginning with Moses and all the prophets,” the stranger interprets to us “the things about himself in all the scriptures.” And even though he is putting everything in a whole new light, it is all ringing so true to us that our hearts burn within us as he speaks. So what is he saying? What are these new interpretations that he gives us? Well, Luke doesn’t give us a word of it. What? Why not? Surely one of us would have fired up the voice recorder on the i-papyrus and made sure we got it down. Lots of people have wished that over the years, thinking that it would solve so many interpretation issues for us. But would it? Probably not. The transcript would have become just one more text in constant need of interpretation. There is no such thing as a text that has no questions of interpretation. The real question is not how to interpret, but whose interpretation to follow; whose eyes to read through. Whose perspective do we read the texts from and whose interpretation is definitive?

The most extraordinary thing going on here is not just what is said, but who is saying it. We haven’t cottoned on to this yet, but we are listening to the words of a dead man. We are seeing the words of Moses and the prophets through they eyes of a man who has been killed. This is the victim of the very execution that so brutally crushed out our hopes. Dead men tell no tales, as the saying goes. The victors get to give the final verdict on what things mean and how they are to be interpreted. The victims voices are silenced. Their perspective is crushed. But here we are, hearing scripture interpreted through the eyes of the murdered victim. No wonder it is a never before comprehended perspective on scripture!

Now I can’t stand up here and pretend to know what Jesus said on the road, or give you the definitive answers on how the Bible is now to be interpreted in light of what he said. And neither can anybody else. As a middle-aged, educated, white, heterosexual bloke, I am a member of the privileged group that least often ends up as the murdered victims of the world’s violent power games, so I have more trouble than most even hearing, let alone imagining my way into the perspective of the silenced victims. But what I can tell you, having done my best to imaginatively inhabit this story and listen to the voice of the dead man talking on the road, is that we are being asked to make his experience as the victimised one the reference point for our reading of all of scripture. It’s not that the older scriptures are just collections of coded predictions about him and his fate. What I am suggesting is that what God is doing in and through Jesus is something we can see God doing in older stories too. God has been suffering for and in and alongside the victims of our hostility and divisiveness and bitter violence over and over and over throughout history. Even when it was the victors who got their versions of the story into the pages of the Bible, there is another perspective present in the stories, and if we will approach those stories with the murdered victim who death can not hold down or silence as our guide, then God’s word will yet speak through these stories. Even when the stories have preserved the propaganda and deluded self-justifications of the blood-splattered conquerers, they are enormously valuable when we allow the murdered victim to begin interpreting them to us, because those very lies will become like a two-edged sword that cuts through our own delusions and reveals to us the truth of how we deceive ourselves and project our evil onto God.

Certainly, when we start learning to interpret scripture with and through the crucified and risen victim, we will learn to be very very suspicious of any interpretation that justifies or encourages us to victimise or scapegoat or shun and despise any person or group. Those of us who were in the crowd, punching the air and chanting “Crucify him! Crucify him!” were all terribly sure of ourselves, and the rightness, even holiness, of our cause. And the unanimity of the chanting crowd made it impossible to imagine that God was not on our side. But all that looks tragically deluded now that the murdered victim is walking with us, speaking the truth to us, and clearly not the least bit resentful about our failure and our complicity in his death. A whole new way of seeing, through eyes that aren’t supposed to be able to see, has been opened up to us, and as he breaks bread at the table with us, our eyes are truly opened and we recognise him for who he is.

My friends, I can’t tell you all that he said to us about Moses and the prophets on that Emmaus road, and I can’t solve all the interpretation questions that arise among us or anybody else. But what I can promise you is that the crucified and risen victim is here, again and again offering himself to us in the breaking of bread at this table, and if we will continue to gather here with him, and be fed by him, and allow him to open our eyes and see the world and the Bible and our many questions through his eyes, then we will be learning from the definitive interpreter who loves us and gives himself for us and is leading us into the fullness of truth and the fullness of life, to the glory of God.