Sunday 26th April - Third Sunday of Easter

Acts 2.14a, 36-41

Luke 24.13-35

Just over a week ago, three people came down to earth with a bump.

Their names were Jessica, Andrew, and Oleg, and they experienced what’s euphemistically known as a touch-down on the Kazakh steppe.  In fact, these touch downs are described as feeling like a minor car accident – quite a brutal way to experience a return to gravity.  But for these three astronauts, returning from many months on the International Space Station, this was, even in the context of space travel, no ordinary landing.  When they took off for their sojourn out of this world, none of us had even heard of Covid-19.  They had a few weeks to adjust to the idea, during which they looked down at our planet and thought, bewildered, about how radically and rapidly it was changing in response to the pandemic.  And then, after their capsule landed, they were helped by masked and social distancing colleagues, who had themselves been quarantined for a month so as not to pass the virus on.

It was hard to believe, said Jessica Meir, that the world would be quite so changed.  They knew, in orbit, that they were the only three human beings who hadn’t yet been touched by the virus in one way or another, and that from up there, they had been looking through their windows at the billions who had.  But the reality would only become fully apparent on their return.

‘Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?’

You’d have needed to be blind and deaf, suggests Cleopas, not to have known what was going on.  ‘What?’ asks the stranger on the road to Emmaus.

And thinking that he has neither seen nor heard, Cleopas gives his own, struggling-to-comprehend account of what had taken place.

The stranger is someone who is used to turning tables.  He’s a specialist in reversing the accepted order of things.  He can do zero-gravity.  And he can also bring you back to earth with a bump.

You’d have needed to be blind and deaf, says the stranger to the two walkers, not to have known what was going on.

And then two things happen.  He tells the story of salvation – his own story, which is also the world’s story.  And he shares with them in the sacrament of his body – his sacrament, which is also the world’s sacrament.  He shows those two disciples that they are people of story and sacrament.  He shows them his identity.  And he shows them their identity.

If you are able to get out and take the air for your allotted span each day, then perhaps you too will know what it is like to walk along a familiar way in a changed world.  Our well-known places and routines can be a comfort in times of uncertainty.  But they can also seem strange and out of joint, requiring reorientation.  The old things need to be seen a new way up.  And that is disturbing.  A friend of mine powerfully described this experience when she returned home from hospital as a new mother, after the dangerous and traumatic birth of her first child.  ‘I felt,’ she said, ‘as if I were coming back home after a war.’  Home was home, but nothing would ever be the same.

The road to Emmaus is still the road to Emmaus, but to the two who walk along it, it is a changed landscape. They need to be reoriented.  And so Jesus takes the Scriptures, those familiar stories and prophecies, and shows the disciples how to see them another way up.  A strange, new, incandescent way up.  A way up which, in its unfamiliarity, makes the familiar new.  A way up which starts to teach the lost how to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.

And a way up which makes them cling to him.  Their heads are spinning in this new, zero-gravity world.  So they have still not recognised this stranger with their eyes, but with their hearts, burning within them, they are starting to respond to his identity and to recognise their own. 

‘Stay with us’ they say.  And Jesus brings them to earth by taking an earthly substance and fracturing it as his own body has been fractured.  Just as he takes familiar words, so he takes a familiar action.  With the words, he reorients his companions, and with the action, he grounds them in the pain and joy of life in his risen presence, as he abides with them at their table.  So their eyes are opened.

A conversation during a walk.  A meal behind closed doors.  The greatest astonishment for these disciples comes, not from the seismic events of the previous days, but from the intimacy of small gatherings with the risen Christ in their midst.  It is through these everyday, extraordinary encounters that they come back to earth, and realise who they are and what they must be. 

‘Brothers, what should we do?’ cry the people as Peter tells them of Jesus, crucified and glorified.  This might be our cry now, in this unfamiliar Eastertide.  But through the risen Christ of the walk and the table, we receive the same assurance that Peter gave to them: that the promise of new life is ours.  Whether we are near or far, if we live by that promise, it is enough.

Amen.