April 6, 2008 Third Sunday of Easter

Sermon Title: “A Walk to Remember”

Series: None

Text: Luke 24:13-35

Dr. Steve Jackson

NewSong Community Church

Delivered on April 6, 2008

 

“Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus…”

Luke 14:13

A Walk to Remember

 

I believe I have shared with you before that practically every afternoon I take a walk in my neighborhood. If you’re looking for me between 4 and 5pm you’ll find me pounding the pavement covering the 2.5 miles of our neighborhood’s streets in about 45 minutes. I’ll be honest with you though, most of those walks are fairly routine. Yes, there is the occasional exciting moment – like the time a fox dashed across the road in front of me. But for the most part my afternoon walks are pretty boring. I have taken a few interesting and memorable walks though. I’ve taken walks on four different continents. I walked down the Via Dolorosa, the “Way of Suffering” in Jerusalem. A couple of years ago I walked down the Champs Elysées in Paris. I’ve walked from the Lincoln Memorial to Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C. And last year I walked about six kilometers between two villages in West Africa on the darkest night I can ever remember. I’ve also had a few memorable walks inside too. I remember a stroll down a church aisle about 31 years ago when I got married just like it was yesterday. I remember walking into the delivery room to witness the birth of both my daughters. And I remember walking up on a stage in Gainesville, GA to have four bishops lay their hands on my head and pray for me when I was ordained as a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ. All those walks were very memorable for me.

 

But I’m sure you’ve had many memorable walks as well. I wish we had the time to go around the room and share a few of them. The walks may not have been that long, but you can remember things about them like they happened just yesterday because they were so special. We’ve also all witnessed some walks on a grander, public scale. Just this past week the solemn funeral procession of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. down the streets of Atlanta after his assassination forty years ago was replayed at the anniversary of his death. Who can forget the images of Coretta Scott King, or Jackie Kennedy before her, or Ethel Kennedy after her, dressed in black slowly walking behind a caisson bearing the body of their husbands? We’ve also seen astronauts in space suits carrying their oxygen equipment striding towards a rocket that will bear them into space. Remember Christa McAuliffe’s cheery smile and wave as she walked toward launch pad 39-B? Most people remember exactly where they were when they heard of these major incidents. Remember where you were when you heard of the death of the Kennedy’s, King, and the Challenger explosion? Do you remember the strong emotions these events evoked in you then?

 

All these walks were memorable, but the walk we’re going to talk about this morning was a walk that happened 2000 years ago near Jerusalem on Easter afternoon. This walk was so memorable and famous that now it is referred to as simply the “walk to Emmaus.”

 

Why so Famous?

In a way it’s interesting that this walk is so famous. It’s only mentioned in one gospel. And little is known the two who took the famous walk. We know that they knew the apostles. We also know that one of them was called Cleopas but the other one isn’t even named and we never hear from them again in the Bible. We don’t even know why they were traveling towards Emmaus that afternoon. In fact, even the village of Emmaus itself remains a mystery. As is so often the case in history, small villages and towns disappear over time. The village doesn’t exist today. There have been controversies as to its exact location since the third century and no less than four locations have been suggested as the correct site. Of course when you go to the Holy Land they’ll take you to a village (usually the village of Mozah) and your guide will assure you that, “that house right over there is the house of Cleopas,” but no one really knows for sure.

 

With so little actually being known about the location and characters in the story one wonders why the account of the walk to Emmaus has become such a favorite in Scripture. I believe the story has become a favorite because there is something deep in the story that resonates with each one of us. We may not even recognize it at first, but there is something about the story that we all can relate to. The external details of the story really don’t matter. It’s kind of like this: My two daughters were born at Northside Hospital, my friend’s children may have been born at North Fulton Hospital ten years later, but something happened to both of us on a deeper level through those experiences. The details don’t matter. What’s important about the story of the walk to Emmaus is the deeper sense in which each one of us is familiar with what these travelers experienced, and how their story resonates with ours. Their journey is a journey that each one of us either has taken or will take. And that is the journey where Jesus Christ either becomes more distant, or he becomes more real in your life.

 

Let’s look at the story together and I’ll explain what I mean.

 

The Walk to Emmaus

Note, first of all, that all this happened on Easter Sunday, verse 13 says, “Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem.” That one sentence says so much. First of all, that it was on “that same day,” which if you look just above it in verses 1-12 meant it was Easter. I’m not quite sure how it is that this story so often gets distanced from the resurrection event, but in my mind the fact that it is so closely related to the resurrection is a strong indicator of what the story is all about. The second thing to notice from this verse is that our two travelers are identified as two “of them.” Who is them? Them is the followers of Jesus. That means these two weren’t “outsiders,” they were “insiders” – they were “church folk.”

 

Stay with me now. On the day Jesus arose from the dead two depressed and disillusioned followers of his leave the rest of his followers in Jerusalem and head for home in Emmaus. They gave up. They’d been with him a long time. They’d seen the miracles. They’d even heard what some were saying – that he’d risen from the tomb and people had seen him. But these two cashed out; they became disillusioned and gave up.

 

Disillusionment

Most followers of the Lord eventually come to experience this sense of disillusionment. We come to a point when we feel that our faith has, in one way or another, failed to live up to our expectations. Yes, we remember the times when what we read in the Bible affected us deeply, and yes there have been times when we saw so clearly the wonder and power of the Lord that we wondered how we could ever doubt again. But then there were the other times when God seemed so distant, so dry, and so unreal. We stood beside the grave of someone we love and we wondered why? We shut down the business that we felt God calling us to pursue because we ran out of money and we asked, “Why Lord?” Life suddenly seems pointless and without meaning, and the fact that we believe in the Lord, doesn’t seem to make any difference at all. In fact, if it does anything, it seems to make life harder because we constantly feel guilty. And compared to Jesus we feel so unloving, unkind, and so selfish.

 

A Heart Problem

Intellectually we know that believing in God is important. But the problem does not really lie in what we think; it has to do with the way we feel. It’s a matter of the heart. Notice that when Jesus begins to open up the Scriptures to the two walkers he describes them as “slow of heart to believe” (v. 25). I think the wording there is crucial. The two weren’t “slow of mind” to believe, they were walking along talking about the dreadful things that had just happened, this stuff was still on their minds, but whatever they believed hadn’t traveled the 18 inches or so from their brains to their hearts. We need the kind of encounter that makes our hearts “burn within us” like these two described in verse 32.

 

Whatever we may still believe and think about the fundamental importance of the Bible and the teachings of the church, it somehow doesn't seem to matter that much to us anymore. It doesn't reach our hearts and so it hasn’t any real effect on the way we feel. So we simply start going through the motions, or worse, we decide to strike out for Emmaus.

 

But something happened to our two travelers in the story of the walk to Emmaus. If you jump down towards the end of the story, say at verse 33 you see that that same day, apparently very late by now, those same two followers took another walk. They walked right back to Jerusalem to rejoin the apostles and other believers that they had abandoned earlier in the day, but now they’re no longer depressed and disillusioned, they’re full of joy and zeal instead. What happened to them to give rise to this dramatic turnaround?

 

They Met a Stranger (they didn’t really know him)

The short answer, of course, is that they met a stranger along the way – a stranger who they didn’t recognize as Jesus but who turned out to be Jesus after all. At least that’s what it says in verse 15-16, “Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” How could they have failed to recognize the very one that they called “Lord” as followers of his? They’d been there to see him arrested. They watched from among the alleys of Jerusalem as he trudged towards Golgotha bearing his own cross. They watched from a distance as he was nailed to the cross and died. How could they have not recognized him? That’s another clue to understanding the story. I believe they didn’t recognize him because they had never really known the real Jesus.

 

The two make this clear when in verse 21 when they say, “We had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel.” The Jesus they knew and loved was not the Savior of the world; in their minds he was a crazed nationalist who planned to remove the yoke of Roman oppression off the backs of Israel. They had heard his teaching, they weren’t strangers to what he had to say or what he did, but they were strangers to whom he really was.

 

I wonder how many people today have been in churches for years. They have been in small groups and Sunday School and men’s and women’s groups. They’ve heard countless sermons, but the Jesus they think they know has as much in common with the real Jesus as the nationalist hero had in common with the real Jesus in our story today.

 

Am I making sense to you? They knew him, but they didn’t really. And so when Jesus didn’t live up to their expectations they threw up their hands and walked away.

 

I have a suspicion that had the two travelers not encountered Jesus on their walk to Emmaus they still would have eventually rejoined the others back in Jerusalem. I don’t think they would’ve returned with the joy in their hearts like they did after meeting him, but I think they would have returned because there was something inside them that told them that this was right, even though their hearts weren’t in it. Church, and religion, does that to people. We recognize the truth there, but it just doesn’t seem to work for us. And so we hang around – sometimes we give up, but we usually return. What we really need though, is an encounter with Jesus himself, like these two had.  

 

Where am I getting all this? What is the crux of my belief that what happened on the walk to Emmaus was nothing less than Jesus becoming real in the life of a couple of church people? I say it because of the different way Jesus is described by these two before and after their encounter.

 

From Prophet to Lord

In verse 19 the two practically rebuke Jesus for not knowing what was going on. It’s a piece of beautiful irony that we, the readers know that they are the ones who really don't know what's going on. But in that near-rebuke the two describe Jesus as “a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people.” And yet after their encounter with Jesus, after the real Jesus was made known to them, when they returned to Jerusalem Jesus is no longer a “prophet” to them, instead they describe him in verse 34 as “the risen Lord.” Jesus had moved from being a good man, a man worth emulating, to the Son of God, the way, the truth, and the life. 

 

What I’m suggesting this morning is that perhaps what we need most today is an encounter with the living, breathing Jesus. Could it be that our expectations of Jesus blind us to the real Jesus as it did with Cleopas and his unnamed companion? Somehow in the process of talking with this stranger the two suddenly realized he was Jesus, the answer to all their heart’s questions. This discovery that the one in whom they had trusted, Jesus Christ, was indeed alive and not dead, gave new meaning to their lives, their faith and their vocation.

 

It’s My Story (is it yours?)

How important is this to you and me? Well, I can’t say for you, but I know for me it’s the most important thing in the world. You see, the story of the walk to Emmaus is my story. I was like Cleopas and his companion. I grew up in the church. I knew about Jesus from my earliest days. In my thirties I held every job imaginable in the church, Trustee, PPR Committee, Lay Leader, youth leader. But you know what, Jesus still wasn’t in here (point to heart) he was strictly up here (point to head). It wasn’t until just a few years ago that he became real to me like he did to the two Emmaus road walkers. It was then that my heart “burned within me.” It was that encounter that changed my faith, that gave new meaning to my life, and that even gave me a new vocation. In fact, I guess in one sense if I hadn’t met him on the road to Emmaus you wouldn’t be here either.

 

Conclusion

In closing please understand this. You are always either walking towards or away from Jerusalem. That’s another kind of “hidden” lesson in this story. Life itself is a journey, and on that journey we are always headed either one way or the other. We’ve either got our backs to the Lord, walking to our own unknown Emmaus’, or else we’re facing him, and getting closer and closer all the time.

 

How about you? Could it be that you, like Cleopas and his friend have a “heart” problem?  Isn’t it ironic that so many folks walk today for their hearts – to keep in shape? And here are these two travelers with a definite heart problem – they’ve been slow of heart to believe – and Jesus encounters them along the way and heals their hearts. Is your heart problem that you have been slow to really believe? Is it the “eighteen inch” problem between here and here? Has life come tumbling in around your ears and you’re about to strike out for Emmaus?

 

If so, let me encourage you to instead to open up your heart to Jesus Christ today. Tell him that you want to know him, not know about him. Tell him you want a relationship, not religion. I did, and it’s made all the difference in the world. My prayer for you this morning is that the real Jesus would become real to you, more real than anything in the world like he did for me. That’s a big part of the Easter message you know, “He’s real, and he’s alive forevermore.” Let’s pray.