Road to Emmaus

1992 (Year C) 26 April / Easter 2

St Peter de Beauvoir Town

Those who find biblical sermons tedious are going to have difficulty with the next couple 
of minutes. If you find the going hard, I suggest that you look at the picture behind me and I’ll tell you when it’s over.

For those who are still with me – I want to get over some basic information about the 
resurrection or at least the way it’s presented to us in the gospels and in our tradition. If I 
were to ask you to tell a couple of resurrection stories to your neighbour now most of us 
would be able to do – maybe it would take a bit of prompting but we’d get there in the end. 
We’d drag the information back from the furthest recesses of memory – where our tradition or our Sunday School teaching put it. We’d be less likely to know which gospels the particular stories were from – indeed I got several of them wrong as I looked at them this week.

You’d be less likely to know that in its original form, Mark’s gospel had no resurrection 
appearances at all. It ended with the disciples running away from the empty tomb in fear. 
Only Monica and Irena, who know much more than I do anyway, would know that there are at least two different sources of resurrection stories in the gopels. There are those 
concerned with an empty tomb and those which have to do with Jesus and the disciples. 
You’ve probably never realised that not all the stories are in each gospel and that whoever 
wrote the gospels had their own reasons for putting their own particular stories.

You’d be even less likely to realise that one of the resurrection stories in John’s gospel, the 
one where Jesus tells his disciples to lower the nets to catch the miraculous number of 
fishes is in other gospels, but there it’s recorded as happening before the crucifixion.

Clearly something fishy, ‘geddit’, is going on here. Or at least several things are happening 
at the same time. Many great thinkers have written book after book about the resurrection 
and the way the gospel writers present it, reflecting on the real meaning of it all. The 
temptation for the rest of us is to give up in bewilderment.

But that would be a mistake and now’s the time for those who have been looking at the 
picture to stop and rejoin the rest of us. I believe that the most important theme running 
through the resurrection stories is this, ‘It is the community between human beings that 
will be raised and transfigured in the light of God, not the isolated and private individual’.

If I can, let me be a little clearer. Christ died not for me, not for you but for all of us. All of creation. He was raised from the dead not for me, nor you but the whole of creation. It is significant then that the resurrection appearances, whether they are remnants of stories which are being told in the wrong places or not, that all of them have to do with the revelation of the risen Christ being made to groups of people living in community. Even where Jesus appears to a single person, Mary, she is told specifically, ‘Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, “I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God”’. The individual is reminded in no uncertain terms of their responsibility and their connectedness with other persons in their relationship with God.

And so it is on the road to Emmaus that the risen Christ is recognised when the two or 
three finally share the meal. In community. The risen Christ comes to Thomas not when he was on his own, to make up for the fact that he was missing the first time, but when the 
disciples are together. And so it is with us. The resurrection only makes any sense for us in 
community – it is as we remember together that its significance becomes clearer to us. It is by encouraging each other together, that we begin to explore the implications for us as 
individuals.

Recently our religion, like our society, has lost sight of the importance of community. It 
has pursued the cult of the individual. Christianity has stressed the individual’s salvation. 
Our society has encouraged individual freedom so much that no-one pays too much 
attention to anyone else.

The resurrection emphasises the communal nature of our faith. We are a community of 
life. A community of empowered individuals who through the glory of the resurrection find themselves in union with the whole of creation, both good and bad alike. All this is 
beautifully expressed by Isaac the Syrian: ‘What is a loving heart?’ he writes, ‘It is a heart 
that bums with love for all creatures – men and women, demons, all created things ... 
Immeasurable pity wrings the heart ... It can no longer endure even the slightest pain 
inflicted on a created being ... It prays even for the snakes, moved by the infinite 
compassion which is awakened in the hearts of those who are becoming like God.’ AMEN