Christmas Sunday
Jesus’ Coming Changes Our Point Of View
Luke 24:13-35

In previous years our messages during the Advent and Christmas season have either come from the opening passages of the gospels that talk about Jesus’ birth, or they’ve come from Old Testament passages that point to Jesus’ coming. This Christmas season we’ve done something a little different. We’ve taken the idea of Jesus’ coming at Christmas and looked at what happened when he came into the lives of various people in the gospels, and then asked what it means for Jesus to come into our lives, today.

One thing that’s become clear as we’ve looked at these various passages is that Jesus’ coming changes things. With Simeon and Anna it was the change from expectation to fulfillment. They were both looking for the coming of the Messiah and when they saw Jesus that expectation changed to fulfillment.

When Jesus came to the disciples in the storm, walking on the water, he changed their experience too. Everything around them had been violent and disturbed, but when Jesus came to them he calmed the storm.

When Jesus came to Lazarus’ family their sadness at his death turned to joy when he was restored to them. When Jesus came to the woman at the well things changed for her as she moved from exclusion into inclusion.

In today’s passage Jesus comes to the disciples on road to Emmaus and he changes their despair into hope.

This story takes place on Easter Sunday afternoon and evening, and it may seem a little strange at first to be preaching from an Easter passage in the Christmas season. But there’s two good reasons to finish our Advent and Christmas series with this passage from the other end of the gospels. One is that Easter is the reason we remember Christmas. At Christmas we remember the birth of the one who rose from the dead. If he hadn’t risen from the dead and shown himself to be the Messiah, the Son of God, then there would be no reason to celebrate his birth any more that the birth of thousands of other unknown first century Jews who were executed by the Romans. But Jesus rose from the dead, and that makes him unique, and memorable.

The other good reason to finish this series with this story is because it is closer to our own experience. We no longer deal with Jesus coming to us as a first century Jew whom we might meet on the way to the market. He comes to us as the risen Christ, which both simplifies and complicates things.

Let’s take a look at this passage…

Once again we have people who are in pain because someone near to them has died. Only this time it isn’t Lazarus. This time it’s Jesus himself who’s dead.

It’s not clear why the disciples are going to Emmaus. It’s possible that that’s where their lodging was for the night, a few miles outside Jerusalem. Just like Jesus used to stay in Bethany when he was in town. We don’t know.

What we do know is that, as they’re walking along the road, someone else falls into step with them. Now, that might seem a little strange to us. If you were walking along the road and some stranger started talking to you, you might wonder what he’s after. But really it would be no different for these guys to fall into conversation with someone else on the road than it would be for us to fall into conversation with the person in the seat next to us on a bus or an airplane. It just makes the journey pass faster.

We don’t always recognise Jesus when he comes

And here’s the strange thing. These guys had been disciples of Jesus; not part of the inner circle of the twelve, but definitely followers. They knew what he looked like, and yet, when he started talking with them on the road, they didn’t recognise him.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. When Jesus came to the disciples walking on the water in the storm they didn’t know who it was. Mary didn’t recognise Jesus by the tomb. She thought he was the gardener. And it won’t be the last time either. When Jesus appears to the disciples in the upper room they think they’re seeing a ghost.

The text doesn’t say why they didn’t recognise him either, just that “they were kept from recognizing him.” It could have been a combination of things. It seems that, after his resurrection, Jesus was in some ways the same, but in other ways different. Some people recognised him, others didn’t. Add that to the fact that these guys are convinced that Jesus is dead and therefore weren’t expecting to see him, and you can begin to understand.

[I have a terrible memory for names and, more than once, I’ve been out somewhere and met someone that I know. But because I’ve met them in an unexpected context, I didn’t realise it was them until they said something that made a connection. It was pretty embarrassing.]

Certainly part of the reason that they were unable to recognise Jesus was their emotional state. They had such high hopes, and then they had been dashed to the ground, and now they were just despairing and confused.

So Jesus counsels them. One of the Old Testament names for Jesus is Wonderful Counsellor (Is 9.6) and he does what a good counsellor does; he asks questions. “What are you talking about?” Like good Jews, their first response is to answer a question with another question. “Are you from out of town? You been asleep for the last few days?” But Jesus presses in and again asks them what they’re talking about, and they tell their story. “About Jesus of Nazareth. He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people. ²⁰ The chief priests and our rulers handed him over…” and so on. And they tell the story of what happened in Jerusalem; about their hopes for a new world order, how those hopes were destroyed by Jesus’ death and how the women’s reports of angels and of Jesus’ body being gone have only served to confuse them more.

This is what grieving people do. They tell their story.

[I was aware of this about this time last year after Marilyn’s father died. How often one or other of the family would recount the story; how he went to the grocery store, slipped and fell in the parking lot, went into hospital with a broken hip, how he developed pneumonia and passed away within three weeks. It’s part of the process of coming to terms with the past. You tell the story over and over until you no longer feel the need to tell it. If you are journeying with someone who has experienced a loss you might find it difficult to listen to the same story over and over again, but they’re not telling it for your benefit. They’re telling the story so they can move on.]

When Jesus comes he changes our point of view

And so, Jesus hears the disciples out; he lets them tell their story. But he doesn’t just leave it there. He sets about re-orienting their point of view. He doesn’t argue about the data. He accepts all of what they have told him. What he does is help them see the events of the last few days from a totally different point of view.

²⁵ He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! ²⁶ Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” ²⁷ And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

The first thing Jesus does is tell them off for not figuring it out on their own. Clearly he thought that they had access to enough information to make sense of what had happened, if only they had understood the scriptures.

A number of the commentaries I looked at for this passage insisted that the inability of the disciples to recognise Jesus shows that we can’t encounter God until he chooses to reveal himself. That’s true, as far as it goes, but Jesus’ response to the disciples here implies that he has revealed himself, and they have been “foolish” and “slow of heart” in not understanding that revelation. Jesus points to the Old Testament (“the prophets”) as public truth that they as Jews, and as his disciples, should have understood as pointing to all that has happened.

You see, Christianity is not a private religion. Despite all you might hear, it is not primarily about your experience of God, or your beliefs about who, or what, God is. Christianity is a public faith, based on public truth; things that God has done and said in the past. God spoke to Abraham. He spoke to Moses, and brought Israel out of Egypt. He settled the people of Israel in the Promised Land. And he came in the person of Jesus Christ to live and die as a man that we might know what God is like. These are public events. As Paul says to King Agrippa in Acts 26, “These things were not done in a corner.”

That is so opposite to the way that our society views faith. Most people in Hamilton, including many Christians, see faith as something internal and personal that has no place in public. In fact they’re a little embarrassed to talk about it in public. They treat faith like that line from the Beatles song, “What do you see when you turn out the light? I can’t tell you, but I know it’s mine.”

That’s not how the Bible views faith. Either God exists or he doesn’t. Either he acts in history, or he doesn’t. Either Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead, or he didn’t. And if he didn’t, then we might as well all go home and find something else to do on Sunday mornings. As Paul says, “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins [and] we are to be pitied more than all men.”

So, Jesus’ response to the disciples’ grief and confusion isn’t to tell them to look inside themselves, to understand their own pain, to reflect on their own experiences. He points them to look out to scripture and back into history, to what God has said and done in the past, to make sense of what is happening in the present.

We don’t know what texts Jesus pointed out to them as they walked toward Emmaus. Assuming they met up just as they were leaving Jerusalem they probably had a couple of hours together walking and talking before they arrived at their destination.

I suspect that Jesus pointed out that he didn’t appear in a vacuum. The way had been prepared for him by thousands of years of prophecy and teaching. Just as we did, ever so briefly, in our service here on Christmas morning, I’m sure that he went back to the Old Testament promises of a saviour and showed them how he fulfilled them. He showed them how the Messiah and the Suffering Servant in the book of Isaiah were one and the same person. He showed them how Calvary and the cross were not some huge mistake, but part of the plan all along.

We often understand Jesus’ coming best in retrospect

 [Some of you might have noticed that I’ve been fiddling with the pulpit over the last couple of weeks; moving it up and down. That’s because I have new glasses. Like my old ones, they’re tri-focals, only stronger because my eyes are getting worse. And so I have to adjust the height of the pulpit so I can see my notes without doing weird contortions.

Those of you who wear glasses know what it’s like when your prescription gets old. Your eyes change but your glasses don’t and so things gradually get harder to see. Then you go into the optometrist and he or she tests your eyes. In my experience, the first thing they do is make things worse. They stick lenses in front of your eyes that make everything blurry and out of focus. Then they adjust them until, all of a sudden, what was blurry and indistinct, suddenly jumps into focus and you can read the letters on the card at the other end of the room.]

I wonder if that’s something like what the disciples experienced as Jesus unpacked the Old Testament in a way that made sense of his death on the cross. Suddenly, everything jumped into focus and it began to make sense.

But it wasn’t until Jesus broke the bread at the table and disappeared that they fully understood what had happened. This Jesus who had been crucified was alive again. This changes everything! “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”

And that’s the third thing I’d like us to see in this passage. The first was that we often don’t recognise Jesus when he comes to us. The second was that his coming changes our point of view. And the third is that we only realise the impact of his coming in retrospect, as we look back on it.

There are three times to know an event. One is in the rehearsal or planning. You plan and practise but it isn’t the real thing. You can see that in wedding rehearsals where everybody walks through the same motions and does all the same things and says all the same things as the wedding itself, but it’s not the same. Worship practise on Saturday morning is not the same as leading worship on Sunday morning. Practising with your buddies in the garage isn’t the same as actually playing a gig in front of real people. I love planning trips, even to places I may never go, but, compared with the real thing, it just all seems unreal, unserious.

Jesus had predicted his death and resurrection numerous times, but the disciples never really took him seriously.

The second way to know something is in the event itself. But then our understanding is hindered because everything happens so fast. The events fly by us and we don’t have the time to figure out what they mean.

The events of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion were all so fast, so compacted in time, that it was impossible for the disciples to understand what was going on.

The third way to know an event is in remembrance, as we reflect back on it. This is how we understand the important things in life; an important trip, a wedding, a gathering of friends, or a conversation on the road and at the table with a stranger who turned out to be Christ himself.

Jesus still comes to us today

I said earlier that, like these disciples, Jesus comes to us as the risen Christ. That complicates things because we can’t just go down the road and sit down with him over a cup of coffee and talk face to face.

But it also simplifies things. Luke tells us that there were a number of special appearances of Jesus over a period of 40 days before he ascended to heaven. But if that was all we had to go on then all believers except those few would only every experience Jesus’ absence. As each generation got further and further away from those appearances of Jesus it would get harder to sustain faith in what someone else had seen.

But what Luke wants us to understand, is that Christ comes to us in scripture. He is both the key that unlocks the meaning of the Bible and the one at the centre of the Biblical story. We can meet him in the text. And, like those disciples, we can meet him in the breaking of bread as we obey his command to remember his death at the communion table.

His presence in our midst as we open scripture and celebrate communion makes us all first generation Christians, and everywhere we meet is Emmaus.

Take aways

A new year ahead of us.

Will you make time and space for Jesus to come into your life?

It doesn’t have to be some miraculous appearance.

You can meet him in scripture, as you read and listen for the voice of the Spirit speaking through the Word of God.

You can meet him in worship, as we gather together here, or in homes through the week, as we pray and celebrate communion, he is there.

And you can meet him in everyday encounters with your neighbours.

Be listening for the voice of Jesus, guiding you into deeper knowledge of himself.