Word of Salvation – August 2024

 

The Story We Find Ourselves In

 

Sermon by Harry Burggraaf B.D. on Luke 24:27

Scripture Reading: Luke 24:13-35

Singing:        We are here to praise you (BoW.179)
                        At Your feet we fall (BoW.337)
                        O love of God, how strong and true (BoW381)

 

One of my favourite television programmes is the ABC’s Australian Story, on Monday evenings.  Each episode the presenter, Carolyn Jones, takes an ordinary person who has experienced an extraordinary set of circumstances in their life and explores their story.

Some time ago there was the story of Hazel Hawke, the ex-wife of Bob Hawke, a past prime minister.  She is suffering from Alzheimer’s and the program explored how she is managing the disease; how she’s trying to complete things she still wants to do before it becomes too debilitating; how friends and family support her.  It was a beautiful, poignant account (told with such dignity) of a person who has suffered some awful things in her life; not least of all a divorce from a husband who she stood by through thick and thin, in success and failure, and then he ended the marriage.  A deeply moving story!

Another episode was of teenager who was emerging as a talented saxophone player.  One day a drunken lot of louts broke into his house, attacked him and broke most of his fingers so that he could no longer do what he loved most: play the saxophone.  A senseless, brutal act of malice, destroying a person’s hopes and dreams.  The story explored how gradually, bit by bit, with incredibly tenacity, he got back the use of, I think it was three of his fingers; how a creative saxophone maker built a special instrument and adapted the keys – whatever you call those things.  In the end you see him playing in an orchestral group.  A deeply moving story of renewal and redemption.

This morning’s Bible reading would be an ‘Australian Story’ if Carolyn Jones had been around in the first century AD in Palestine.

It’s one of those stories that touches the heart and lifts the spirit and provides insights for our living.

It’s interesting that of all the four Gospel writers only Luke tells it.  Of course Luke, being a doctor is deeply interested in the human dimension; how the crucifixion and resurrection touches the lives of ordinary people.  You notice how the story interrupts the main narrative: crucifixion… death and burial… resurrection… ascension.

Here you have this account of the most momentous event that has ever happened, the climactic point of all of history, the drama of salvation – and embedded into it is this lovely, poignant, personal story of two people whose lives are touched by this drama.

Shattered hopes and empty dreams

Cleopas and his friend (some commentators say it was his wife, which would be rather a nice touch) must have been exhausted.

They were certainly physically exhausted. Seven miles, 12 kilometres is quite a walk in the hilly country from Jerusalem to Emmaus.  But especially exhausting after the tension filled days these two had experienced.

They were emotionally exhausted.  They’d been there, or heard the story first hand, when the chief priests had handed Jesus over to Pilate for rough Roman justice.  They’d seen the cowardly Pilate wash his hands of responsibility for Jesus.  They’d heard the bloodthirsty crowd call on Pilate to release a murderer, Barabbas and have Jesus crucified.  They’d followed Jesus on that long agonising walk dragging his cross to Golgotha.  And then those long, long hours on that hill called ‘the place of a skull’, the garbage dump just outside Jerusalem, waiting for their friend to die that slow painful death by crucifixion – women crying; Pharisees mocking; Roman soldiers gambling for his cloak; what a humiliating, emotionally excruciating day.  And then the sudden darkness; pitch black; and that cry of desolation, it still rang in their ears; ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’  And then that silly story by the women who said that the tomb they’d put him in was empty and he was alive.

But most of all they were spiritually and existentially exhausted.  What most knocked the stuffing out of their lives was their loss of meaning.  Here they had put all their hopes and expectations in Jesus.  “We had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel.” (verse 21).  And all their hopes and dreams were now shattered.

We need to understand the devastating emptiness of that phrase.

I suppose most of us can recall situations and times when our hopes and dreams have died; when we’ve wondered, ‘Why did this happen?  What does this mean?’  The loss of a loved one; one of the children making some really bad choices; ongoing pain and sickness.  ‘What is God doing in my life?’  Spiritually empty and exhausted…!

The story reframed

A man joins them and walks with them.  Jesus makes himself part of their journey.  And what does he do?  He reframes their story.  He gives them a new way of understanding their experience of the last few days.  Remember we said that this ‘story’ of the two people walking to Emmaus is an intrusion into the larger ‘story’ of God’s drama of salvation: Jesus death and resurrection and at the end of the chapter his ascension.

And Jesus points these two people – whose hope has vanished; whose meaning for life has been shattered – he points them to the larger story.

“Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the scriptures concerning himself.”

Wow, that must have been some Bible study.  It needed a substantial part of those seven miles of walking to tell it.  It laid the foundation for their lives to be changed.  Afterwards they remarked that their hearts burnt, their adrenalin was pumped, their emotions went sky high, as Jesus unfolded the drama of redemptive history.

Wouldn’t you have liked to be a fly on the nose of one of those walkers?  I wonder which parts of the scriptures Jesus explained to them.  We’re not told precisely – use your imagination – give it some thought when you’ve got a moment.  Which O.T. Scriptures did Jesus unpack for them?

The story: our story.

Beginning with Moses and the Prophets; covering the whole of salvation history; from Genesis to Revelation (although of course Revelation hadn’t been written yet); marvellous memories and powerful promises; Jesus outlined it all for them.  And this wasn’t just dry history, not just abstract theology, he drew them into the story.  This was their salvation story.  Jesus was the key character; he explained all that the scriptures said of him; but it was also their story.

• Can you imagine him taking them way back in time; when the Father and the Son and the Spirit created human beings in their own image and gave them that wonderful mandate to develop and enjoy the earth? The Father and the Son taking the dust of the ground and forming these marvellous, mysterious creatures called men and women. I was telling this story to preppies at school once and one little kid asked, ‘Is that like God doing play-doh?’  It’s an image that’s stuck with me.  Play-doh time with the Trinity.  God forming you and me from the dust of the earth and saying, ‘This is very good’.  Creation; the first chapter of redemptive history.
• And then, soon after: Crisis; rebellion, disobedience; and the Father and the Son in eternal covenant to redeem a lost humanity; he will crush the serpent’s head; victory in Eden; but not just for a lost humanity; but specifically for those two people walking to Emmaus; and for you and me.
• And then throughout the story of the Old Testament: Christ in the calling of Abraham; Christ in the Exodus; Christ in the sacrificial system of the Tabernacle and then the temple; each time a lamb was sacrificed it pointed to Jesus; each year when the scapegoat was sent into the desert it spoke of Jesus our scapegoat.
• Christ in the Davidic kingship; Christ in the Psalms (Psalm 22 – ‘My God my God why have you forsaken me; Psalm 23 – ‘the Lord is my shepherd’); Christ in the Prophets (Isaiah 53 the suffering Christ – ‘He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities’; Daniel 7 the vision of the victorious Christ – ‘I looked and there before me was one like a son of man… he was given authority, glory and sovereign power… all peoples and nations worshipped him’)
• Christ who walks with the men in the fiery furnace in Daniel; Christ who ‘turns the hearts of fathers to their children’ and restores relationships in Malachi.

And so Jesus walks with that couple from Emmaus and talks with them and he shows them that their story belongs to a far larger story and he gives them new meaning.  And finally, finally the penny drops as he sits down with them and has a meal.

It takes a long time for them to recognise him.  That’s the trouble when your life is totally absorbed by your disappointments and difficulties.  It dominates your whole horizon and you can’t see the wood for the trees.  Have you experienced that?  Or a friend?  The text says, ‘They were stopped from recognising him!’.  How come?  They’d been with him often enough.  How could they be so blind?

And he comes in our, everyday, ordinary workaday lives.

In her quaint old fashioned way Fay Inchfawn writes:

            “Sometimes when everything goes wrong;
             When days are short and nights are long;
             When wash-day brings so dull a sky
             When not a single thing will dry.
             And when the kitchen chimney smokes,
             And when there’s naught so ‘strange’ as folks!
             When friends deplore my faded youth,
             And when the baby cuts a tooth.
             While John, the baby last but one,
             Clings round my skirts till day is done;
             And fat, good tempered Jane is glum,
             And butcher’s man forgets to come.
             Sometimes I say on days like this,
             I get a sudden gleam of bliss.
             Not on some sunny day of ease,
             He’ll come… but on a day like this!”

When the challenges and disappointments and failures of our own life overwhelm us we need to sit with Jesus and hear again that wonderful story of redemption, from Genesis to Revelation and see it as our story.

In his lovely metaphorical book ‘Watership Down’, Richard Adams tells the story of a little rabbit, Fiver, who develops a messianic hunch that something terrible is about to happen to his Sandleford rabbit warren.  Fiver tells his brother Hazel and they try to warn their aging Chief Rabbit Threarah.  But they are ignored as silly doomsayers.  Fiver and Hazel decide that with the coming threat they need to leave the warren and they are joined by Bigwig, Dandelion, Pipkin, Silver and others to make band of a dozen rabbits.

They escape just in time as the rabbit warren, their ancestral home, is destroyed by housing developer bulldozers.

The little band takes off across the countryside in search for a new home, Watership Down.  They face great dangers, the likes of which rabbits never encounter – they have to cross streams and fox infested fields; they have to negotiate highways with thundering, death dealing trucks; there are obstacles and hardships that no normal rabbit would have to deal with.  Their whole instinct is to dig into the cool deep earth; to burrow away into safety.  That’s what rabbits do.  But they are driven by the conviction they cannot stop until they reach safety at Watership Down.  What keeps them going?  What enables them to cope with all their troubles and difficulties?

They tell themselves stories.  What fills them with courage and hope is the retelling of the stories they heard when they were babies in the warren.  The most important is the rabbit creation story about ‘the blessings of El-ahrairah’.  When Frith, the god of the rabbits allocated gifts to each of the species El- ahrairah missed out because he was too busy dancing and eating.  He missed out on the best of the gifts.  But Frith gives him a consolation gift, strong hind legs so that he can escape all the enemies of rabbits.  When faced with enemies and trouble he can always run.  This creation story tells Fiver and Hazel and the others the reason for their being; it describes the rabbits task in life.  Telling and remembering the stories keeps the rabbits running, searching for a new home and gives them courage for the dilemmas life brings.

It isn’t a bad allegory for the Christian life.  At times we’d like to escape in the cool dark earth, to escape the troubles of life, to dig into our little burrows for all we’re worth.

And then we need to tell each other again those wonderful life-giving stories – how we’re wonderfully made in God’s image, infinitely precious, deeply loved by the Father and the Son.  How Christ has won the victory and has crushed the serpent’s head at Calvary.  How he is the scapegoat for our failures and the sacrificial Lamb.  How as a suffering servant he has carried all our burdens and sorrows and how he is the accompanying angel in the most fiery of furnaces.  And how he will come again in power and we will inherit his ‘Watership Down’, a new heaven and a new earth, where everything is whole again.

In 1738 John Wesley, the great evangelical preacher, was at a meeting against his will and someone read Luther’s preface to the book of Romans, a summary of the story of salvation, and he records: ‘I felt my heart strangely warmed… I knew I could trust in Christ alone for salvation and an assurance was given me’.  It was his Emmaus experience.

It’s interesting how the story finishes.  The Emmaus travellers have their eyes opened, their hearts burn with new hope and spiritually refreshed they had to go and tell others – ‘Jesus is really risen; he’s with us right now.’