Easter 3 A

Luke 24.13-35, the Road to Emmaus story, celebrates the way breaking bread with strangers makes the life of Christ present in ordinary space and time. The table fellowship that comes toward the end of the story is an Imitatio Christi, an imitation of the life of the Messiah, in which his life becomes our life. The resurrection of Christ is made known in concrete actions like breaking bread, that is to say, in our discipleship.

The disciples in the story are depressed because the story has not turned out as they had expected. As the story unfolds, we might ask what was actually the more unexpected—the cross through which they experienced defeat, or the ordinary experience of broken bread through which they experienced such a profound sense of undefeated “presence” that they could proclaim that Jesus remained alive? The story is about a conversation with Scripture that unfolds in a new understanding, metanoia (conversion, literally “change of mind), that becomes explicit in action, in the breaking of bread. It is in this concrete but meaning-laden act that their eyes were finally opened. “My thoughts are not your thoughts,” says the Lord (Isaiah 55.8), “nor are your ways my ways.” The conversation we have with Scripture becomes an interweaving of his ways with ours until they become one. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?

Let me share another conversation that, for me, connects with this story of conversation emerging in discipleship. The week after Easter I booked a study leave at the URC’s Windermere Centre to bone up for teaching “Advanced New Testament Greek”. I was the only resident that week, so I felt overjoyed when Lawrence Moore, the centre’s director, popped around one evening to relieve the isolation. I like Lawrence. We resumed the on-going conversation we’d been having since we first met about seven years ago.

One of the things we discussed was the “Vision4Life” programme the United Reformed Church is promoting these days as the latest effort in resuscitating a moribund church. It’s not just supposed to revitalise the church. It’s also supposed to be a meeting place for the evangelical conservatives and the liberals. The programme consists of local churches concentrating on the Bible one year, prayer the next and, in the third year, evangelism.

I have always tried to embrace our denomination’s agendas, but I confessed to Lawrence that I myself had never been either conservative or liberal. Either option seemed ill-focused to me. My own self-understanding came from a third term, “radical” Christianity. I think I formed my sensibilities in my young adult years working with Catholic Worker-Movement-type people who were engaged in doing things in places like inner-city Chicago. We exercised our discipleship in what theologians at the time were calling “praxis”—action that embodied consciously shared values. We met—a community of Presbyterians, Catholics and a few Baptists—every Friday evening in a house where a couple of nuns lived that was a kind of community base for us. We shared a pot-luck meal and an informal, guitar accompanied Eucharist, sitting around on the floor. The emotional stresses of sharing our lives in ministry were given healing therapy by this gathering, by shared liturgy, shared prayer and broken bread. For me, radical Christianity is an imitatio Christi, a way of living rather than believing, or perhaps a way of believing that is inseparable from praxis.

The often tense division between evangelicals and liberals in our denomination seems to me more a matter of believing, and more of a Protestant phenomenon, resulting from the unnatural weight of authority we have given to the Bible, and to the question of believing what the Bible says. In the sixteenth century Reformation we ditched the authority of the Pope and, to fill the vacuum, gave supreme authority to the text of the Bible.

It was more than that, of course. The Reformation in large part emerged from the broader concerns of Renaissance humanism. These scholars were editors who sought the authoritative clarity of the best possible manuscripts from classical Greece and Rome, texts shorn of layer upon layer of medieval commentary and corruption. The scholars who provoked this intellectual revolution exposed the ways the encrustation of medieval perspectives had corrupted biblical texts in the same way they had obscured Cicero and Galen and Aristotle. The very concept of the “Middle Ages” derives from the value given to the recovery of ancient learning. The Reformation came on the heels of the Renaissance, the re-birth of classical learning.

The result was to give the biblical text a weight of authority that it was not suited to carry. As John Campbell points out in Being Biblical, biblical authority doesn’t come from the text as text, but from the voices of those blessed in the Beatitudes and from the cross, from the voices of those enslaved in Egypt and those exiled in Babylon. This is the authority of those who suffer from the structures that the “world” considers to carry authority. It is, as Bonhoeffer said, authority from below. And this is the biblical narrative being unfolded to those two disciples on the Emmaus road when their hearts were burning. It is the story of radical commitment to those who suffer that is born out in the cross and in broken bread. It is the story that unfolds in the life of Jesus. It is the story that unfolds in the life of the faithful disciple. It is the story that underlies the stories of the Bible rather than the literal text itself. It is a story to be lived.

The first year of the Vision4Life programme is to be a year of living with the Bible. If Vision4Life is to become a meeting place between conservative and liberal in the United Reformed Church then we are going to have to grow beyond the way we use the text of the Bible as our final authority, so enshrined in the creeds and constitutions of the Reformed churches. Conservatives lock onto the biblical text as a clear guide to life verging on inerrancy. Liberals, in reaction, seem to focus on what they don’t believe, as if the hole was more important than the donut. Where conservatives and liberals need to come together is in their discipleship, in ways their lives re-tell the story in the challenging, uncharted context of the present moment. Both conservative and liberal in our denomination are too tied to the cerebral dimension of Christianity—what we believe and what we cannot believe. What both need to re-discover is a Christianity that is primarily focused on a Christian way of living that is itself a means of interpreting the biblical text, a way of life that is what John Campbell calls “being Biblical”. Being Biblical unfolds in all the classic Christian disciplines, like the faithful, generous giving we are so bad at in the United Reformed Church, in prayer and in the kind of accompanied living for which the road to Emmaus has become proverbial, and particularly in the way we accompany the lies of the dispossessed. It is not to live like puppets on strings in mechanical obedience to the letter of the text, but rather to live in a way that allows the text to continue to speak through us as we imitate Christ. What we do in obedience, far from an uncritical response to authority from on high, is a creative, imaginative response to the situations we find ourselves in as neighbours. We live not for ourselves but for others. As the hymn says, echoing Book Three of Calvin’s Institution of the Christian Religion, “we are not our own”.

I think the Road to Emmaus story says we see such a life lived in the real presence of Christ most vividly in the Lord’s Supper, for it is in the breaking of bread that the disciples’ eyes are opened, and this story seems obviously to be an interpretation of early Eucharistic practice as embodiment of the living presence of Christ, in the same way that Paul challenges us to discern the presence of Christ in this shared meal in 1 Corinthians 11. From all that has been said above, of course, it is clear that this feast of the Church cannot remain entombed in mere ritual. In order to have any meaning at all the breaking of bread needs to be connected to radical acts of inclusion and affirmation. It should never be a ritual designed exclusively for initiates alone but must be opened up to become a welcoming, reconciling feast with strangers. It needs to have a direct relationship with those who are really hungry in the world, not just through charity, but in actual table fellowship. When our Christian life is practised in this way, then we, too, can run from this feast with the exciting news that “the Lord is risen!” The next unexpected step in this story, of course, is when we discover that the presence of the Lord has already been recognised in all sorts of other faithful but otherwise very ordinary acts of shared discipleship. “He is risen indeed,” they say. It should not come as disappointment when the good news is no news at all, but simply the way things are when our eyes have been opened. Christ 'R' Us.