Reflections and Refractions

The Gospels were written primarily as teaching documents that enabled or assisted teachers in the early christian communities to help their students to know the crucified Jesus of Nazareth and to encounter the Risen Lord. The first christians debated not only who Jesus of Nazareth was, but how one could still know him and see him after his death. They wrote their own life stories in terms of the Jesus stories to which they had access. The early christian communities didn’t just talk about theology. They did theology. They lived it. The stories that we find in the Gospels contain the very fingerprints of the individual early christian communities out of which the Gospels arose. They reflect the poiesis, or poetry and meaning, and the praxis, or practical demonstrations, of the community’s theological understandings. They enabled the family of Jesus (Lk 8:21) to refract and reflect Jesus’ life and death into their own lives and experiences as well as into those of the wider community.

This has far-reaching implications within Churches of Christ today. As members of a supposed ‘New Testament Church’, recognising its intrinsic diversities, do we ‘do theology’? Do the Gospel stories ‘live’ for us in the twentieth century? The Gospel Stories remain simple words from myths and legends scratched onto ancient papyrus sheets until we, as the 20th/21st century family of Jesus, re-read, re-interpret and respond to them in a way which reflects, expresses and interprets our own life experiences. The stories of Jesus of Nazareth, and those of the Risen Lord, only become ‘real’ when they are embodied within the lives of those who read them.

One of the keys to the identity of Churches of Christ lies in its weekly celebration of the Lord’s Supper, and almost invariably presidents make the link between that supper and the memory of Jesus’ death and, perhaps less often, his resurrection. Whilst Luke’s interpretation of the Lord’s Supper and of the Resurrection are only one of a diverse understanding that permeates the whole of the New Testament, it is perhaps in Luke’s stories, and in particular the Emmaus story (Luke 24:13-35), that we see one of the clearest images of an appropriate response to one of the earliest christian creeds, ‘Christ is Risen’.

When looking at many of our churches today, outsiders may perecieve that our repsonse to this ancient confession is closer to ‘So What?’ than to anything else. Yet in gaining an understanding of what the early christian communities understood by these events, how they were inextricably bound together, and in examining what it meant for them to see the Risen Lord, perhaps our response might more appropriately be ‘Christ is risen indeed!’

In entering into and becoming part of the Emmaus story, we have the opportunity to walk beside Cleopas and his companion. We are able to enter into their discussions of the events leading up to our mutual hero’s untimely and unexpected death. We listen with The Stranger as Cleopas explains the reason for their sadness. We learn what sort of Messiah Cleopas and the other disciples were expecting Jesus of Nazareth to be. We have the opportunity to listen as The Stranger explains how to see the Lord in the texts that make up Moses and the prophets.

Here is, however, where our story and that told by Luke may diverge. The reaction of the two travelling companions to what the Stranger has said was to invite him in for a meal and provide lodging for the evening. The Risen Lord became visible, not simply because Jesus broke the bread. The two friends engaged in an act of community which involved the breaking of bread. The Risen Lord was present because he was an active participant in the life of the community. Our reaction to what we see and hear within these texts determines whether we too see the Risen Lord by engaging with The Stranger in community, or whether The Stranger simply continues walking the road of life alone.

One of Luke’s major themes is the importance of table-fellowship. Within Luke’s Gospel, meals occur at significant points and often involve the acceptance of the stranger into the community, or the gathering of people from outside into the smaller household circle. (5:27-32, 9:12, 14:1-24, 19:1-10, 12:16-21). Table fellowship was not just a case of eating together and perhaps engaging in a few ‘spiritual activities’. Whilst Eucharist, or ‘thanksgiving’ was an important symbol for Luke in presenting the nature of the Jesus movement, community was not simply meeting together around the Lord’s Table. Table-fellowship for Luke embodies the whole concept of community: sharing of wealth and property, communal meals, distribution of provisions for the poor outside the community, support networks and so-on. By inviting The Stranger in to share a meal, by extending hospitality to the stranger, the travellers respond to Luke’s suffering messiah. But this is not simply a case of feeding and accommodating a hungry, tired traveller. There is a unique and amazing mutuality of community here. To allow a visitor the role of host was a unique sign of absolute and total acceptance within the household. In having The Stranger make the blessing and break the bread Luke indicates that The Stranger was welcomed as a friend and as a valued member of the community.

Celebration of the Lord’s Supper does not simply celebrate the individual person-Jesus-God relationship. The cross had an horizontal beam as well as a vertical one. In almost all images of Jesus on the cross, he has his arms outstretched, reaching out to the physically suffering and the spiritually hurting. Much is made today of the Eucharistic part of the Lord’s Supper, the personal thanksgiving, while the building of community aspects of the agape, the love-feast, have long since been vanquished to the extremities of worship services, and sometimes one would struggle to find them at all.

Luke’s Jesus of Nazareth was one who responded to people’s needs, one who met people where they were at, whereas many of the religious leaders of the day did not. Throughout his Gospel, Luke shows his community their responsibility to respond to the needs of the powerless and the poor, the suffering and the hungry, and yet at the same time recognising that the powerful and the rich had a place at the table provided they were totally committed to the ‘kingdom’ community. For Luke, having wealth and power in the wider community was not immoral. Indeed, many of Luke’s heroes were rich – the good Samaritan, the father of the prodigal son, the man who prepared a great feast to name a few. It was the use of that wealth and power that determined the morality or otherwise of one’s behaviour. In this story, the travellers were expressing the mercy and compassion which God had expressed through the law and the prophets, but which had been lost in the legal interpretations of the law and in the exclusive power and wealth-gathering of the ruling classes.

Luke’s risen Jesus is found in The Stranger, the unrecognised one, the suffering messiah. He is not the Jesus of Nazareth who died on the cross (24:19-21). He is the one who ‘is not here’ (24:5, 24:22-24)). He is the one who is living. He is to be found in the hungry, the needy, the suffering; the people who were outside the gates of Luke’s community (16:20). For the Lucan community, recognising the Risen Lord, or having the competency to see the Risen Lord, involved being an active participant in a community whose members knew both how to be hungry and how to feed the hungry. Unless the community actively seeks to alleviate the sufferings of the wider human community and to speak out against injustice, the Risen Lord ceases to exist. Yet at the same time, when the community responds to the Word of God, the Risen Lord disappears. Each time a hungry person is fully and unconditionally accepted at the table, she disappears, for the needy one is no longer needy. Here on the road to Emmaus, the two travellers listen to Moses and the prophets and respond, not to the walking, talking ghost, but to the love, mercy and compassion of God as expressed in the scriptures. This isolated invitation to community expressed to The Stranger by the community is the climax of Luke’s story of Jesus. This is what Luke’s story of Jesus is all about. This is resurrection. Jesus of Nazareth may have been crucified, but the resurrection happens because the community lives out his life practices and teachings.

As Luke’s community seeks access to Jesus, they find him not in the grave by which to place flowers and shed a tear. They find him in the stranger who accepts the invitation to table-fellowship and who therefore accepts a share of the physical, financial and spiritual wealth that is offered by the community of the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, though of course it should be understood that the community may not have been ‘rich’. Emmaus is not about the renewing of a relationship with a dead person, that Jesus of Nazareth character who was crucified on the cross a few days before. Emmaus is much more a story of encountering The Living Stranger. Emmaus involves meeting the one who travels the road of life, who experiences hunger and knows what it is to be thirsty, who may be homeless and friendless, but who can be identified with and accepted regardless of her circumstances, as one seeks ways to alleviate the hunger, to quench the thirst, to provide a home, and above all to provide true friendship and companionship.

Emmaus is Luke’s Gospel in miniature. Within this story Luke presents the gospel as he saw it. It is a story that never happened, and yet it always happens. Luke’s resurrection stories show how the Lucan community was to reflect and refract the stories from their own past into their own present and future. The stories look back to the basis on which the community came into being and on which it exists and they look forward to what is to follow from their experience of Jesus – namely the gift of the Spirit or the ability to see the Risen Lord, and the consequential mission of the church. The resurrection was not something that defines a unique point in human history. Rather, it should be human history. The resurrection never happened unless it continues to happen.

Later in Luke’s story ‘Jesus himself’, not ‘Jesus of Nazareth’, appears to the eleven and their companions, and even though he shows them the physical reality of his being (24:39) and expresses his continued physical needs (‘I’m hungry’) they don’t fully comprehend who is in their presence. Just providing food is not enough. There is more to seeing the Risen Lord than just meeting physical needs. As on the road to Emmaus it is to the Law and the Prophets, the existing texts, that Jesus turns in order to explain the nature of the Gospel to them, but when The Stranger leaves, we are left wondering whether they have correctly identified and responded to the Risen Lord. The response of that Jerusalem group was to go into the synagogue and continually praise God. Is that what Jesus intended?
As proponents of ‘New Testament Christianity’, as Churches of Christ, what is our response to the creed ‘Christ is risen’? Are we only in the temple and continually praising God? Or are we out on the road of life re-encountering the Stranger and building community? ‘So what?’, or ‘Christ is risen indeed!’

SOURCES
Crossan, JD Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, San Francisco: Harper and Collins, 1994
Curkpatrick, S Easter and Hermes’ Conceit, Reo, Iss 2, 1996, pp60-65
Gill, A Life on the Road: The Gospel Basis for a Messianic Lifestyle, Homebush West: ANZEA Publishers, 1989
Moxnes, H The Economy of the Kingdom: Social Conflict and Economic Relations in Luke’s Gospel, Philadelphia, 1988
Sawicki, M Seeing the Lord: Resurrection and Early Christian Practices, Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994

© 1996 Steve Mellor