I believe very few of you would have seen the Easter altar cloth at St. Matthew’s Santa Cruz.  A picture of it is above. It was done by Camille Chedda. It is the encounter with Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Every time I look at it, my heart burns within me.  I usually describe it as being ‘strangely warmed’.  The painting says so much. Every time I look at it, I see something different, something more. I understand the encounter between Jesus and Mary a little better. It causes me to question how I am understanding my encounter with the risen lord and thus my relationship with him. 

I believe the story of the walk to Emmaus in Luke 24, calls us to examine how we meet Jesus on a day to day basis.  The story tells us that while walking home from Jerusalem after the Passover, two disciples encountered the risen Jesus. they do not at first recognize him. It is not in church, synagogue, temple or in a worship service.  this describes how many of us meet Jesus. Firstly, He appears in our lives and we do not even recognize that he is present.  secondly when we realize that he is present, we become committed to him. 

Sometimes we go through life without ever acknowledging that Jesus walks with us.  The song says he walks with me and he talks to me and he tells me I am his own and the joys we share as we tarry there, no other will ever know.  Our encounter with Jesus is personal.  No two encounters feel the same way because we are individuals, who experience things differently.  Your encounter is not mine.  i am sure many persons come and see the Altar Cloth at St. Matthew’s and admire it. But I have never heard of anyone saying they were moved by it.  It doesn’t mean that they are not moved by what it says to them, but they may not think it is important enough to share it. 

The passage says that they were blinded, they did not see that it was Jesus who had joined them.  They were not visually challenged, but like many of us they were not paying attention.  They were preoccupied with their thoughts: that they missed Jesus, that their hopes had been dashed. Jesus, I am sure did not change physically.  It is the same when the disciples saw him on the shore.  There is something about encountering Jesus, that makes us afraid to acknowledge that he is here in our lives.  For us, it is, I believe that we have been taught perfection. That there is a checklist, if all the boxes are not ticked, it means we have failed. “Jesus really could not come to someone like me”. We hear it in the songs and hymns – a sense of not being good enough for Jesus to be with us. He is too good and we are too sinful. So we go through life feeling that we are not worthy enough for Jesus to be with us. We are unable to have encounters with Jesus and for Jesus to bring meaning to our lives, so we go through the motions.  The road to Emmaus tells us pay attention. Jesus is with us all the time. He comes in the ordinary and mundane.

These disciples  were distressed about the empty tomb.  They were trying to make sense of what the women had reported.  They have been talking about it all day;  wondering I suppose how this could be. Adding and subtracting possibilities, trying to explain what could possibly have occurred.  Trying to understand what the empty tomb meant.  They wanted to understand.  They possibly reminded themselves of things Jesus said before he died. Maybe how the temple would be rebuilt in three days.   

They probably doubted the women and they certainly are disappointed by Jesus’ death.  They were depending on him to save Israel from the Romans.  They misunderstood.  Like so many of us we fit Jesus and God into what we already believe and know, rather than seeing ourselves and what happens, as being a part of a larger picture.  We do not see ourselves as being in a world we don’t quite understand and that we should be open to new perspectives leading to a deeper faith. Like the Altar Cloth and I, every time we  have an encounter, whether its through scripture, a song  a sermon or some life experience we learn something more about Jesus. 

The men (an assumption) learnt something more as Jesus explained. They opened their heart and what he said made sense.  It filled out their understanding rather than fitting into what they already understood.   They now had a fuller picture.  

They saw their encounter as being  significant enough to share. They didn’t understand it as a vision, or duppy. They understood it as Jesus walking with them and breaking bread with them. 

We too, like the disciples are called to give meaning to our encounters with Jesus in our daily to day life.  We are called to experience life through our hearts burning within us as we recognize God working in us and for us.  We do not experience this by going along with what others tell us, but being open to the movement of the spirit within us. Listening to the spirit speaking to us and following it. 

We do not believe and come to know Jesus through facts.  We come to know him when our hearts react to what is happening to us and around us. The passage says their hearts burned. This heart burn does not cause indigestion. And many of us dismiss it, because we see others going through the motions.  We sometimes think that hearing Jesus and really and truly doing Jesus’ work requires you to stop living normal lives. You must appear to others and believe yourself to be perfect.  God does not ask for perfection God asks for faithfulness.

We should not meet our encounters with skepticism and distrust, discounting them as nothing important. They are important because that is where we live and tell the Jesus story. That is when people see Jesus through us. 

The story of the walk to Emmaus, calls us to examine, how we have been treating our encounters and asks the question, if it is enough? Are our hearts strangely warmed or burning within us? If it is what are we doing about it? I don’t know if I told you the story of how I became a priest but this is what happened.

I was invited to a weekend retreat/workshop, put on by the All Together Group of the UWI Chapel, St. Margaret’s Liguanea and Church of the Ascension -Mona. Bishop Robert Wright of Atlanta was the guest speaker for the weekend. After the church service on Sunday I went to the Bishop and told him how he had inspired me. He asked “What are you going to do about it”, looking straight at me. I felt something move from the top of my head to the sole of my feet and back up again. it was like a bolt of lightning. the rest is history as they say.

OUR CHALLENGE

You may not have had as dramatic an encounter as I did, but, I do believe each of us has met the risen lord in one way or another. It is why we continue to attend church.  But friends, we must pay more than lip service.  We must actively pay attention to the heart burn and address it by making Jesus become real and alive in our lives so that others can see. We must seek to understand what is happening to us so we can explain, we can testify.  Sometimes we do not agree on how to express Jesus. We want others to be like us.  But there is no one way of Jesus showing up.  We are just called to show up as he leads.  I pray that our hearts will burn within us, that we will feel strangely warmed. I pray that we will not be afraid to do God’s bidding, even while it is painful.  May we have the faith to live as Jesus calls us and not what is convenient to us.  Amen