Conversation, Walking, and Breaking of Bread Together

Conversation, Walking, and Breaking of Bread Together | Luke 24: 13-35

For Cleopas and his companion Jerusalem had become a city of collapsed hopes. They had laid everything, their understanding of the Messiah, their vision of liberation, their salvation on the life of one man; and now that man was dead. The crucifixion had not merely taken a life; it had taken the world of these apostles. And so they leave to Emmaus. Not in rage, but in the quiet devastation of people who have decided, almost politely, that there is no reason to stay.

And yet, and here is the grace, they do not stop talking. This is what saves them, initially. Not faith, not clarity, not courage, but conversation. They are discussing and debating as they walk, and it is this very openness of speech that creates the opening for the stranger to draw near. In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus survives not because he is the strongest or even the most faithful, but because he is the most curious, he keeps speaking, keeps asking, keeps engaging even when the gods have turned against him. They have one saving quality: they have not yet closed their mouths or their minds.

We often can’t see the full extent of way or grasp the whole journey. As you start walking the road appears. The disciples kept walking, and gradually thins became more clearer to them. The stranger, who is, of course, Christ unrecognized, does not announce himself. He asks them a question: What things? And in asking, he gives them permission to grieve aloud. This is the pedagogy of the incarnation. Meaning does not arrive as announcement. It arrives as accompaniment, walking beside us at the pace we can manage. It requires only that we not shut the door entirely; that we remain, even in our exhaustion and disillusionment, open. Whatever it is, it is enough. And at the table, in the breaking of bread, their eyes are opened.

Then Jesus vanishes. And they are left not with his presence but with the burning certainty of what they have witnessed. What do they do? They rise, immediately, and return to Jerusalem. The seven miles they walked in grief, they now walk in joy. The city they left because there was no reason to remain has become the city they must reach because there is every reason to speak.

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