Third Sunday of Easter

Acts 2.14a,36-41; Psalm 116.1-3,10-17; 1 Peter 1.17-23; Luke 24.13-35

THE most vital theological query that Christians can ask about their faith is: “Is it true?” The most vital historical query that Christians can ask about their faith is: “Did it occur?” The Emmaus Gospel — unique to Luke, precious to believers — requires a response to each questions. Or, no less than, it requires us to concentrate on the presuppositions that we bring to the story.

Only certainly one of the weather of the Emmaus episode is straightforwardly “super-natural”. In verse 31, Luke records that Jesus “vanished from their sight”. His sudden appearing (verse 15: “Jesus himself got here near and went with them”) can have been supernatural, however the text says only that Jesus approached Clopas and his companion and fell into step beside them.

That will not be much of the supernatural in a protracted episode. And — before we get distracted by the battle between faith and reason, or science and religion — we must always keep in mind that, in pre-scientific Bible days, people didn’t demarcate their religious experiences in this fashion. They knew in addition to we do this some things that occur are “odd”, and others are “extraordinary”. But they didn’t sort events into dualistic philosophical categories as a strategy to make sense of them.

Modern scholars are less holistic. Just a few cheerfully explode the historical character of Emmaus by referring to it as a “legend”. Some suggest that its theological elements have more the character of myth than logic. Others assert that its factual reality is clear, and its basis in real-life events needs to be self-evident to any reasonable reader.

This will not be certainly one of those occasions when we are able to sit on the fence, declaring that Emmaus comprises elements of all of those. If we read the Gospel while holding to a previous conviction that folks don’t dematerialise at will, and, before that, that dead people can never be resurrected in a physical form, then we’ve no alternative but to dismiss the entire story as a pious fiction. A really beautiful fiction, yes. An inspiring fiction, actually. A life-changing fiction? Beyond doubt. But not the reality.

Christians are used to conflicts of detail between the Gospels. If the empty tomb is the mark of the resurrection, then women, in all 4 Gospels, are the primary witnesses of the Easter miracle. If, however, we reckon the resurrection by someone’s encountering Jesus himself in his resurrection body, then Matthew and John still give that honour to women. The short version of Mark records just some women’s witnessing of an empty tomb, not any encounters between the disciples and the risen Lord.

In Luke, though, Clopas and his companion are the primary witnesses of the resurrection marked by a gathering with the risen Lord. Luke agrees with the opposite Gospels that ladies were the primary witnesses of the empty tomb: but he gives the primary sighting of the resurrected Jesus to “two of them” (verse 13), a reference back to “the apostles” (mentioned in verse 12, before the lection), namely Clopas and his companion.

In a proper police interview, the primary rule of convincing your interrogators is to maintain it easy. Do not elaborate — because your questioner will catch you out for those who vary any of the small print. But the primary rule of creating fiction sound like fact in historical narratives, when one’s essential readers is probably not sceptical scholars or trained interrogators, is: generate plausible imaginative details. Flesh out particulars just like the weather, the locations, the small print of individuals’s appearance, the essential characters. At the very least, give a reputation to Clopas’s companion.

Luke is commonly said to be the Church’s first historian. That will not be at all times meant as a compliment, because, as a pre-modern historian, he’s joyful to point out what side he favours, and tells his tale in a way that persuades readers to see events as he sees them. Still, the facility of his Emmaus story doesn’t lie in plausible corroborative details, but within the absence of them — a contrast to the pious fiction (arguably) that’s Mark 16.

The location of Emmaus resists all attempts at convincing identification. The appearance and disappearance of Jesus remain mysterious. But probably the most powerful message of Emmaus is theological, and historical, and as true in today’s Church because it was on that road, just before the Church was born: they recognised Jesus — as we recognise Jesus — within the breaking of bread.