Skip to main content

Walking to Emmaus in a time of social distancing


Then their eyes were opened. (Luke 24.13-35, https://www.biblegateway.com NRSVA)
I have been wondering what the walk to Emmaus would look like if Jesus and the two disciples had been forced to apply ‘social distancing’. If they were husband and wife, or siblings, or parent and child, they would still be allowed to walk together, but the stranger wouldn't be able to ‘draw near’ and go ‘with them’. They might cross the road when they see him approaching, or duck into a gateway to let him go past at a safe distance. At the very least they would have to walk on opposite sides of the road and call out to one another. 
We do see people having a chat while standing, or sitting, two metres apart. We’ve done that with our neighbour. But social distancing limits the conversation somewhat. The stranger wouldn’t be able to ‘interpret to them… all the scriptures’.
And why doesn’t the stranger ‘know the things that have taken place [in Jerusalem] in these days?’ In a time of social distancing we might think that he’s decided he can’t take any more bad news and has hunkered down and started watching box sets of all his favourite escapist entertainment shows instead.
Finally, at journey’s end, when the stranger ‘walks ahead as if he were going on’ no one would ‘urge him strongly’ to stay with them. Instead he would simply vanish from their sight into the gathering gloom and the disciples would not know that Jesus is risen. 
We need to experience lockdown in a different way. We need, even when things do seem at their gloomiest, to have our ‘eyes opened’ so that ‘our hearts burn within us’ as Jesus is ‘made known to us’ in everyday events like breaking bread, and we ‘recognise him’.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I don't believe in an interventionist God

Matthew 28.1-10, 1 Corinthians 15.1-11 I like Nick Cave’s song because of its audacious first line: ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God’. What an unlikely way to begin a love song! He once explained that he wrote the song while sitting at the back of an Anglican church where he had gone with his wife Susie, who presumably does believe in an interventionist God - at least that’s what the song says. Actually Cave has always been very interested in religion. Sometimes he calls himself a Christian, sometimes he doesn’t, depending on how the mood takes him. He once said, ‘I believe in God in spite of religion, not because of it.’ But his lyrics often include religious themes and he has also said that any true love song is a song for God. So maybe it’s no coincidence that he began this song in such an unlikely way, although he says the inspiration came to him during the sermon. The vicar was droning on about something when the first line of the song just popped into his ...
14 comments
Read more

Giotto’s Nativity and Adoration of the Shepherds

John 1.10-18 In the week before Christmas the BBC broadcast a modern version of The Nativity which attempted to retell the story with as much psychological realism as possible. So, for instance, viewers saw how Mary, and Joseph especially, struggled with their feelings. But telling the story of Jesus with psychological realism is not a new idea. It has a long tradition going back seven hundred years to the time of the Italian artist Giotto di Bondone. This nativity scene was painted in a church in Padua in about 1305. Much imitated it is one of the first attempts at psychological realism in Christian art. And what a wonderful first attempt it is - a work of genius, in fact! Whereas previously Mary and the Baby Jesus had been depicted facing outwards, or looking at their visitors, with beatific expressions fixed on their faces, Giotto dares to show them staring intently into one another’s eyes, bonding like any mother and newborn baby. Joseph, in contrast, is not looking on with quiet a...
1 comment
Read more

Luther and Loyola

James 1:17-27 Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 Within Christianity there has always been a tension between two poles. At one end of the spectrum stands Martin Luther, who said that Christian faith is about trusting in God to put us right - or make us righteous - through the saving death of Jesus. Luther came to this conclusion when he was a professor of New Testament studies in a little town in Germany called Wittenberg. One year he decided to teach his students about Paul’s letter to the Romans and that’s when it suddenly dawned upon him that Christian faith is all about trust. At the other end of the spectrum , stands someone like Ignatius Loyola the founder of the Society of Jesus. He spent a lot of his later life in crisis, first struggling to overcome severe wounds that he had suffered when he was a soldier and then during two short periods locked up in a cell by the Spanish Inquisition. He came to believe that the Christian life is a similar sort of struggle, a lifelon...
Post a Comment
Read more