“Road to Emmaus” – Tiffany (1912)
Psalm 116 begins with this verse.
“I love the Lord, because he has heard the voice of my supplication, because he has inclined his ear to me whenever I called upon him.”
Jesus wants to hear our prayers during these challenging days.
After all, he is the one who ransomed us with his precious blood, shed on the cross. The writer of I Peter says that Jesus was destined before the foundation of the world for this job, and he was revealed at the end of the ages for our sakes when God raised him from the dead and gave him glory.
Jesus is ready to hear our prayers because he knows what we are going through, having suffered himself.
And–knowing Jesus helps us to know and to trust God.
And when we trust God, we can bring our anxieties and desires to God in prayer.
“God, please, please, please protect my parents. God, watch over Ben. God, I miss hugging my granddaughter. Please keep her well and happy. God, watch over and heal those people I am praying for specifically. God, please heal everyone who is sick. God, please bring this pandemic to a halt. God, please, please we need a vaccine. God, I miss everyone so much. God, I’d love to see my daughters and be with them. Please keep them and my Steves (their husbands) safe. God, please don’t let me get sick when I go to the grocery store. God, take away all my anxieties. God, please let me live through this. God, I don’t want to die. I want to have longer to enjoy being on this earth and longer to serve you on this earth.”
My prayers lately have been pretty much helpless as I cast myself on God. I hope that God can help me and those I love, because I certainly can’t do much to help myself, or them, except to wash my hands and stay home.
So today’s Psalm, Psalm 116, really grabbed me when I read it because I could have written these lines that follow the first verse.
“The cords of death entangled me; the grip of the grave took hold of me; I came to grief and sorrow. Then I called upon the name of the Lord: “O Lord, I pray you, save my life.”
And these lines, which the lectionary leaves out for some unknown reason.
“Gracious is the Lord and righteous; our God is full of compassion. The Lord watches over the innocent. I was brought very low, and the Lord has helped me. Turn again to your rest, O my soul, for the Lord has treated you well. For you, O Lord, have rescued my life from death, my eyes from tears, and my feet from stumbling. I will walk in the presence of the Lord in the land of the living.”
God considers any death costly. God is all about health and salvation. When I remember that God is with me and is in my every breath, I realize that yes, I am walking in the presence of the Lord in the land of the living, even when the anxiety, grief and sorrow lay me low and death dominates the news.
The story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus is my favorite resurrection story this year. I feel such kinship to Cleopas and his friend. They remind me of me right now. Walking down a road, often shaken, feeling sad, and caught up in distress.
As they walk, these two disciples are sharing their inmost feelings and confusions and distress and grief with one another.
And Jesus hears them! Across time and space, the resurrected Lord hears their grief and sorrow.
And he comes to them, way out on the road to Emmaus. He comes to them because he hears their cries. And then he listens to them. He listens to everything they have to say. He listens. He notes their grief and sorrow.
And then he talks with them. He reminds them of all they already know by taking them back through the great love story of God, spelled out in scripture. God, who loves us so deeply, who is so full of compassion, the one who helps us, who rescues us, who keeps us from stumbling. He helps them see how Jesus, the one they thought was dead and gone, had to suffer what he suffered in order to enter into glory.
Jesus listened patiently to these two disciples, and responded graciously.
That’s what Jesus wants to do for us. God wants to hear our prayers, every last anxious, or angry, or frustrated or depressed prayer we have to offer.
Jesus listens just as patiently to us as he did to the two disciples on the road that day, and he responds to us just as graciously.
Of all the many things that the resurrected Lord could have been doing late on the day of his resurrection—he set everything else aside and he chose to walk down a dusty road with two broken hearted disciples because he heard their distress.
And he will come to us in our distress if we call on him. Jesus is never too busy to walk alongside us, to listen to us and to respond graciously to anything we have to say.
And here’s the next part of the good news of this resurrection story.
Not only will Jesus come to us, walk alongside us, listen and respond graciously to us, but Jesus will stay with us.
When the disciples get near Emmaus, Jesus walks ahead as if he were going on. But they beg him to stay with them, because it is almost evening and the day is nearly over.
I love the irony of this scene. Do you remember on the night of Jesus’ arrest, he goes out into the Garden of Gethsemane to pray and he takes Peter James and John with him, and he says to them, “Stay with me. Remain here with me. Watch and pray.”
And all those disciples can do is to sleep. They can’t keep their eyes open because they are too full of grief and uncertainty and anxiety and fear.
Now the tables are turned. Cleopas and his friend are the ones who are begging Jesus, “Stay with us, remain here with us.”
Jesus accepts their invitation and goes in to stay with them.
What would happen if we wanted Jesus to be with us so badly that we urged him STRONGLY to stay with us?!?
I’m willing to bet that we would see him with us in the most ordinary parts of our days. We would see Jesus with us at our tables. We would see Jesus in our baking and breaking of bread. We would realize all over again that Jesus takes and blesses and gives us all that we have.
Jesus is with us now in the breaking apart of all that has seemed normal and routine. Jesus is in the breaking of our assumptions we have about our ability to control our lives.
And we can be sure that when our lives get broken wide open, Jesus will come to us. Jesus will walk with us. Jesus will stay with us.
And Jesus understands the pain of being broken, because he himself was broken by his own suffering and death on a cross.
All that happened to Jesus had broken the disciple’s hearts so that they could only feel grief and uncertainty and sadness.
But Jesus reminded them as he broke the bread at the table on that evening of the first day of the resurrection that broken things can reveal more than we could ever ask or imagine. When he broke the bread, he revealed his identity.
“Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him!”
Jesus had been with them all along, walking along with them in their distress, staying with them when they asked, and now showing them the wholeness of life in the breaking apart of the bread.
Jesus is the wholeness in the brokenness all around us. Jesus is the joy in the sorrow, the light in the darkness, the life that conquers all of death.
The disciples were so full of wonder, love and praise that they headed straight back to Jerusalem to share the news, “Yes, it’s TRUE!” They had to tell what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.
The psalmist feels this same overwhelming gratitude that cannot be kept a secret. God has rescued his life from death, his eyes from tears, and his feet from stumbling.
The psalmist cries out, “How shall I repay the Lord for all the good things he has done for me?”
He says, “I’m going to the temple to make my sacrifice of thanksgiving and to call upon your name, in the courts of the Lord’s house, in the midst of you, O Jerusalem. Hallelujah.”
Today as we worship, let’s offer our sacrifice of thanksgiving, give thanks for all that God has done for us, and give thanks for Jesus.
For he is the one who hears our cries, and comes to us, and walks with us, and listens to us, and stays with us, and breaks us open and makes us whole.
How could we ever repay Jesus for all he has done for us?
How could we ever repay him?
By loving him, and by walking with him in the land of the living.