Jesus - the suffering companion of all men and women - on the Road to Emmaus

What do you do when everything goes horribly wrong?

That’s a massive question … and it is one I have found myself reflecting on in the past few weeks. It is a question I want to reflect on this evening.

As far as those two friends on the Road to Emmaus were concerned something horrible had happened. They had pinned their hopes on someone they thought would change the world. For a while he had changed their way of looking at things. For a while it felt as if he was going to sweep people along with him.

Nazareth was a pretty unimpressive place … so unprepossessing that when recently the eggheads on the TV quiz show of that name were asked which village Jesus came from in Galilee they couldn’t come up with an answer.

Nazareth was as little known then as it seems to be little known now in the world of TV Quiz shows.

Jesus of Nazareth had spoken out so powerfully. He had held the powers that be to account in just the way his ccousin John the Baptist had done a while before. This Jesus really had been a prophet the like of which hadn’t been seen for five centuries at least. He matched his actions to his words. And he had made a difference. He spoke out powerfully against the abuses of the religious rulers – how they were absorbed in the minutiae of religious practice – tithing mint and cumin so carefully and neglecting the weightier matters of the Law, Justice and Mercy and Faith. He spoke out against the abuses of the state authorities and challenged people to turn the other cheek when they were threatened not to retaliate.

And with this Jesus it hadn’t just been words. He matched actions to the words he used. Where people were hurting he healed them … he preached acceptance of all and of everyone and he ate with tax collectors and sinners, and what’s more he even touched people suffering from leprosy.

He truly was a prophet mighty in deed and word.

He had said it would turn out this way. But no one had really believed him, not least his closest friends. But that’s exactly how it had turned out.

And it had been horrible.

To see him betrayed. Him of all people! Betrayed and handed over to the authorities, the religious authorities the state authorities. Condemned to death and crucified.

It had been horrible to see.

So, what did those two friends do when the unimaginable happened.

I want to home in on the first couple of verses of this familiar passage.

Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened …. they were talking and discussing,

What do you do when something horrible happens?

That’s what you need to do.

Don’t cut yourself off. You need someone to talk to. Someone to listen. And that’s exactly what these two friends found in each other.

It has been a strange period since Christmas.

There have been wonderful things that have happened. And there have been horrible things that have happened. I have been close to people who have gone through horrible times since Christmas. Difficult to know what to do.

And since Christmas much has happened in our world. Egypt, Tunisia, … but then Libya. The family whose nephew was about to go on their third tour of duty to Afghanistan. A veteran. And only 23.

We touch horrible things.

I don’t know about you, but I found what happened in Japan, and continues to happen, horrible. Difficult to cope with. All sorts of questions.

What do you do?

First and foremost. How vital it is to talk. To come together. To be a support to each other. Don’t bottle it up in the face of horrible things that happen close to home. It is important to come together. To talk things through. To talk and discuss.

It’s been great to welcome the CF Youth Easter event this weekend. 40 years ago Felicity and I were among the group that started those events off … with an Easter Youth conference here at Highbury. Great to welcome the young people back this weekend.

Great connections to be made at such event.

Following this afternoon’s decision at the Open Meeting of CF Youth, CF youth is being wound up, or better, it is morphing along with the other CF youth organisation into CF Extra. A new youth thing in our churches involving everyone in our churches who is 10 and older. Sad to see these Easter youth conferences finish as they began here at Highbury. But exciting to have the prospect of something new happening.

That’s what happens with youth events. Wind the clock back 50 years and you reach the days of the Livingstone Fellowship. That was a youth movement among our Congregational churches that came into its own in the fifties and lasted into the sixties. And was strong here at Highbury.

As happens at such events people meet, they fall in love, they marry. It worked for Felicity and me … and it worked for Dick’s brother John Adams who married Elizabeth Harding.

I pricked my ears up when I read about Elizabeth Harding’s nephew, Daniel Harding. He has become one of the country’s leading conductors.

On 11th March 2011 Daniel Harding found himself in Tokyo, scheduled to conduct the New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra in Mahler’s 5th Symphony. What had happened was so unimaginably horrible, what should they do?

He consulted with the Orchestra. Collectively, they came to the decision that they would carry on with the concert and play that evening.

They did.
On Twitter, subsequently, Daniel Harding tweeted, “Would have played just for the 69 year old who walked 4 hours across Tokyo to make it to the concert! That's dedication to music!!
Just played Mahler 5 for the 50 who made it… Hope the other 1750 are all ok. Wonderful atmosphere on strangest of days.” (http://www.classicalmusic.org.uk/2011/03/orchestras-caught-up-in-japan-earthquake.html)
As soon as I read that story, I went to the CD shop behind the Brewery, was treated to a 30 minute conversation with the guy behind the counter on Mahler, and ended up purchasing the Simon Rattle performance of Mahler’s 5th recorded by the Berlin Philharmonic. Not an inappropriate choice as Simon Rattle was the one who took Daniel Harding under his wing at an early stage in Daniel Harding’s career. I learned first in that conversation, and since have come to hear for myself, how moving that symphony is. Emerging from a life that not least in death and bereavement had experience pretty horrible things, it explores musically the two themes of death and resurrection. How moving it has been to play that music as we have laid out our own walk to Jerusalem in the footsteps of Jesus this Holy Week.

What do you do? It was good simply to come together. To be a support to each other. And in that music share the sadness of death but also share the hope of resurrection.

Those two on the Road to Emmaus found that evening that something happened as they talked and discussed with one another.

While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them,

I don’t want to dwell on the rest of the story, how Jesus explained the messiah to be messiah had to be a suffering messiah who experienced the most horrible of horrible suffering himself, and only then come through to resurrection victory beyond. I just want to focus on those words,

“Jesus himself came near and went with them.”

In the face of horrible things that happen. That is what I find so precious about my faith, my Christian faith. Faith for me isn’t about arguing about the existence of God, much as I enjoy doing that. It isn’t about trying to figure out how God allows things to happen. Much as my questioning mind finds itself asking those enormous, unanswerable questions.

The great thing about faith for me is that it focuses on the God who in Jesus Christ comes alongside us in our sufferings and walks with us along the way.

When that Japanese earthquake struck I found myself turning to a Japanese, Christian novelist I had first read ten years ago. At that time I found it quaint to see how often earthquakes and volcanoes figured in the writing of Shusaku Endo. Just like that quaint Japanese art with the ever present Mount Fuji in the background. Now I realise it is not quaint at all. It reflects the fact that Japanese people live always very close to death and destruction by the forces of nature. I re-read Shusaku Endo’s novel, Volcano, though the novel I would recommend is Wonderful Fool, written at the same time. It was the translator of Volcano, Richard A Schuchert, who reminded me what it is about Shusaku Endo that for me goes to the heart of the Christian faith.

Born in 1923, he had become a Christian in his teens. After studying in Paris, he returned to Japan where he found him self frustrated at the way westerm missionaries presented Christianity with a triumphant victorious Christ.

That was not the Christ Shusaku Endo had found. The Jesus Christ who was so important to him was very different.

For Endo … the quintessence of Christianity lies in God’s loving compassion for His wretched children. His willingness to share with us in our suffering. The Japanese heart and mind seek a merciful mother-image of God, rather than the stern, demanding, threatening father-image which (in Endo’s opinion) has been unduly emphasised by the missionaries…. Endo is attracted to Jesus the suffering companion of all men and women. (Richard A Schuchert in the Introduction to Shusaku Endo, Volcano (Sceptre, 1978, originally published in Japanese in 1959)

That’s it!

That’s the heart of the Christian faith for me.

That’s what made all the difference to the two on the Road to Emmaus.

“Jesus himself came near and went with them.”

Shusaku Endo later published A Life of Jesus. He reflects on the hard lesson the disciples had to learn that in Jesus the Messiah is not ‘glorious’ possessed of power, full of majesty … but a suffering servant, a man of sorrows.

“There is probably no passage in the whole New Testament which better portrays the disciples’ mood than the episode of the travellers to Emmaus.

“What emerges clearly,” for Shusaku Endo, “in that evening’s touching so try is the image of Jesus as ‘companion’.

What do you do in the face of something horrible?

Find someone to talk to. Share the burden. Be a support to each other.

And then discover in Jesus the God who is alongside us in the pain, sharing the suffering, walking with us along the way, our companion for the journey.

As they talked and discussed and supported each other, as Jesus joined them on that journey, something prompted those two to do something themselves.

As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, ‘Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.’ So he went in to stay with them.

They felt compelled to do something. To offer hospitality to this stranger.

Maybe that’s where our faith is propelling us. Strengthened by the talk, strengthened by the presence of the companion, then we too can DO something. Practical response to help those who face times of difficulty.