30-04-06 - 2nd Sunday after Easter


If you go to the National Gallery in London just now, you will see an exhibition of the paintings of the Italian artist Caravaggio who lived at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries.

 

He painted two pictures called “The Supper at Emmaus”.

 

The one I am thinking of shows four men around a table.

 

As always with Caravaggio, light streams in from a source outside the picture and lights up the bright white cloth on the table. Jesus leans forward into this light and he is blessing the bread with his right hand.

 

Two of the three men along with Jesus – the two disciples he had joined on the road – are very excited. They have recognised who it is blessing the bread. One of them is pushing himself out of his chair and the other's arms are spread out wide as if to embrace the blesser of the bread.

 

On the table there are a dish, a jug, a loaf, a chicken, and, on the edge of the table, as if it is about to topple off and onto the ground, there is a bowl of fruit. And that bowl of fruit which is about to fall off the edge of the table draws you into the picture, making you want to stop it from tumbling over; and maybe disturbing the tranquil figure of Jesus as he blesses the bread, or the two disciples in their excitement/

 

But there is a fourth man in the picture. To the right of Jesus and blocking off some of the light that streams in over this man's shoulder, is the cook. Unlike the two disciples he had not been with Jesus at the Last Supper when he broke bread. Unlike the two disciples he had not been on the walk from Jerusalem to Emmaus. He had been here, cooking for two men, who are now excited……but he can't understand what Jesus is doing, blessing this bread; and he doesn't share the other two men's excitement. But he looks at what Jesus is doing, blessing the bread,. with wrapt attention.

 

So Caravaggio's picture, by the device of drawing us into the picture to stop the fruit tumbling off the table, introduces us to someone like ourselves, in the form of this cook, who, like us, has never experienced what this moment of blessing is all about.

 

He doesn't understand.

 

Which of us does understand? Which of us can make sense of this strange, elusive, fragmentary experience which we call resurrection.

 

I was saying last Sunday that one of the things the Gospel writers are wanting to stress again and again in the resurrection stories is that neither those who were the first readers of the Gospels, nor those of us who are the latest readers of the Gospels are at any disadvantage because we weren't there at the time. The way St John's Gospel puts it is when Jesus says to Thomas: “Did you believe because you saw? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed”. The way St Luke puts it in this loveliest of the Easter stories, about the two people making their way from Jerusalem to Emmaus when a third person joins them….the way St Luke puts it is to tell a story where two disciples come to believe in the risen Jesus because of two things: because they learn more about what is in the Bible from this person who joins them; and then there is the breaking of the bread.

 

And what St Luke is saying to the people he wrote his Gospel for is this: if the Bible and the breaking of bread helped these two people to come to terms with Easter, then you've got the same help. You can explore the Bible for yourself, and you can break bread and find the real presence of the risen Lord.

 

Well I don't want to talk about the breaking of bread and the Lord's Supper this morning. Indeed I hardly ever want to talk about it at all. The Lord's Supper is an action, a symbol,.a dramatic presentation of what lies at the heart of the Christian faith and we shouldn't talk about it, just experience it.

 

So lets think about the bible against the background of what St Luke describes that stranger saying on the eight mile journey between Jerusalem and Emmaus. They have a conversation about what has happened and about what was in the Scriptures.

 

A conversation. The two disciples. The strangers. And the bible.

 

They were all Jewish people, all of them, and not so long ago the Chuef Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks wrote this: “Jews don't ‘read' the Bible. We sing, it, argue with it, wrestle with it, listen to it, and turn it inside out to find a new insight we had missed before”.

 

So the risen Christ has a conversation with these disciples. And maybe we should learn that the bible isn't something

 

• we should uncritically accept,
• or believe should dominate our lives,
• or must obey to the last letter

 

but a book we should try to have a conversation with.

 

I wish I could show you an edition in Hebrew of Genesis or Exodus, Deuteronomy or Leviticus or Numbers – what we call the first five books of the Bible. If I could show you a standard Hebrew edition of these books you would see on the page the same words, the same text, as you see in any bible. But around the text of every passage you would one person has said “this means one thing” and someone else will have written “it means something else”, and you would find different voices from different places and different centuries, and the official, Hebrew text of the bible preserves them all.

 

Nowadays on the internet, people go into what they call “chat rooms” – where everyone can add their tuppence worth to a conversation started maybe by two people and then everyone else adds their bit too.

 

Jewish people regard the bible as a kind of religious ‘chat-room' where we should all be adding our own thoughts, our own insights, our own ideas, our own convictions – and some of them will agree with what's in the Bible and some won't and that doesn't matter.

 

And someone says to me “But surely the Bible is the Word of God”; and I say “Yes, but it only becomes the word of God when you or I or countless thousands of people down the generations have a conversation with it, or a disagreement with it, or an argument with it”.

 

The Bible is the Word of God but God's Word does not have a single meaning. Its resonances echo in different ways across space and time. And so I hope that if you read a verse of the Bible today, what it means to you today won't be the same as what it might mean next year or the year afterwards.

 

Let me give you a very personal illustration. Earlier this morning I was speaking on a Radio 4 service from Glasgow University Chapel. I wrote the script well over a year ago, because it was meant to be broadcast well over a year ago. And then Pope John Paul II died, and people at the BBC thought, the next day, that the world was more interested in the death of Pope John Paul II than the thoughts of Johnston McKay. So they said: Lets do it next year. But when I looked at the script I wrote for last year – as it happens all about the walk of these two disciples to Emmaus – I came to the end of the script and said to the producer: I'm going to have to change it all. That's not what this passage says to me any more.”

 

If the Word of God is, as the bible says it is “alive and active” then our conversation with it is what keeps it alive and active. Because we change, what we bring to and take from the bible changes.

 

“Did not our hearts burn within us as he unfolded what was in the scriptures” they said as they remembered the bible study Jesus conducted on that dusty road between Jerusalem and Emmaus. Hearts burn because the conversation about the bible with the stranger was real.

 

With the stranger.

 

And that brings me to the other point of contact you and I today, in Ardrossan 2006 have with these three people on the Emmaus road, 32 AD.

 

He was a stranger.

 

The Jesus as stranger has come full circle in Scotland .

 

Jesus is the stranger who only latterly is recognised.

But Jesus is also recognised in every stranger who needs us.

 

Let me tell you a story I heard last week. You will know that Jack McConnell has made Malawi an important area of concern for Scotland . Well, a Church of Scotland minister who was in Malawi recently Jack McConnell's Malawi initiative was on his way home, on a bus being driven a long way to the airport. Already his mind was thinking of all he had to do back home to give effect to what was needed. And on the bus to the airport he found a wee boy who was going to get tests for meningitis. They struck up something of a bond. Before getting on the plane this kirk minister phoned up to see how the wee boy's tests had gone. Did he have meningitis? Yes, was the answer. But he has also inherited syphilis and HIV. And he has only six months to live.

 

Imagining himself back in Scotland with phones to use and people to interrogate, the kirk minister said: what can we do? Call in more medical supplies? Get another medical opinion? Find a consultant who might help.

 

There is nothing we can do

 

No we've got to do something. Don't give in.

 

There is nothing we can do.

 

“Surely there is something we can do for the wee boy?” said the kirk minister, recognising that all his organisational skills in this situation didn't amount to a row of beams. “Is there anything that he would like to do or see that we could make possible?”

 

And to cut a long story short it turned out that the wee boy had never seen an elephant and would love to see an elephant, and in his village there were a lot more wee boys going to die of meningitis and syphilis and HIV and so the kirk minister found funds to enable them all to go to a safari park and see the elephants.

 

And somewhere, when I heard that story last week, I heard a voice saying “I was a stranger and you took me in”. Or maybe “I was a stranger and you found money to let me see an elephant before I died.”.

 

I am sure it is no accident that the risen Jesus is described as a stranger.

 

“Often, often, often comes the Christ in the stranger's guise” wrote St Columba so long ago.

 

And as they were walking on the road, a stranger joined them but they did not recognise him.

 

Of course if it had been obvious then we'd never have ignored you, Jesus. If you had made it more clear to us who you were.

 

And so the question for you and me is not whether we need to be drawn into encountering the risen Christ by the device of an artist like Caravaggio. We're drawn into encounter the risen Christ by the gospel of an artist like God who asks us to see in every stranger the risen Christ.

 

The poet TS Eliot wrote:

 

 

Who is the third who always walks beside you?

When I count there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

…….

But who is that on the other side of you.