The Disruptive Stranger
A Reflection on Luke 24:13-35 for Easter 3A
SETTING OUR READING FREE
I have a sense that most of us have been taught to approach the Bible as a closed book. We often justify this belief using biblical images like that of the prophet Daniel, who at the end of his prophecy, is told to take all the words he’s written down, bind them up in a scroll, and seal them (Dan. 12:4,9). Or we may perhaps turn to John the Revelator, who said that anyone who adds anything or takes anything away from his book is cursed (Rev. 22:18-19).1 Many of us will have been warned that everything God wants to say, everything we need to know, is in the Bible, and so it is unnecessary and dangerous to seek wisdom anywhere else. To question or re-interpret Scripture, to consult with other sacred or ‘secular’ texts,2 or to apply Bible passages in ways that aren’t ‘traditional’ is evil.
But the Bible itself never says that it’s closed. In Matthew 5, as part of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus declares that he has not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfil them. Then, in the next verses, he repeats the refrain, “you’ve heard it said…but I say to you” six times (5:21–22, 27–28, 31–32, 33–34, 38–39, 43–44). In these statements, Jesus is not closing the Bible down and forcing a single interpretation on it. Rather, he is opening it up to new interpretations and applications, while still honouring its traditions and value. Jesus could do this because he did not hold to the relatively new idea that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible, divinely written “word of God”. The way Jesus used his ‘Bible’ (the Hebrew Scriptures) in the Gospels aligns far more with Marcus Borg’s understanding of the nature and role of Scripture in our lives:
To speak of the Bible as the “Word of God” means that it is a vehicle, a means, of communing with God. It is sacramental—divine not in its origin or authority, but in its purpose and function in the Christian life. It is a means whereby the Spirit of God continues to speak to us.3
I like to think of the Bible as a diving board which allows us to launch ourselves into the depths of God’s presence, wisdom, love, and mystery, and into the sacredness of life, the universe, and our own humanness. When we read the Bible in this way, it is not an end in itself. It doesn’t control us or imprison us. It launches us into the ever-expanding joy of learning, and of new experiences and relationships. It invites us to dive into life in all its depth and vibrancy and amazement. It sets our reading of the Bible free.
When we engage with the resurrection appearances in the Gospels, this diving board approach is especially important. The writers of the Gospels do not give us scientific data or historical facts about what Jesus and his friends experienced. If we’re seeking evidence for a literal, physical resurrection, their accounts offer more questions than answers. But this is because they weren’t concerned to prove that a miracle had happened. They took that for granted, and rather than dissecting the nature of the miracle, they focused on its meaning and the impact it had in the lives of Jesus’ first followers. This means that when we read these stories, we should follow the lead of the Gospel authors and open ourselves to the meaning of resurrection and to how we can encounter the Risen Christ now, rather than get caught up in the specifics of what may or may not have happened two thousand years ago. And that brings us to the Emmaus Road journey of two little-known disciples.
LUKE’S APPROACH TO THE SCRIPTURES
The account of Jesus’ appearance on the road is unique to Luke’s Gospel (24:13–35), and aligns with the writer’s focus on God’s all-encompassing salvation in Christ and his holistic vision of God’s reign.4 The author and his audience remain a mystery, but we do know that the writer was well educated, knew the Hebrew Scriptures well, and wrote in some of the most sophisticated Greek in the New Testament.5 And, while it is always tempting to read the Gospels simply for an account of Jesus’ life and teachings, Luke insists that we dive more deeply into his text and recognise the meaning and message beneath the stories. This includes the Emmaus Road resurrection appearance, which also reveals how the writer worked with the Hebrew Scriptures to support his narrative about Jesus’ identity and mission.
Luke connects Jesus’ appearance to the two disciples with “episodes of divine encounter in Genesis”, and there are also similarities with the writer’s account of Philip meeting with the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:26–40.6 This reveals that the author used the Hebrew Scriptures not as fixed texts, but as a springboard from which to understand Jesus’ life, ministry, death, and resurrection, and also to describe and interpret the experiences of the disciples after the resurrection and ascension of Christ.
In the Emmaus Road account, the writer tells us that “beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures” (24:27 NRSV). As Greg Carey notes:
To the modern reader/hearer, Luke advances an unsettling biblical hermeneutic,…the Scriptures just don’t say what the risen Jesus purports them to say, not on any pre-Jesus reading. Scholars have long discussed the Gospels’ “post-resurrection perspective,” how the experience of and conviction about Jesus’ resurrection transformed their understanding of everything. Paul, for example, persecuted the church until he received his own revelation of the risen Jesus. Luke’s post-resurrection perspective generates a certainty that “Moses and the prophets” were speaking about Jesus. We moderns cannot find the details of healing, exorcism, crucifixion, and resurrection in the text of Israel’s Scriptures. That information would not have dissuaded Luke.7
In other words, Luke’s Jesus read the events of his ministry, death, and resurrection back into the Hebrew Scriptures. The original writers were not thinking about Jesus when they penned their texts, and had no miraculous pre-knowledge of the events that happened in what we now call the first century CE. Rather, Luke and the other New Testament writers learned to make sense of Jesus’ life and work both by highlighting Jesus’ Jewish heritage and by using the Law and the Prophets as a lens through which to interpret the Christ event. In the words of Joel Green, for Luke, “What has happened with Jesus can be understood only in light of the Scriptures, yet the Scriptures themselves can be understood only in light of what has happened with Jesus. These two are mutually informing”.8
In the Emmaus account, Luke constructs this narrative in a way that allows us to place ourselves in the story, even centuries later and experience Jesus today as the disruptive stranger who is revealed in our conversations and meals, in our communities and shared quests for truth and sacredness.9 What, then, does it mean for us to read the story in the way Luke intended, and open ourselves to new encounters with the risen Christ?
