Luke 24:13-35
For April 30, 2017
(Unfinished Sermon)
I.
At the conclusion of this story, Jesus is sitting with two disciples in their home in the town of Emmaus. They have been walking and talking with him, but, oddly enough, not recognizing him. Perhaps, it doesn’t occur to them that it could possibly be Jesus because they saw him die on a Roman cross three days before.
They sit down to eat dinner and the stranger takes a piece of the bread stacked on a plate. It is still Passover so, according to Scripture, the bread is unleavened matzoh. He cracks the hard, dry bread apart… and in that action the two disciples suddenly recognize the stranger as Jesus. At which point he vanishes.
I think there is more to this than just an action that they must have witnessed Jesus do dozens of times when gathered around a table with his disciples. He would probably pronounce the blessing in Hebrew over the bread — Baruch atah Adonai eloheinu, melech olam: ha motzi lechem min ha aretz — and break the bread into two pieces before handing it around to the gathered group. That was, and remains, just normal Jewish practice.
For Jesus it becomes something more. It becomes his most characteristic act. What does it mean that this act is breaking something? It seems somewhat almost violent. As if the catalyst for our recognition of his living Presence among us and within us is a kind of shock, a breaking, a disruption in the routine.
Breaking is not usually considered a positive thing. When we say something is broken we usually mean that it doesn’t work anymore. At best it needs to be fixed; at worst it is useless and should be thrown out into the trash. We don’t usually give each other broken things as gifts. I once had a 4-year-old make a face at me when I tried to give her a broken cookie. Broken things are dysfunctional and incomplete. They are generally not desirable.
And yet this is the act that most reminds those disciples of Jesus. Not anything in his teaching, which the disciples have just heard for a long conversation on the road from Jerusalem. None of that woke them up. They don’t say, “Yeah, our teacher Jesus said the same thing… hey, wait a minute!” They don’t even recognize his voice, let alone his face. In the movies, the director has to figure out some way to make Jesus unrecognizable, so often Jesus has a big cowl over his head, or a kaffiyeh-scarf around his face. But when they get to the house and he breaks the bread: boom! it’s Jesus!
What is it about this particular act that is so personal and unique to Jesus that it is the one thing that he does that causes people to recognize him? Why is it the act of breaking something that is so characteristic of him? Why bread?
I mean, this act, by which these disciples recognize him, is specifically what he tells us to do if we want to remember him. And the church has been dutifully doing it ever since… because it works. Generation after generation, Christians have recognized and remembered the Lord in this simple act: the breaking of bread.
II.
It is becoming perhaps the most famous line from any Leonard Cohen song, where he sings, “There is a crack, a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in, that’s how the light gets in.” I think that one has become so popular because it speaks to us about our own brokenness and hope. So often it is the places of our weakness and pain, the places where we are most wounded, our failures and challenges… that become the sources of our most profound growth and enlightenment.
We derive comfort from the knowledge that our bones are stronger where they have been broken, and our turbulent and wounded places are where we find the most meaning.
For Jesus, he doesn’t just break the bread on his last night with his disciples in a matter of fact, ordinary way. It isn’t even ordinary bread to begin with: it is “the bread of affliction” which is part of the Passover meal. It is symbolic bread, unleavened for a reason: it reminds the people of the haste with which their ancestors had to leave Egypt; there was no time for the bread to rise. They have already shared it as part of the Haggadah, the ritual. They dipped it in a bitter herb to remind them of the horrors of slavery.
Jesus takes the bread left over, prays over it, and pronounces, “This is my body,” before he cracks it in half.
He knows what is going to happen, that his body will be broken, shattered, pierced, and bled on the cross in just a few hours. He knows that he is about to give up his own life for the life of the world. It is, in a way, the “crack in everything” which is “how the light gets in.” His death opens the way for God’s love to pour more visibly into our lives
In many churches the image of broken, crucified Jesus is front and center, and there is a direct connection made between what the celebrant is doing on the altar and what is happening on the crucifix above or behind the altar. As if to say, “That is where the light comes in once and for all, and this down here is where it continues to come in here and now for us.”
This is the way he gives us to remember him. It is remembering his brokenness. Through his brokenness we remember our own brokenness and the brokenness of our world, a world that intentionally executes a perversion of justice and a horrible torturous death on an innocent person… and many innocent people, daily.
III.
In our own lives, we find ourselves locked in a shell of ego-centric, personality-driven habits and practices, thoughts and words. This is the only life we think is real for most of us. And it is only when that shell finally gets cracked that the light of who we truly are can emerge within us. It gets cracked when we realize that, as Dr. Phil would say, it isn’t working for us. It gets cracked when we stop and notice that 20 or 40 or 60 years of acting in a certain way has not made us any happier or better as people.
It hasn’t brought us good relationships or helped us to be any healthier. If anything, our habits have calcified and hardened over time, and we have come to rely on actions that are just plain unhelpful. We may not be addicts in the sense of substance abusers, but we are addicted to sinful, selfish behaviors that only keep us separate from and at enmity with others. But we keep doing them because we don’t know there is any other way to act.
When we are able to step outside of ourselves and see what we are doing, and realize that it doesn’t have to be this way, then that shell begins to crack, and light begins to seep in.
{At this point, having had increasing pain in my chest for a couple of hours, I asked my wife to take me to the Emergency Room.}
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