But we had hoped

Text: Luke 24:13-35

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.

But we had hoped. Four heart-rending words.

This is a sentence people speak to each other each in grief. In mutual consolation. Supporting one another. A resignation that things did not work out—not that we thought they necessarily would; probably they wouldn’t. But they might have. This one time they might have. There was a pretty good chance. It would have been so great, so much better, if things had worked out like we thought they might do.

On the road to Emmaus, two friends were talking to each other. We had high expectations, they might have said, we followers of Jesus. Jesus encouraged us. By his deeds, we could see he was a prophet, more than a prophet even. He healed people beyond healing. Made the blind see. Some say he raised people from the dead. By his words, we could see he was wise, brave, and intense. He claimed the authority of God. He condemned the hypocrites who ruled the church and the land. He shamed and embarrassed the rulers. By the promises that everyone read into his sermons—about being free, about evil being overturned, about the poor and the destitute receiving the blessings so far reserved for others—by those promises we could see a new kind of world. By the very fact that crowds came to be with him, to hear him, to be changed by him, and just recently to sing hosannas to him, we could see it was coming soon. And finally, by our own need for victory and freedom in a land of poor people oppressed by a foreign power, our hopes were fed.

We had high expectations. Foolish ones, though, as it turned out. But we had hoped.

But we had hoped. People cannot help hoping. It is in us. It is not the same as wishing. The kind of hope the two had on the road to Emmaus, seven miles from Jerusalem where Jesus had been killed, is a hope for a new way of the world to be. A new physics, a change in the laws of mind, spirit, and nature. It is hope for things to be very different than usual. It is the same hope we have that our mortal diseases will be cured, that our addictions will be lifted, that our broken hearts will be mended. It is the hope that time could reverse itself just a little to undo what was irrevocably done. It is the longing that nothing is irrevocable, nothing is impossible, nothing is final or fatal. It is a hope that leads us to have unreasonable expectations.

But we had hoped. The walkers on the road are trying to re-set. They are trying to talk themselves down. Talking to each other about all the things that had happened, it says. We had hoped, but we know now that was silly. We heard he was alive, but people have not seen him. You can hear the two friends trying to make things make sense again. They are trying to get back into the ordinary way of looking at things. They are trying, as poet T.S. Eliot wrote, to be cured of craving something they cannot find. They are trying to learn to avoid excessive expectations.

In that moment, Jesus appears. They are, he explains, seeing things in the old way. That way leads to the morass of self-recrimination and hopelessness in which they find themselves. There is a new way, just as they had once thought. It was declared by the prophets. They are foolish—how foolish you are, he says—but foolish on the flip side. Not fools to be hopeful, but fools to give up hope so easily. They have been quick to abandon what they knew. The evil does not erase the truth of the good. The crucifixion does not erase the ministry of Jesus. Just as disease does not erase good times past, and as addiction does not erase past steadfastness, and as heartbreak does not erase past love.

The travelers do not see him. Within the framework of the possible, Jesus is unrecognized. Jesus encourages them to try out a new strategy, a new frame of mind. Consider this: God is different than you think. The world is less limited than you think. God is more involved in your lives than you think. Our normal experiences are not necessarily good indicators of what is possible.

Yet all this almost-pedantic talk is not sufficient. Jesus can tell it is not working. Coyly he walks ahead, it says, as if he were going on. They invite him—as he figured they would—they invite this strange yet strangely familiar man, to their homes. There, he re-enacts what we readers recognize as the pattern of the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharistic pattern. He took bread, and blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to them. And then their eyes were opened. Jesus was made known to them, it says, in the breaking of the bread.

It is a turning point in their lives. They see Jesus and remember him. The walkers escape their disappointment, not through figuring out and talking about it, but through sharing a meal together in a special way, through a ritual that is full of meaning and memory, one that Jesus commanded them to do.

We celebrate The Lord’s Supper every week for many reasons. For example, Martin Luther said we should do so because we needed to eat to be strong to fight the devil. But another reason is that the Lord’s Supper is a way of thinking that is out of the ordinary. Sacraments, like other rituals, are a kind of new physics. They are messages spoken in another language. They are guided by tradition and scripture and the Spirit. And most of all they are something that we approach with humility and mystery. For a moment, we put aside the ordinary way of seeing things and adopt a new way. We come forward, and hear words that are both strange and comforting, we eat as we were instructed to by Jesus, and we leave transformed. We come back week after week, because we need reminding that there is a way to see things that we usually do not see.

The travelers on the road start out convinced that nothing has changed. That the world and their lives will be as they always have been. But Christians are right to have excessive expectations. It is what Jesus taught us. We are right to think that what is broken can be healed and what is stuck can be freed.

As the hymn from the Iona community says:

Goodness is stronger than evil; love is stronger than hate; Light is stronger than darkness; life is stronger than death.

It is risky to hope so deeply. It makes us vulnerable to grief and disappointment. Yet not to hope deeply, starves us.