Biblical Text: Luke 24:13-35
The Road to Emmaus is one of the most evocative stories in scripture. It has some echoes of the Old Testament and the “Messianic Secret” in the line “their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” It also fits in perfectly with Luke’s love of travel narratives. We are always on the way somewhere. But for me – and liturgically coming on Easter 3 it plays into this – it is a post-resurrection appearance that deals with knowing. How do we know? In that way it can be something of a Lukan Thomas story. Except where as John’s answer is the beatitude – “blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe” – which plays into John’s love of sight metaphors, Luke’s answer has some layers. I pull in John Wesley’s quadrilateral which in the way it gets used might be the most misused theological framework. I touch on that in the sermon a bit. Wesley had an answer to “How do you know?” It was roughly: Revelation, Tradition, Experience and Reason. And at least how I think it should be taken that order is a hierarchy. Scripture or Revelation is the bedrock. Tradition, something that is ever growing, is the witness of the saints and ages. It illumines the fullness of scripture. Experience is how these intersect with our lives. And the last, reason, is really teaching our fallen self to see God at work. They aren’t separate ways of knowing that are weighed against each other. They work together. And as the sermon develops the text, Jesus walks the pair on the road to Emmaus from experience through tradition and back to the Scriptures. And then they are prepared to see.
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