“While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near
and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” Luke
24:15-16
The Reverend
Luther Zeigler
Easter 3A –
April 30, 2017
The young man emerges from the subway and
positions himself near the top of the station escalator. There seems to be
nothing special about him: a white guy in jeans, a T-shirt and a baseball cap.
From a small case, he removes a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he
shrewdly throws in a few dollars as seed money, and begins to play.
It
is the morning rush hour on a Friday in Washington, DC. It is a Metro stop I know well, having lived
in Washington most of my life, although I was not there that particular morning
in 2007, much as I now wish I had been. In the next 43 minutes, as the
violinist performs six classical pieces, 1,097 people will pass by. Almost all of
them are on their way to work. Each passerby has a choice to make, one familiar
to commuters in any urban area where street performers are part of the cityscape:
Do you stop and listen? Or do you hurry past, mildly annoyed at this unbidden
demand on your time? Or, more likely still, are you just in a fog of semi-conscious
routine, barely even aware of the musician’s presence?
No
one knew it at the time, but the fiddler standing in the subway that morning
was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, Joshua Bell. His
performance was arranged by The Washington
Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities – and I owe
this description of the occasion to one of the newspaper’s reporters, Gene
Weingarten.[1]
So,
here is the $64,000 question: what do
you think happened? How many people stopped
to listen to Bach’s Chaconne from his
Partita No. 2, one of the most wonderfully complex pieces ever written for the
violin? Or to Schubert’s Ave Maria, a
breathtakingly beautiful work of adoration to the Virgin Mary?
Well,
for three full minutes nothing at
all happens. Sixty-three people pass by without so much as a turn of the head
until, finally, there is a breakthrough of sorts: A middle-age man alters his gait for a split
second, turning his head to notice that there seems to be some guy playing
music. He doesn’t stop, but at least he notices. It is not until six minutes
into the performance that someone actually stops for more than a few seconds.
As
Weingarten reports, in the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell plays, a
crowd never forms. Only seven of the more than one thousand people who pass by
that morning stop what they are doing to take in the performance for at least a
minute.
There
are many painfully awkward scenes in the video of the experiment, but one memorable
one is of a mother hurrying her toddler off the escalator, trying hard to whisk
the child by the music so that he won’t notice and want to listen. She puts her
body between the boy and Bell, wanting to block the child’s curiosity. But the
boy is drawn to the music, and tries to escape his mom’s clutches to get closer. But her determined momentum is too much for
him.
The
poet Billy Collins once observed that all babies are born with an openness to poetry,
because the lub-a-dub-dub of a mother’s heartbeat is in iambic meter. But then,
Collins noted, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. The same may
be true with music, too.
I
wonder if it is also true of our capacity to experience God?
In
our gospel reading today, we get one answer to this question. Cleopas and his
friend are walking along a dusty road a few miles outside of Jerusalem toward a
village named Emmaus. They are trying to sort through the events of Good Friday
– the betrayal, the injustice, the cruelty, the death of hope itself. They stand
at the intersection of what is and what might have been; locked in memories,
memories of what they had seen and known in Jesus, the joy they felt in his
presence, the promise he held for them.
The
two disciples are leaving Jerusalem just wanting to get away from the overwhelming
sadness of it all. Where is this place Emmaus toward which they are going? We
don’t know. Scholars speculate about its location, but there is no certainty as
to where this town actually was or is. Emmaus is wherever we go to make
ourselves forget the tragedy of this world: to forget that even the wisest and
bravest and loveliest among us suffer and die; that even the noblest ideas that
humanity has to offer are in the end twisted out of shape by selfish men and
women for selfish ends.
As
writer Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, “Emmaus is the road you walk when your
team has lost, your candidate has been defeated, your loved one has died – the
long road back to the empty house, the piles of unopened mail, to life as
usual, if life can ever be usual again.”[2]
But
then, in the midst of this confusion and grief, a stranger appears. He asks Cleopas and his friend: What are you talking about? What are these things
that distress you so? They, in turn, tell him their painful story – which, of
course, is in truth the stranger’s own painful story.
The
stranger observes that our sacred texts have long pointed to the inevitability
of this day – that suffering and death are built into the fabric of this world.
But the Scriptures also assure us, the stranger explains, of God’s intention to
redeem the pain and loss and that God’s love for us is steadfast. But Cleopas
and his friend still don’t quite understand.
“How foolish you are,” the stranger quietly
whispers, “and how slow of heart to believe.” But the stranger doesn’t give up
on Cleopas and his friend; he walks with them still. While they can’t quite
fathom what he is saying, there is something about the stranger that draws them
in. His presence helps, a balm for what ails them. And so they invite him to
stay, to break bread, and to rest awhile. And he does, gladly.
And
then, their hearts warming, the disciples realize that it is in the stranger’s quiet
persistence, and in their openness to him, that grace comes. In a holy moment
of hospitality, their friend Jesus, now gloriously transformed, himself emerges
to greet them, restoring their hope, healing their wounds, giving them back the
life they thought they had lost.
The Joshua Bell story is an amusingly ironic
study of human busy-ness and preoccupation, but at the end of the day it leaves
us feeling profoundly sad about the human condition and our obliviousness to
moments of grace. The Emmaus story, on the other hand, while unflinchingly
honest about this same human brokenness, doesn’t end with our obtuseness. The
stranger in the Emmaus story, unlike Joshua Bell, won’t go away until we recognize
him and experience his life-giving presence.
This stranger refuses to let our preoccupation with ourselves have the
last word.
To
quote Barbara Brown Taylor again: “The
blindness of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus does not keep their Christ
from coming to them. He does not limit himself to those with full confidence in
him. He comes to the disappointed, the doubtful, the disconsolate. He comes to
those who do not know their Bible, who do not recognize him even when they are
walking right beside him. He comes to those who have given up and headed back
home, which makes this whole story a story about the blessedness of
brokenness.”[3]
But more than a story just about the
blessedness of brokenness, Emmaus is also a testament to the relentlessness of
God’s love.
Will
Willimon, the former dean of Duke University’s Chapel recounts a coffee
conversation he once had with a parishioner, a mom with a troubled son.[4]
“How have you been?,” Willimon asks her. “Not so good,” she says. “Our son’s
been putting us through hell.” “I’m so sorry,” said Willimon.
“We
haven’t known where he has been for the last six months, and then he shows up
the other night, unannounced, during dinner, just pounding on the front door
asking to be let in. We open the door and there he is. And then out of his
mouth comes this string of profanity.”
“I
said to him, ‘we’re eating, come on in, sit down and join us’; but he refuses
to sit down at the table, instead storming into his room, slamming the door shut,
and locking it shut. My husband sits there a minute, then gets up, pours
himself a drink, and turns on the TV. His way of coping.”
“Not
entirely sure what to do, I get up and go out to the garage. There, I pick up this big hammer from my
husband’s toolbox. I go back in the
house, upstairs to my son’s room, stand in front of the door, and say: ‘Open
the door.’”
“And
then, again, a burst of profanity pours out of his mouth on the other side of
the locked door. So I take that hammer and I lean back and, with all the
strength I can muster, I slam the hammer against the doorknob. I knock the
whole knob clean off the door, the lock, and everything. And then I barge
through the door to confront my son. He looks terrified. And I go over to him, throw
my arms around him in a bear hug, squeeze him as hard as I possibly can, and I
say: ‘I went into labor because of you. The
hell if I am giving up on you now.’”
The
good news of Easter is just this, my friends. We have a God whose love for us
breaks through every door we are able to put in the way; a God who refuses to
leave our side no matter our self-absorption and bewildered indifference; a God
who walks with us through even the darkest hours of our despair; a God who,
like a mother, longs to embrace us. Let
us open our eyes, our ears, and our hearts this Easter season and greet our
risen Lord. He is waiting . . . for us.
