Jesus was crucified on Friday.  All day Saturday, his body lay in the tomb.  On Sunday, the first day of the week, the tomb was empty, and that’s when the risen Lord began to appear to his friends, including the two on the road to Emmaus.  Here’s what Frederick Buechner  (The Magnificent Defeat, 1966) has to say about those three days:

            Late Friday afternoon he died, and then there was Saturday, which should have been the worst day except that somehow or other perhaps it was not. 

            If for even as much as an instant we look up into the full brilliance of the sun, we find that for hours afterward, whenever we close our eyes, the outline of the sun is still there as though the image had been branded on our eyelids; and so it must have been for the ones who had been present that Friday on the hill where he was executed.

            On Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, even with their eyes closed, they could still see the three crosses dark and angular against the sky; even with their fingers in their ears, they could still hear the sounds that had been made up there; the cry of thirst, the buzzing of the flies, and the heat, because heat has a sound too, like a muffled drum or the beating of a heart.

            But the poet was right who said that “After great pain a formal feeling comes,” and for the people who had loved the man and had gone up Friday to be near him when he died, Saturday must have been a strangely formal day too, the way the day after the death of someone we love is always a formal day:  when we arrange our faces carefully and our words carefully, and we are even careful where we put our feet because we have the feeling that one careless step and earth and heaven both might split in two about us.  The way if somebody in our family dies, when we go back after the funeral, things are quite different for a while:  people are very polite and a little stiff with us, and are apt to straighten their ties and start talking about the weather when we enter the room. 

            But the world of course never lets us be formal for long.  All of a sudden, before we know it, it is back to its old tricks again:  pulling the chair out from under us just as we are about to sit down; just as the lumps in our throats are about to burst, blowing trumpets in our ears or setting off firecrackers.  And perhaps that is the worst time of all  --  when we realize that life is going to have to go on the same way it always has except that of course it will never be the same again.

            So for at least some of the followers of Jesus, maybe the worst day was the third one, Sunday, which for the Jews was like our Monday, with everything around them returning so completely to normal that it was impossible to believe that either his life or his death was going to make any difference to the world at all.    When they were suddenly afraid that the whole business of his life had not really added up to much.

            He had made great promises and great claims, and a number of people had placed all their greatest hopes in him.  But now he was dead.  Of course there were rumors about the tomb’s being empty.  The women had come back just after sunrise full of wild stories.  But rumors are only rumors, women are always telling wild stories, and for at least two of the people who had followed him, there was nothing left to do that Sunday but get out of town.

            And where did they go?  They went to Emmaus.  And where was Emmaus and why did they go there?  It was no place in particular really, and the only reason that they went there was that it was some seven miles distant from a situation that had become intolerable.

            Do you understand what I mean when I say that there is not one of us who has not gone to Emmaus with them?  Emmaus can be a trip to the movies just for the sake of seeing a movie or to a cocktail party just for the sake of the cocktails.  Emmaus may be buying a new suit or a new car or smoking more cigarettes than you really want, or reading a second-rate novel or even writing one.  Emmaus may be going to church on Sunday.  Emmaus is whatever we do or wherever we go to make ourselves forget that the world holds nothing sacred:  that even the wisest and bravest and loveliest decay and die; that even the noblest ideas that men have had  --  ideas about love and freedom and justice  --  have always in time been twisted out of shape by selfish men for selfish ends.  Emmaus is where we go, where these two went, to try to forget about Jesus and the great failure of his life.

            It is a strange story.  All the stories about how Jesus appeared to people after his death are strange, and the strangest thing about them is how unglamorous they are, how little fanfare there is about them.  If you or I had written them, it would have been hard to resist giving them a little more drama.  In the stories about how he was born there is a whole choir of angels singing “Glory to God in the highest” and kings arriving from the East with precious gifts; the shepherds coming in out of the night to kneel at the manger; and the star. 

            But here, for instance, all we have are two men walking along a dusty road to a town that nobody had heard of much, suddenly aware of footsteps approaching them from behind and being joined then by a stranger who was Jesus but whom they did not even recognize, perhaps because even when he was alive they had never really recognized him, had seen him not as he actually was but only as they had wanted him to be; a hero who would give them a lot of easy answers to all of life’s hardest questions, questions about love and pain and goodness and death.

            So they were joined by this Jesus, whom they did not recognize, and when they reached the village of Emmaus, and because it was getting late, they persuaded him to stop and have supper with them.  And it was only then, only as he took the bread and blessed it and broke it, that they knew who he was.  And no sooner did they know who he was than he vanished from their sight.  Much as they would have given to have had him stay there a minute or two more, they could not make him stay.  They can never nail him down.  And that is how it always is.  We can never nail him down, not even if the nails we use are real ones and the thing we nail him to is a cross.  He comes suddenly, out of nowhere, like the first clear light of the sun after a thunderstorm or maybe like the thunder itself; and maybe we recognize him, and maybe we do not, and our lives are never the same again either because we did not recognize him or because we did.

            And the place where he comes is very apt to be Emmaus, which is the place where we spend much of our lives, you and I, the place that we go to in order to escape  --  a bar, a movie, wherever it is we throw up our hands and say, “Let the whole damned thing go hang.  It makes no difference anyway.”

            But there are some things that even in Emmaus we cannot escape.  We can escape our troubles, at least for a while.  We can escape the job we did not get or the friend we hurt.  We can even escape for a while the awful suspicion that life makes no sense and that the religion of Jesus is just a lot of wishful thinking.  But the one thing we cannot escape is life itself:  the fact that I am here on this earth, a living human being with blood in my veins and breath in my lungs.  We cannot escape getting hungry, and we cannot escape eating.  We cannot escape walking or driving down a dusty road to get from one place to another. 

            And my point is this, that it is precisely at such times as these that life is going to ask us questions that we cannot escape for long:  questions about where the road we are traveling is finally going to take us; about whether food is enough to keep us alive, truly alive; about who we are and who the stranger is behind us.

            In other words, it is precisely at such times as these that Jesus is apt to come, into the very midst of life at its most real and inescapable.  Not in a blaze of unearthly light, not in the midst of a sermon, not in the throes of some kind of religious daydream, but at supper time, or walking along a road.  This is the element that all the stories about Christ’s return to life have in common:  Mary waiting at the empty tomb and suddenly turning around to see somebody standing there  --  someone she thought at first was the gardener; all the disciples except Thomas hiding out in a locked house, and then his coming and standing in the midst; and later, when Thomas was there, his coming again and standing in the midst; Peter taking his boat back after a night at sea, and there on the shore, near a little fire of coals, a familiar figure asking, “Children, have you any fish?”;  the two men at Emmaus who knew him in the breaking of the bread.  He never approached from on high, but always in the midst, in the midst of people, in the midst of real life and the questions that real life asks.

            The sacred moments, the moments of miracle, are often the everyday moments, the moments which, if we do not look with more than our eyes or listen with more than our ears, reveal only . . . the gardener, a stranger coming down the road behind us, a meal like any other meal. 

            But if we look with our hearts, if we listen with all of our being and our imagination  --  if we live our lives not from vacation to vacation, from escape to escape, but from the miracle of one instant of our precious lives to the miracle of the next, what we may see is Jesus himself, what we may hear is the first faint sound of a voice somewhere deep within us saying that there is a purpose in this life, in our lives, whether we can understand it completely or not; and that this purpose follows behind us through all our doubting and being afraid, through all our indifference and boredom, to a moment when suddenly we know for sure that everything does make sense because everything is in the hands of God, one of whose names is forgiveness, another is love.  This is what the stories about Jesus’ coming back to life mean, because Jesus was the love of God, alive among us, and not all the cruelty and blindness of men could kill him.

            If someone wants proof that he is alive and that this is so, all I can say in honesty is that I have none to give.  No preacher can prove it, no teacher, no book, not even the Bible.  It defies logic and reason, and it breaks the laws of nature as we understand them.  If we are to believe he is really alive, with all that that implies, then we have to believe without proof.  And of course that is the only way it could be.  If it could be somehow proved, then we would have no choice but to believe.  We would lose our freedom not to believe.  And in the very moment that we lost that freedom, we would cease to be human beings.  Our love of God would have been forced upon us, and love that is forced is of course not love at all.  Love must be freely given.  Love must live in the freedom not to love; it must take risks.  Love must be prepared to suffer even as Jesus on the Cross suffered, and part of that suffering is doubt, even as Jesus on the Cross doubted.

            But if we have no proof that he is alive, we have many witnesses, two thousand years of them, and yet we have more than that.  We have the witness of our own lives, or at least of certain deep moments when we were truly alive and when, if only for a moment or two, we have seen in the breaking of a piece of bread, for instance, not just a piece of bread breaking, but something broken for us, a givenness, a source of life.  The tale that Christianity tells is the tale of a sinless life given away, in love, to make up in some unfathomable way for all that we mean by our sin, to give us life in place of all that we mean by death.  The greatest miracle that Christianity has to proclaim is that the love that suffered agonies on that hill outside the city walls was the love of God himself, the love of God for his creation, which is a love that has no limit, not even the limit of death.  And for us the meaning of that love is that we can now raise our own shrill voices from the hills of our own suffering and say some such words as these:

            There is little that we can point to in our lives as deserving anything but God’s wrath.  Our best moments have been mostly grotesque parodies.  Our best loves have been almost always blurred with selfishness and deceit.  But there is something to which we can point.  Not anything that we ever did or were, but something that was done for us by another.  Not our own lives, but the life of one who died in our behalf and yet is still alive.  This is our only glory and our only hope.  And the sound that it makes is the sound of excitement and gladness and laughter that floats through the night air from a great banquet.  It is what Christians mean by salvation, and we saw it first at Emmaus, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

            It is what George Wallace Briggs means by salvation in these words we will sing with him later this morning:

                                    Come, risen Lord, and deign to be our guest;

                                                nay, let us be thy guests; the feast is thine.

                                    thyself at thine own board make manifest

                                                in thine own Sacrament of bread and wine.

                                    We meet, as in that upper room they met;

                                                thou at the table, blessing, yet dost stand;

                                    “This is thy Body”; so thou givest yet:

                                                faith still receives the cup as from thy hand.

                                    One body we, one Body who partake,

                                                one Church united in communion blest;

                                    one Name we bear, one Bread of life we break,

                                                with all thy saints on earth and saints at rest.

                                    One with each other, Lord, for one in thee,

                                                who art one Savior and one living Head;

                                    then open thou our eyes, that we may see;

                                                be known to us in breaking of the Bread.