What a terrible few days the people who have gathered in Jersualem to celebrate the Feast of the Passover have experienced.  This most important festival in the Jewish year has been totally overshadowed by what has happened to Jesus. Just think, a week ago, He entered Jerusalem to fulfil the predictions of the Old Testament Prophets, even riding on a donkey, with all the expectations of the Jewish people who had followed Him, who had listened to Him hour after hour, telling them how God wanted them to live their lives, relating parable after parable to teach them.  The Prodigal Son, The Good Samaritan, The Sower, The Rich Ruler, The Great Dinner, and hadn’t they witnessed Him healing the woman, raising Lazarus from the dead, healing the man with the demons, feeding the five thousand. Hosanna! they had cried as He rode into Jerusalem seated on a donkey. Jesus, the hope of a new Israel, the hope of a free Israel, the hope of the end of Roman rule and oppression, how they listened as He preached in the Temple every day.  They had regarded Jesus as a King who would redeem Israel, they regarded Jesus as their hope of earthly salvation from the oppression of Roman occupation.  That was until He was arrested and put on trial and then crucified.   Now all their hopes were dashed, His followers scattered like the wind in every direction, His own disciples denying they knew Him.  Those last few days had been full of fear in case the Romans rounded them all up and crucified them.

Yes, Jesus’ followers had probably carried on and gone to the Temple to take part in the ceremonies which formed the Jewish Passover, they had to, it was prescribed by Jewish Law, they couldn’t do anything else, but their hearts must have been broken.  All their hopes dashed, killed on the cross, that most awful instrument of torture and death which the Romans used against their enemies. This morning we rejoiced that Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James, and Salome had gone to the tomb where Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus had laid Jesus’ body on Good Friday, and found it empty. Evidence that Christ is Risen.  And now later the same day Cleopas and his companion, are walking from Jerusalem where they have witnessed for themselves all of the disaster of Good Friday, to Emmaus, a village about seven miles away. Naturally they are discussing between themselves what they have seen the last few days.  The joy turned to sorrow.  They must have been thoroughly dejected and dispirited.  This wasn’t what was meant to happen. Jesus was supposed to save Israel, and now was dead at the hands of the Romans and the Chief Priests.

How often have we felt like Cleopas and his companion, walking a lonely road, dejected and dispirited, when we have witnessed our world crumbling around us and unable to do anything to stop it.  When something which we don’t want to happen, happens to us or to our loved ones.  Left feeling as if our world has collapsed and there seems no way forward or no point in going forward. When we feel deserted by God. But then they are joined on the road by a stranger, who enquires what they are discussing, and they tell him what has happened.  Now it is obvious from what Cleopas tells the stranger walking with them, he and his companion know that the tomb has been found empty that morning, the third day after the crucifixion, but the last thing they would expect is the Risen Lord walking alongside them. The last thing they would expect is an obviously dead person coming back to life. 

Dead people don’t do that sort of thing, its as simple as that. But Jesus is no ordinary person.  He is the Son of God who came and took human flesh so he could dwell among us.  That’s the truth of what Cleopas and his companion has witnessed in Jerusalem those last few days. The truth that Jesus Christ was crucified and has now risen from the dead, just as the prophets of old told He would, to prove he truly is God’s Son. The Gospels don’t spend much time on the resurrection, and yet it is central to our Christian faith, if we don’t believe that Jesus died and rose again from the dead, can we claim to be Christians?  Of course we have to remember that the Gospels and Paul’s letters were written when people would still remember what happened in Jerusalem 2000 years ago.  It was a fact for them, something they witnessed or knew someone who had witnessed the events, they didn’t need proof, they had seen the proof. Hundreds of people, as well as the disciples, saw the Risen Christ after the empty tomb was found on that  Easter Sunday, had talked with Him, had eaten with Him.

Thomas is for me the best example, he is absent when Jesus appears to the disciples, and Thomas doesn’t believe them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe”.  A week later Jesus appears again to His disciples and Thomas is there, and offers Thomas the opportunity to do just what he said he must do. The result, “My Lord and my God”.  Thomas had no more doubts.

This baby born in Bethlehem to a human mother, who suffered death on the cross, and then overcomes that human death, is truly the Son of God.  The expected Messiah. Cleopas and his companion still don’t understand who is walking with them and now telling them what the prophets and the Old Testament had foretold about Jesus. It’s not until they reach home and invite Him in and He breaks bread with them that they realise their mysterious guest is the risen Christ.  “Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized Him; and he vanished from their sight”. What Cleopas and his companion have just witnessed before their very eyes, is the first meal of the new creation created by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Death itself has been defeated. 

God’s new creation, brimming with life and joy and new possibilities, has burst in upon the world of decay and sorrow.  Jesus himself, risen from the dead, is the beginning and the sign of this new world.  He isn’t alive in the same way that we are alive, we have to face death ourselves, it’s the only certainty in life for us.  No, Jesus has gone through death and out the other side into that new world, a world of new and deathless creation, which awaits us all if we believe, if we have hope. A new complete life in Christ.

Cleopas and his companion were full of joy at meeting the risen Jesus, so much so they ran back to Jerusalem to tell the disciples and the other followers what had happened, and Jesus appeared to them again.  “Peace be with you”, he told them. All these resurrection stories show us that Jesus is a God who wants to surprise us with joy.  That joy which comes to us when we experience the risen Christ in our lives.

C.S. Lewis, the famous Oxford Don, who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, was a committed atheist, he went out of his way to avoid God, to deny that God existed.  It seemed easier for him to do that, he didn’t want God to complicate his life which had been marked by sorrows.  But God was after him, he said, looking back, “You must picture me, alone in my room, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet”. Gradually Lewis came to admit that God was God, and knelt and prayed: he said that “perhaps that night, he was the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England”. But Lewis still didn’t believe that Jesus was God’s Son, that came on a journey to Whipsnade Zoo one day. Lewis said that when he set out he still didn’t believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and when he reached Whipsnade he did. During that journey Lewis had found the real joy of knowing Jesus Christ in his life.  It was his Emmaus Road experience of finding Jesus, of finding the joy of Easter morning.  “He is Risen, He is Risen indeed!”.

We never know when we are on our Emmaus Road experience until it happens to us, I certainly didn’t, and was very much like C S Lewis, I didn’t want God to complicate my life. We don’t know what joyful surprises Jesus has in store for us, but we can expect joyful surprises on the journey, and whether we realise it or not we are on that journey with God throughout our life, its part of  our human condition from the moment we are born. The first followers of Jesus weren’t called Christians, they were called “people of the way”, to identify them on the journey with Christ.  So let us keep travelling on the way, a way  we stray from every now and again, and let our bible reading encourage us to live as “people of the way; and be thrilled by the expectation that in doing this we will almost certainly find Jesus somewhere en-route, surprising us with joy.

Christ is Risen, He is Risen indeed.  Alleluia!  Alleluia!