Cleopas and another disciple of Jesus were walking away from Jerusalem where their Savior had died, and all of their hopes along with Him. They were on the road to a town called Emmaus. The road to Emmaus is the long road you take to walk away from your disappointments. Maybe even your disappointments in God Himself. It is the road back home, to work, to the grind, or back to the place where disappointment is just part of the fabric. Then a stranger joins you in the most unlikely and most routine of moments. Around a table, while you share bread and a cup.

Frederick Buechner wrote these words in 'The Magnificent Defeat' (p. 87-88): “Sacred moments, the moments of miracle, are often everyday moments, the moments for which, if we do not look with more than our eyes or listen with more than our ears, reveal only 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 our being and imagination . . . what we may see is Jesus Himself.”

Prayer - Open our eyes, O God, to truth hidden in mystery, to Your presence revealed in the ordinary. Open our ears so that we may hear Your word among the anxious voices that fill our busy lives. Open our spirits that our blind eyes may recognize You at the Table. Open us to Your living presence to heal and redeem. Amen.

Marva Dawn is one of my favorite Christian writers. She points out in one of her recent works that we live in a society whose very economy is dependent on our being disappointed – in being disappointed with what we have and wanting more. You can’t be satisfied, because if you were you would not be a good consumer. Consuming assumes that you are disappointed which is why we keep on consuming. Many of us have come to live our lives by a story of disappointment.

One day, two disappointed disciples made their way along a road discussing how they could have been so duped. Scripture had seemed so clear, and Jesus seemed like everything they had hoped for for centuries. Now He was gone, and they were alone in their misplaced hopes and false understandings. They say those words that we often repeat in our worst moments of disappointment. “We had hoped.” (v. 21). We all have our hopes for what Jesus was supposed to do in our lives. We had hoped that if we brought our child to church that she would grow up to be ok. We had hoped if we prayed our marriage would change. We had hoped that Jesus would not disappoint us. But Jesus does not appear in the “nick of time” to clean up our messes or to save us from disappointment. He shows up after the nick of time has come and gone.

The disciples were discussing what had happened on that horrible weekend, and a stranger showed up on the road and began walking with them. He seemed a bit familiar, but they were not sure who He was. As they discussed Scripture together, what He said made a lot of sense. He assured them that they had not been wrong. The story wasn’t over yet.

As it was getting late, the two travelers invited the stranger to come in and stay with them. Jesus kept walking, but the text says that the hearts of these two disciples burned within them so that they couldn’t let Him go. They were not quite sure yet who this man was, but they knew there was something special about Him, something that spoke to every longing and disappointment of their hearts. They had to stay with Jesus, even if they still couldn’t see Him. That is true for us too … you have to take in the stranger in your life, even when you can’t see Him just yet. That is the only way you will find the grace your soul craves.

That night, while they were at the table, Jesus took the bread, blessed it, and broke it and gave it to them (there is that language again). For Luke, this is the trademark activity of Jesus. It is what He did with the 5,000. It is what He did when He shared Passover with His disciples. It is what He did with His own life. As Henri Nouwen states in his book 'Life of the Beloved,' it also is what Jesus does to us. He takes us, blesses us, even breaks us, and gives us to a holy purpose.

As Cleopas and his friend shared this meal with Jesus, the Bible says, “Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized Him.” (Luke 24:31). As they saw these broken pieces of bread in His hands, they finally saw in this man their risen Savior who holds every broken part of us in His own brokenness.

That is what we proclaim every time we come to the Table. Communion begins with broken bread where we are reminded that everything is broken in our lives, our church, and in this world, but that it is held in the broken body of Jesus Christ. Nothing is more offensive to the character of communion than to believe that one must rid themselves of brokenness before they come to the Table. The idea that we must be “worthy” to eat of the Table is totally contrary to the very symbolism and meaning of this Table – the Table is for broken people and a broken world. We do not get our acts together to have communion with God. We come to the Table precisely because we are broken. Here we commune by a holy mystery with his broken body and his poured out blood. Here we finally see him – this stranger – this other presence who has been knocking on the door of our lives – this man who won’t let us go – he is present here in the midst of our brokenness as he shares broken bread with us.

But Jesus is not content just to identify with our broken places. That is why He also offers a cup – a cup of His blood for the healing of our brokenness, a cup of redemption for our sins. Even more, this healing can take place not just because of the shedding of blood to forgive the past but because the Risen Lord is now here to redeem the future. Everything – past, present and future – is now set right in His presence our Redeemer also lives!

At the moment when Cleopas and his friend recognized that this stranger was the risen Christ, He vanished from their sight. In that moment, the unrecognized visible presence became the recognized invisible presence. It is a strange occurrence. If I were writing this story, I would have had lots of screaming, back slapping and hugging at this point in the story. I would have scripted Jesus as having spent the rest of the night up with the disciples, and everyone living together happily ever after. Instead, as soon as the disciples recognize Jesus, he disappears. Why?

I think it is because Jesus does not want to remain a stranger. Jesus wants to commune with us. As long as He was there in the flesh, Jesus was always “other” to these disciples. Jesus was always the one leading, directing, saving. Though they thought they knew Him, He was always in some sense a stranger, a holy other. But at the Table around bread and cup the Spirit opens our eyes to see that we now enjoy something much more than we could if Jesus were here with us in the flesh. At this Table we now enjoy a mystical union with Christ. Now He is no longer “other”, and you are no longer “other” to Him. At the Table, by God’s great mercy and mystery, we are now in “communion” together. We spend a lot of our lives feeling different than others, and we wonder how even God can understand us. But at the Table we discover that God will no longer remain a stranger to us, and He will not allow us to remain a stranger to Him. He is present as we take bread and the cup to finally give us what our hearts have craved all along – communion with Him.

Now, if you can see that, you are in for big changes in your life. Your experience of communion no longer will be limited to reflection but now opened up to transformation. God’s atonement for you is a past event, but its power is not limited to your past. As we become one with Christ in this Supper, the risen Savior is with you as the recognized invisible presence. He is in you. It is then that religion ceases to be a lot of rules, petty morals and staid ideologies for someone’s conservative or liberal agendas. It is then that every way of describing ourselves according to human labels – by race, ethnic origin, gender, or sexual orientation – all fade away as ways of understanding our core identity into one identity for all who are baptized into Christ: “It is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”

Christ in you – the risen Christ in you and with us– that is the promise of Communion. That presence and power available to us in this meal, wherever Christians eat bread and share the cup, is what led some to call this Table a sacrament, meaning that by a holy mystery and the grace of God Christ is present and made known to us in the breaking of the bread and the drinking of the cup. Not only do we see Him here for who He really is – we also come to see in the taking of this bread and cup that He now abides with and in us.

What if your life were defined by that reality? What if you were given a new narrative, a new imagination for your life? If your life is going to be defined solely by your own experiences or the narrative you want to create for it – then life is going to be defined by its disappointments because they are inevitable. What if life could be defined instead by a new story that begins with a God who said “Let there be …” and that God now lives in you by the Holy Spirit. What if you took seriously the stranger that has joined you on your journey? What if you began to live out of a new narrative that you have been made one with Christ?

Where will you find such a narrative? In the Word and at the Table. Luke includes this story at the end of his gospel to tell disciples how they can know Christ as the fulfillment of their hopes. The way disciples come to know the presence of Christ, in the absence of Christ, is Word and Table. These disciples came to know Christ as they discussed Scripture together and as they shared communion with Him. As we open up Scripture together, the Holy Spirit leads us into all the Truth about Jesus (John 16:35). And as we commune with bread and cup, Jesus becomes mysteriously present to us again and we realize our communion and oneness with Him.

As we gather at the Table, we learn that life no longer has to be lived as a long journey between disappointment and consumption, living a little life where you squeeze out some happiness but that will ultimately end in death. That is the ultimate disappointment. To believe that Jesus Christ is now present to you, that as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you celebrate a mystical union with Jesus . . . well that is a death-defying hope. When you discover that kind of hope, you can even return to the broken places with boldness and without fear.

That is what these disciples did after they met the risen Christ at the Table. They “got up and returned to Jerusalem.” (Acts 24:33). You can know that you are healed by Jesus when you can return to the places of pain and the hurts of your past and go there freely as a new person. You can go there no longer being shaped and determined by the narrative of past days, or by your losses, or by your hurt. It doesn’t matter how much time you spend reviewing it, you’re never going to have a better past. Until you are free of it, and even grateful for it, you will always be running from it. It is possible to live out of a new narrative that does not end in disappointment but in a meal where every craving is lost in wonder, love and praise.

To see the presence of Christ in the Table, and to discover that this same living Lord now lives in you, is to see that all of life’s brokenness and disappointment is held and healed in His hands. Even the great disappointment of death. You may feel like a stranger to that kind of presence, or to the promise of that kind of hope. But Jesus invites you to the Table. It is from the Table that the disciples went back to the places and people of their disappointments, and there they proclaimed that the living Lord, and the fulfillment of all their hopes, “had been known to them in the breaking of the bread.”


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