BBC Radio 4 Sunday Service

Sunday 30th March 8.10 a.m.

The Emmaus story is one of my favourites. I love the drama of the walk along the road, the stranger who appears, and how he is invited to join them for their meal. It’s those words ‘were not our hearts burning within us?’ that sometimes send a shiver up my spine! It’s as if I’m there with them, and it’s all happening now.

Another reason why I find it easy to imagine myself there is that the story is so anonymous. We don’t know where Emmaus actually is, except that it is a few miles from Jerusalem. That’s deliberate – it makes Emmaus a place where we all go when we are confused or badly hurt. And the two disciples are a bit faceless. Only one of them is named – Cleopas – and we don’t hear of him again, whereas the other disciple isn’t named at all. So they weren’t the well-known followers of Jesus, like Peter, or James, or John. They were just about anyone – and they could be us as well.

We can walk to Emmaus, in the countless different ways we break bread together: think of an anxious young mother giving thanks for the birth of a child, an elderly housebound living on their own, a maturing teenager facing up to a rather threatening world, a teacher about to deal with a difficult problem, a stockbroker wrestling with an ethical issue, a doctor who is caring for a terminally ill patient, or a young person bursting with enthusiasm at their first communion. It is in these small, intimate occasions that to break bread is just as important as in the grand, very public celebrations, such as a coronation.

But perhaps more moving than any of these is what took place during the Second World War. It was Christmas 1942 at the Battle of Stalingrad, one of the worst and most violent in the war. The German forces were completely surrounded by the Soviet troops. They had been denied all opportunity to retreat and were ordered by the Nazi leadership to fight to the very last. The winter cold was more oppressive than they had ever experienced before.

The fact of the matter is that they felt entirely forsaken, isolated, and rejected by those they had trusted and believed in. They knew they had hardly any hope of long-term survival: they were either going to be killed or wounded in battle, or cruelly route-marched into captivity, probably – as it turned out for most of them – dying on the way. Every earthly hope was lost. So what did they do? They gathered on Christmas Day and celebrated the eucharist together in those heart-rending circumstances. It was, or so it seems, all that was left for them to do.

Thankfully, an event like that one is not a daily experience for us – and certainly not at Easter last week-end!  But what I find fascinating is the mixture of that simple, basic routine, of sharing the Scriptures and the sacred meal, alongside the very different concerns and stories which people bring along with them, and the sometimes testing and challenging contexts in which they live. The Stalingrad eucharist, however, is one of those rare events that brings home the depths to which human beings sometimes have to descend, and the way that God is able to bring new life, even when all appears to be lost.

So the Easter message is not some contrived happy ending. It is about God speaking across the many cultures and centuries, as he will continue to do in the future, and absorbing the meaninglessness of this world, in order to bless it with his words and his nourishment. That is the real genius of walking to our Emmaus, and breaking bread and sharing wine in the presence of Christ.

+ Kenneth Portsmouth