Eyes for the Road

Luke 24:13–35 | Ephesians 1:15–18

 

About half of you didn't see the gorilla. And you were looking right at it.

 

Psychologists call it inattentional blindness — the inability to perceive something fully visible simply because your attention is locked somewhere else. You were counting passes. You were doing the task. And something large, something extraordinary, walked right through the middle of the frame and you missed it.

 

I want to hold that image this morning. Because I think it is exactly what Luke is describing in the twenty-fourth chapter. And I think it is exactly where many of us find ourselves today.

 

We lost Linda this week.

 

I do not want to rush past that. We lost Linda — our organist, our musician, our steady and faithful presence at the keys of this church. She came through open-heart surgery and did not come back to us, and that loss is sitting on this congregation this morning like a weight. You have been counting that loss since you heard the news. You have been counting the passes — who will play, what will the music sound like, how do we do this without her — and underneath all that counting is just grief. Plain and heavy grief.

 

I want you to know that your grief is right and good. Linda mattered. Her music mattered. The silence where her playing used to be is a real silence, and it deserves to be named.

 

And I also want to tell you a story about two people who were so consumed by their grief that the risen Christ walked right beside them for seven miles and they did not see him.

 

It is the Sunday of the resurrection. Two disciples — Cleopas and a companion Luke leaves unnamed, which is to say, you and I — are walking away from Jerusalem. Walking away from the place where everything fell apart. The one they had followed, the one they had hoped would redeem Israel, was dead. Buried. The tomb was empty, but that had only added confusion to grief. And so they walk.

 

They are not walking toward anything in particular. They are grief-walking. Moving because staying still is unbearable.

 

And while they walk, they talk about everything they have lost. They recount the whole story — the arrest, the trial, the crucifixion, the tomb, the women who said he was alive. They are counting the passes. They are deep in the accounting of their sorrow.

 

And then a stranger falls into step beside them.

 

The stranger asks what they are talking about. They stop walking. Luke says they stood still, looking sad. And they tell him everything. They tell this stranger the whole story of Jesus.

 

They are telling the story of Jesus to Jesus.

 

The gorilla is right there in the frame. And they cannot see it.

 

Luke tells us their eyes were kept from recognizing him. Scholars have wrestled with that phrase for centuries. Were they prevented by grief? By disbelief? By the sheer impossibility of expecting the dead to walk the road beside you? We don't know exactly. What we know is this: they were counting their losses so intently that something extraordinary walked right into the middle of their story and they did not see it.

 

Paul knew something about this kind of blindness. In his letter to the church at Ephesus, he prays one of the most tender prayers in all of scripture — that the eyes of their hearts might be enlightened. Not the eyes of their heads. Something deeper. The capacity to perceive what is really there. To see the holy in the ordinary. To recognize the risen Christ even when grief has narrowed your vision to a single terrible point.

 

That is the prayer of this congregation today. God, open the eyes of our hearts. Help us see.

 

The two disciples walk the road. Seven miles. The stranger opens the scriptures to them, explains everything — and something begins to happen beneath the surface. Their hearts are burning within them, they will say later. They feel it before they know it. The recognition is coming. It just has not broken through yet.

 

Before I go further, I want to point you toward the painting standing near the doors of this sanctuary. Some of you passed it on your way in. It is Robert Zund's Road to Emmaus — a nineteenth-century Swiss painter who had a fondness for oak trees, which is why the whole scene looks considerably more like the Swiss countryside than the hills outside Jerusalem. No matter. What matters is what he chose to paint.

 

Zund painted the road. He painted the conversation. Three figures walking, two of them listening intently to the third, the light filtering through the trees, the journey still underway. This is the teaching moment — hearts beginning to burn, eyes not yet open.

 

There is another famous painting of this same story — Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus — which captures the moment at the table, the instant of recognition, the disciples' astonishment as they finally see who has been with them all along. That is a magnificent painting. But it is not the one standing by our doors.

 

The one by our doors is the road. The walking. The not-yet-seeing. And I think that is exactly right for where we are today. We are in the Zund painting. We are on the road. The conversation is already happening. Our hearts may already be burning with something we have not yet named.

 

When the travelers reach Emmaus, the disciples urge the stranger to stay. And when they sit down together — when he takes the bread and blesses it and breaks it — their eyes are opened. He is known to them in that moment. And then he vanishes from their sight.

 

I am not preaching a communion sermon this morning. But I do not want to pass too quickly over the word table. Because the table in this story is not about one particular sacrament. It is about what happens when human beings sit down together. It is a theology of shared presence.

 

Think about the tables you have sat at this week. Maybe a kitchen table with someone you love, talking through something hard. Maybe a table in a fellowship hall after a funeral, where the food appears as if from nowhere, brought by hands that just needed something to do with their grief. Maybe a hospital waiting room that became its own kind of table — people gathered, holding each other up, present to one another in the middle of fear.

 

We do not always recognize what is happening at those tables until we are back on the road and we turn to each other and say — were not our hearts burning?

 

Linda was present at a lot of tables in this congregation. The fellowship table. The table of ministry. The table of music, which is its own kind of communion — people gathered, something holy moving through the room, a presence larger than the sum of its parts. We will feel her absence at those tables for a long time. That is grief doing its honest work.

 

And this is what I want to say to you: the risen Christ does not absent himself from tables of grief. He shows up at them. Maybe you will not recognize him right away. Maybe you will be too busy counting the passes — accounting the loss, figuring out what comes next. But he is there. He is already in the conversation.

 

This Sunday, our congregation is walking the Emmaus road in yet another way. Kevin and Sandy Kruger are leaving us. I want to say that plainly, because there is no way to soften it that does justice to what they have meant to this community. They have walked this road with us — in worship, in service, in the quiet faithful showing-up that is the actual substance of church life. And now they are walking toward a new place, a new road, a new chapter.

 

I think of the disciples at Emmaus. They were walking a road of ending — the end of what they thought the story was. And the risen Christ walked with them not to keep them from leaving, not to turn them around, but to open their eyes before they went.

 

Kevin and Sandy — I hope this church has been an Emmaus road for you. A place where the stranger became known. A place where your hearts burned within you enough times that the burning was real. And as you walk forward toward wherever God is calling you, here is what this congregation knows: he is on that road too. You may not always see him clearly. Grief and transition and the uncertainty of new places will sometimes do what grief always does — narrow your vision to the immediate loss. But he is there. He will make himself known. Probably at a table. Maybe a kitchen table. Maybe a fellowship hall. Maybe in a new congregation that does not yet know how lucky they are.

 

And to all of us who remain — we are walking our own roads. Every one of us carries griefs and hopes that blur our vision. Every one of us has had the experience of looking back on a hard stretch of road and realizing, only afterward, that something holy was present the whole time.

 

Paul's prayer is our prayer today. May the eyes of your heart be enlightened. May you come to know the hope to which you have been called. May you recognize the Risen One walking beside you, even in the miles when you cannot see him.

 

On your way out today, stop and look at that painting by the door. Robert Zund's oak trees. That Swiss light. Those three figures on the road. The stranger is already speaking. Their hearts are already burning. The recognition is coming.

 

That is where we are. That is the road we are on.

 

Keep your eyes open.

 

Amen.