Day 45: And their eyes were opened

The Road to Emmaus story is my favorite good news that the event of Jesus's resurection changes everything. I really re-acquainted myself with this story, in Luke 24, in the year 2000, when I tried writing a poem to submit for a creative writing contest that was soliciting pieces under the theme "Road to Emmaus". When I re-read the story, I noticed the phrase, "and their eyes were opened and they knew . . .," and it seemed to be a familiar phrase. I followed a hunch and turned back to Genesis 3 and there that phrase again.

I spent a lot of time with the details of these two stories to write a poem that told the Emmaus story as an echo and reversal of the Garden of Eden story, to describe a vision of Adam and Eve, because it is Easter day, getting a second chance to walk and talk with their God, to be freed from the curse of death and banishment, and to eat of the Tree of Life again.

The Emmaus story is a story of recognition, and it illustrates that the Day of Easter has the power to reverse and undo that curse-weighted death-fated recognition which opened Adam and Eve's eyes to shame and fear and distrust of Creator and each other.

It is a story that celebrates hospitality to strangers. The hosts are amazed and overjoyed when the guest unveils himself as Deity, very similar to the Greek myth I mentioned on an earlier day. It is also a story of timing, as hiddenness is actively sustained by the one who is not recognized until the moment he chooses.

To me it has become the beginning spot for all of my reading and understanding of Scripture. Although Jesus carefully explained the Law and Prophets to this pair of disciples on their walk, and although they felt a strange heartburn sensation as a result, none of it fully made sense or gave comfort or revealed biblical truth until they finally had mealtime companionship with the Truth, Jesus, the human-God whose body was raised from the dead.

All of my assumptions about what the Bible is saying and meaning about God now are founded upon this story, because until I saw Truth as a person, just as the Emmaus couple saw him, the Bible was an old document about static reality rather than a still-happening story about delayed recognition.

My idea of the Bible used to be founded upon a pre-Christian interpretation of Psalm 1: there are the righteous and the wicked, and the careful and obedient journey of the first ends with prosperity, while the sloppy and rebellious path of the other leads to destruction. There has been a pre-determination of who the righteous are and who the wicked are and there is no possibility of changing your or another's status from one to the other. Prosperity is heaven and destruction is hell. I used the Bible as a way to figure out who are the righteous, how can I be sure I am one of them, and how do I keep a safe distance from those who are not? As I became older and more confused and more empathatic and more anxious, I used the Bible to search out if there was any clue that anything could or that anyone would change the status and the destiny of those doomed wicked people?

But after I recognized who the Emmaus couple saw at their dinner table, I re-cognized Psalm 1 in a way that can only happen after you re-cognize Jesus's Resurrection identity within that Psalm. Jesus, because he became Sin on the cross, and because he was redeemed from the Pit as the Righteous One, exists, at the same time, as the two main characters of Psalm 1. The words never change, but in my experience, Psalm 1, along with the rest of the Bible, has been transformed from proof-texts about a static condition of who's good and who's bad, in/out, elect/reprobrate, saved/lost, included/excluded, heaven-sent/hell-bound to a gripping story about how evil is, over the passage of time and events, finally absorbed and overcome by Immanuel. Jehovah himself could show up at our Bible studies to explain Moses and the prophets to us for as long as we like, but until we re-cognize Jehovah as a carpenter-man from Nazareth, who is the Righteous Son of God, but who died of rejection by the Father as The Accursed One, and who then was raised to life as the Victor over death and evil, the whole complicated document of writings just causes an uncomfortable feeling of heartburn.

So much can happen while eating a meal with a stranger!