Please read Mark 14:12–26
The Thursday of Holy Week is often known as "Maundy Thursday." Maundy is an old word for the ritual of footwashing. It was on the Thursday of Jesus' last week that he washed the disciples feet to show the need for Christians to serve each other. Some Christian traditions still have footwashing as a ritual to show our humility and duty of service to others, especially our duty to the poor. (This is the origin of the monarch distributing "Maundy Money" today.)
But this post is about another rite that Christ introduced on the same day; one which is observed by almost all Christians - the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, also known as the Eucharist (Thanksgiving) or Holy Communion, or as we might also call it "The King's Feast."
Imagine the scene in the upper room that Thursday night. The disciples have gathered with Jesus to celebrate the Passover meal, just as they had every year since boyhood. They had probably eaten this special meal twenty, thirty or forty times before on previous Passovers. It's as traditional to them as Christmas dinner is to us. Then, in the middle of the meal, Jesus does something totally new and unexpected. He switches from commemorating, through the meal of roast lamb, the exodus from Egypt in Moses' time and now looks forward to a new exodus - a new deliverance for God's people - through his own death as the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.
The meal is as simple as possible. Bread and wine. Bread symbolising Christ's body broken for us on the cross; wine symbolising Christ's red blood poured out to seal a new covenant between God and his people. The eating and drinking of the bread and wine symbolising the living relationship of faith and obedience that depends on Christ and draws on Christ for spiritual nourishment and life. And the sharing of the loaf and cup with fellow believers symbolising our unity and comradeship as Christian pilgrims on the Way together.
A simple meal of bread and wine and yet the greatest feast this world affords and the foretaste of the great King's feast to come when Christ returns in glory.
Showing posts with label Lord's Supper. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lord's Supper. Show all posts
Thursday, 18 April 2019
Thursday, 12 June 2008
Rethinking Communion
There is sometimes a danger in Reformed theology that we just assume that at an arbitrary point in time - let's say for example 1646 when the Westminster Confession of Faith was first written - the Church finally and totally sorted out its theology for ever and whatever was laid down then is the truth and any opinion at odds with it is false.
However, such a view is itself highly questionable from a Reformed standpoint. The Reformers and Puritans themselves viewed the task of reforming the church as an ongoing task that never ceases. One of the mottos of the Reformation was Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda which means "The church reformed and always being reformed". In other words, the church must always be willing to search the Scriptures and be led by the Holy Spirit to new and more accurate insights into divine truth.
This means that the work of the reformed theologian is never done. Each generation of Christians has a duty to return afresh to the Holy Scriptures and check and re-check our theology, our doctrines and our practices, to see if they are indeed in line with the inerrant Word of God, or whether we might have made a mistake in how we previously interpreted the Bible.
It seems to me that a case in point concerns the restriction in many Protestant churches that only ordained ministers can properly administer the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's supper. Although much of the following discussion would apply equally to administering baptism, we shall focus solely on the Lord's Supper in our discussion.
The Westminster Confession of Faith is, as always, nothing if not clear on the point at issue:
"There are only two sacraments ordained by Christ our Lord in the Gospel; that is to say, Baptism, and the Supper of the Lord: neither of which may be dispensed by any, but by a minister of the Word lawfully ordained."
The texts that are put forward in support of this proposition are:
1 Corinthians 4:1 "So then, men ought to regard us as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the secret things of God." (NIV)
Hebrews 5:4 "No one takes this honour upon himself; he must be called by God, just as Aaron was." (NIV)
It seems to me that these texts cannot bear the weight of doctrine that the Confession seeks to put upon them here.
In the Corinthians verse, it seems clear that the "servants of God" Paul is referring to are the apostles and the "secrets" or "mysteries" are not the sacraments of the Church, but apostolic doctrine revealed to them by the Holy Spirit for the teaching and instruction of the churches under their care. Since few Presbyterians would regard gospel ministers as being the same office as the apostles, nor do we tend to believe that our ministers are given divine revelations (at least not on a par with the truths revealed to the apostles by the Holy Spirit), it seems reasonable to say that this text does not actually prove that only ministers can administer baptism or holy communion.
The Hebrews text plainly deals with the calling to office of Jewish High Priests. The only high priest - or any priest - that the Presbyterian acknowledges is the Lord Jesus Christ. The teaching eldership or gospel ministry is not an order of priesthood, and the sacraments administered are not in any sense propitiatory or expiatory sacrifices. It does seem more like mere "proof texting" than proper hermeneutics to use (or rather misuse) this text, out of context, to prove that only ministers may administer the sacraments.
Having examined the Confession's proof texts and found them insufficient to establish the proposition in question, we must also consider some passages in Scripture that would seem to indicate that there was no such restriction in the New Testament churches. At the very least, it seems very difficult to sustain the argument biblically that the sacraments cannot be administered by all ordained elders in the congregation.
I realise that alongside this immediate question lies another, perhaps more controversial one: are there two distinct categories of elder or presbyter mentioned in the New Testament or only one? In other words, what is the nature of the distinction between a full-time minister ("teaching elder") and a lay elder ("ruling elder")? Is the main difference that the former is paid by the church to labour full-time and is more skilled as a teacher whereas the latter is not paid and works part-time, or are the differences even more substantial than this - with one group having rights, privileges and powers as elders that the others do not possess? This is certainly the case in practice, but can it be justified biblically?
This article is not the place to explore the nature of offices in the church fully but some remarks on this might be useful at this stage. The standard Presbyterian answer to this second question is that the difference lies not merely in remuneration and time but in formal function also. Ministers, though technically called "teaching elders", are not the same as ordinary elders according to what might be called "classic" Presbyterian teaching. They have a different role - they have the main or sole responsibility for teaching in the congregation and they have sole responsibility for administering the sacraments. And in practice, if not in theory, they tend to be seen as the focus of leadership in each local congregation.
However, this distinction between "minister of Word and sacrament" and other elders is certainly questionable when the biblical evidence is reviewed. When we examine the New Testament passages that deal with offices in Christ's church, particularly the office of elder or "overseer-elder," there is no indication from those passages that a minister and an elder are to be understood as separate offices with only the former having authority to teach and to administer the sacraments.
First of all, the Bible is clear that an overseer or "bishop" is not a separate office from an elder. In Acts 20:17 & 28 Paul sends for "the elders of the church" (v.17) and then in his speech to them he designates those same people as the flock's "overseers" (v.28) .
So when Paul speaks of the qualifications for an "Overseer" in 1 Timothy 3:1-7, he is describing the qualifications for the eldership also. And among those qualifications is listed the ability to teach (v.2) and to pastor the church: "take care of God's church" (v.5). This is not the qualification for a select band of elders designated a holy order of ministers, but for all elders. All elders are to be teachers and pastoral carers to some extent at least.
Similar qualifications and instructions are given in Titus 1:5-9 where again "elder" and "overseer" are used interchangeably by the apostle Paul. There he says that elders are to "hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught, so that [they] can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it." Again this indicates a teaching and instructing role and that all elders are to share in this task and that each church is to have a plurality or team of elders to carry out the work (v.5 - "appoint elders in every town, as I directed you.")
In 1 Peter 5:1-4 the same, consistent apostolic teaching on church offices is to be found. Here the apostle addresses "the elders among you" (appealing as a "fellow-elder" even though Peter was also an apostle) and encourages them to "be shepherds of God's flock that is under your care, serving as overseers" (v.2).
Sometimes appeal is made to Ephesians 4:11 to show that the office of pastor or minister is distinct from that of elder: "It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists and some to be pastors and teachers." But once we realise that the word usually translated "pastor" in Ephesians 4:11 is the very same word translated as "shepherd" in 1 Peter 5:2 & 4 - and those "shepherds" were none other than "the elders" then such a view is difficult to sustain.
Reading all the passages together in context, it is clear that according to the New Testament, those designated pastor-teachers (or shepherds), overseers and elders are all different ways of describing the one body of church leaders envisaged by the apostles to hold office in the Church of Jesus Christ. It should be noted that this view of the biblical eldership does not mean we fail to recognise that some elders will have greater gifts for teaching or preaching while others may be more gifted in pastoral care and different elders may concentrate their efforts more towards where their greater gifts lie. In 1 Timothy 4:17 it is recognised that some elders will specialise in preaching and teaching and the verses following contain the basis for paying such elders for their teaching labours, presumably because they need time to learn and prepare lessons and sermons and so cannot work in day-to-day jobs as much as other elders. But nothing here suggests that these full-time or specialist teaching elders are anything other than elders, equal with all other elders in a church.
Turning back to our main question, not only is the proposition that only ministers can properly administer the sacraments not really sustained by the texts put forward in support of it, nor by the New Testament's picture of a single church office of elder-pastor-overseer, but more importantly there are actually strong arguments, which seem to me to be biblically compelling, for instead arguing that the sacraments can at least be administered by any elder and perhaps by any Christian when done with the approval and permission of the elders in a congregation.
The first thing worth pointing out is that the passages in the Gospels (Matthew 26:17-30, Mark 14:12-26, Luke 22:7-23) and in 1 Corinthians 11:17-34, which describe the institution of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper in the Church, do not deal with the issue of who may administer the sacrament. It would be easy to overlook this. Admittedly this is an argument from silence, but nevertheless it is striking that in these passages, particularly the Corinthians passage written to a Church, no mention is made of how or by whom the supper is to be administered. One would have thought that with all the problems that were occurring around the issue of communion in Corinth, Paul would have mentioned the minister's duty to make sure communion was conducted properly had he been the only one in the congregation administering it.
If anything, the Corinthians passage seems rather to indicate the opposite was indeed the case, and in the Church, we should expect the sacrament is to be administered by a wider circle of Christians than ordained ministers. Certainly the whole passage is addressed to the church at large and not to the minister(s) of the Corinthian church. In the passage everyone is criticised and everyone is instructed.
The indication seems to be that the Lord's supper would be taken often by Christians. "For whenever you eat this break and drink this cup..." (verse 26) might at least hint that the churches of the New Testament took communion very regularly, perhaps daily. If this is so, then it is highly unlikely that the ordained minister would always be in attendance to consecrate the elements and lead the others in communion.
It is also clear that the Lord's supper was celebrated as part of an ordinary meal shared by the members of the church. How very different is this from the very formal, symbolic "meal" that communion has become in the vast majority of churches, where it is celebrated as part of a formal service of worship after preaching of the Word of God and not usually as part of a normal, proper meal?
The picture we get of communion in the early church is further backed up from Acts 2:42-47: "They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer...All the believers were together...Every day...they broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts."
We have good reason to suppose that this "breaking of bread" mentioned here is more than simply a way of saying that the believers ate together. I believe this is saying that they shared in the Lord's supper together. And according to this passage, all the believers did it, and they did it every day in their own homes not just when the whole church gathered together for worship. Once again, there is absolutely no indication that only certain Christians were permitted to break the bread when these meals took place.
Perhaps it is time for those Presbyterian and Reformed churches which do not allow anyone except ordained ministers to administer the sacraments to apply the Reformed principle of semper reformanda to this issue, time for them to stop complaining about their ordained ministers being overburdened and burnt out from stress and fatigue, time for them to abandon the misguided notion that "the minister" is a separate and special creature compared with the "rank-and-file elders". Allowing other elders and other trusted Christians to administer the sacraments would allow more fellowship meals and informal communions to be held within the life of a congregation, doubtless improving the spiritual life of a congregation while freeing up the full-time minister from having to try to fulfil every teaching, worship-leading and pastoral task that comes up in the life of their congregation.
Furthermore, it would send a clear signal to every church member and every person who has contact with the church from outside that every church has not one minister who has to be the one to attend to them but a whole team of ministers who all do God's work in teaching, caring for and guiding the congregation. In return, perhaps more "ordinary" elders would live out their calling better and really see themselves as ordained ministers or servants to God's people and not merely the spiritual management committee of the local congregation?
However, such a view is itself highly questionable from a Reformed standpoint. The Reformers and Puritans themselves viewed the task of reforming the church as an ongoing task that never ceases. One of the mottos of the Reformation was Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda which means "The church reformed and always being reformed". In other words, the church must always be willing to search the Scriptures and be led by the Holy Spirit to new and more accurate insights into divine truth.
This means that the work of the reformed theologian is never done. Each generation of Christians has a duty to return afresh to the Holy Scriptures and check and re-check our theology, our doctrines and our practices, to see if they are indeed in line with the inerrant Word of God, or whether we might have made a mistake in how we previously interpreted the Bible.
It seems to me that a case in point concerns the restriction in many Protestant churches that only ordained ministers can properly administer the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's supper. Although much of the following discussion would apply equally to administering baptism, we shall focus solely on the Lord's Supper in our discussion.
The Westminster Confession of Faith is, as always, nothing if not clear on the point at issue:
"There are only two sacraments ordained by Christ our Lord in the Gospel; that is to say, Baptism, and the Supper of the Lord: neither of which may be dispensed by any, but by a minister of the Word lawfully ordained."
The texts that are put forward in support of this proposition are:
1 Corinthians 4:1 "So then, men ought to regard us as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the secret things of God." (NIV)
Hebrews 5:4 "No one takes this honour upon himself; he must be called by God, just as Aaron was." (NIV)
It seems to me that these texts cannot bear the weight of doctrine that the Confession seeks to put upon them here.
In the Corinthians verse, it seems clear that the "servants of God" Paul is referring to are the apostles and the "secrets" or "mysteries" are not the sacraments of the Church, but apostolic doctrine revealed to them by the Holy Spirit for the teaching and instruction of the churches under their care. Since few Presbyterians would regard gospel ministers as being the same office as the apostles, nor do we tend to believe that our ministers are given divine revelations (at least not on a par with the truths revealed to the apostles by the Holy Spirit), it seems reasonable to say that this text does not actually prove that only ministers can administer baptism or holy communion.
The Hebrews text plainly deals with the calling to office of Jewish High Priests. The only high priest - or any priest - that the Presbyterian acknowledges is the Lord Jesus Christ. The teaching eldership or gospel ministry is not an order of priesthood, and the sacraments administered are not in any sense propitiatory or expiatory sacrifices. It does seem more like mere "proof texting" than proper hermeneutics to use (or rather misuse) this text, out of context, to prove that only ministers may administer the sacraments.
Having examined the Confession's proof texts and found them insufficient to establish the proposition in question, we must also consider some passages in Scripture that would seem to indicate that there was no such restriction in the New Testament churches. At the very least, it seems very difficult to sustain the argument biblically that the sacraments cannot be administered by all ordained elders in the congregation.
I realise that alongside this immediate question lies another, perhaps more controversial one: are there two distinct categories of elder or presbyter mentioned in the New Testament or only one? In other words, what is the nature of the distinction between a full-time minister ("teaching elder") and a lay elder ("ruling elder")? Is the main difference that the former is paid by the church to labour full-time and is more skilled as a teacher whereas the latter is not paid and works part-time, or are the differences even more substantial than this - with one group having rights, privileges and powers as elders that the others do not possess? This is certainly the case in practice, but can it be justified biblically?
This article is not the place to explore the nature of offices in the church fully but some remarks on this might be useful at this stage. The standard Presbyterian answer to this second question is that the difference lies not merely in remuneration and time but in formal function also. Ministers, though technically called "teaching elders", are not the same as ordinary elders according to what might be called "classic" Presbyterian teaching. They have a different role - they have the main or sole responsibility for teaching in the congregation and they have sole responsibility for administering the sacraments. And in practice, if not in theory, they tend to be seen as the focus of leadership in each local congregation.
However, this distinction between "minister of Word and sacrament" and other elders is certainly questionable when the biblical evidence is reviewed. When we examine the New Testament passages that deal with offices in Christ's church, particularly the office of elder or "overseer-elder," there is no indication from those passages that a minister and an elder are to be understood as separate offices with only the former having authority to teach and to administer the sacraments.
First of all, the Bible is clear that an overseer or "bishop" is not a separate office from an elder. In Acts 20:17 & 28 Paul sends for "the elders of the church" (v.17) and then in his speech to them he designates those same people as the flock's "overseers" (v.28) .
So when Paul speaks of the qualifications for an "Overseer" in 1 Timothy 3:1-7, he is describing the qualifications for the eldership also. And among those qualifications is listed the ability to teach (v.2) and to pastor the church: "take care of God's church" (v.5). This is not the qualification for a select band of elders designated a holy order of ministers, but for all elders. All elders are to be teachers and pastoral carers to some extent at least.
Similar qualifications and instructions are given in Titus 1:5-9 where again "elder" and "overseer" are used interchangeably by the apostle Paul. There he says that elders are to "hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught, so that [they] can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it." Again this indicates a teaching and instructing role and that all elders are to share in this task and that each church is to have a plurality or team of elders to carry out the work (v.5 - "appoint elders in every town, as I directed you.")
In 1 Peter 5:1-4 the same, consistent apostolic teaching on church offices is to be found. Here the apostle addresses "the elders among you" (appealing as a "fellow-elder" even though Peter was also an apostle) and encourages them to "be shepherds of God's flock that is under your care, serving as overseers" (v.2).
Sometimes appeal is made to Ephesians 4:11 to show that the office of pastor or minister is distinct from that of elder: "It was he who gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists and some to be pastors and teachers." But once we realise that the word usually translated "pastor" in Ephesians 4:11 is the very same word translated as "shepherd" in 1 Peter 5:2 & 4 - and those "shepherds" were none other than "the elders" then such a view is difficult to sustain.
Reading all the passages together in context, it is clear that according to the New Testament, those designated pastor-teachers (or shepherds), overseers and elders are all different ways of describing the one body of church leaders envisaged by the apostles to hold office in the Church of Jesus Christ. It should be noted that this view of the biblical eldership does not mean we fail to recognise that some elders will have greater gifts for teaching or preaching while others may be more gifted in pastoral care and different elders may concentrate their efforts more towards where their greater gifts lie. In 1 Timothy 4:17 it is recognised that some elders will specialise in preaching and teaching and the verses following contain the basis for paying such elders for their teaching labours, presumably because they need time to learn and prepare lessons and sermons and so cannot work in day-to-day jobs as much as other elders. But nothing here suggests that these full-time or specialist teaching elders are anything other than elders, equal with all other elders in a church.
Turning back to our main question, not only is the proposition that only ministers can properly administer the sacraments not really sustained by the texts put forward in support of it, nor by the New Testament's picture of a single church office of elder-pastor-overseer, but more importantly there are actually strong arguments, which seem to me to be biblically compelling, for instead arguing that the sacraments can at least be administered by any elder and perhaps by any Christian when done with the approval and permission of the elders in a congregation.
The first thing worth pointing out is that the passages in the Gospels (Matthew 26:17-30, Mark 14:12-26, Luke 22:7-23) and in 1 Corinthians 11:17-34, which describe the institution of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper in the Church, do not deal with the issue of who may administer the sacrament. It would be easy to overlook this. Admittedly this is an argument from silence, but nevertheless it is striking that in these passages, particularly the Corinthians passage written to a Church, no mention is made of how or by whom the supper is to be administered. One would have thought that with all the problems that were occurring around the issue of communion in Corinth, Paul would have mentioned the minister's duty to make sure communion was conducted properly had he been the only one in the congregation administering it.
If anything, the Corinthians passage seems rather to indicate the opposite was indeed the case, and in the Church, we should expect the sacrament is to be administered by a wider circle of Christians than ordained ministers. Certainly the whole passage is addressed to the church at large and not to the minister(s) of the Corinthian church. In the passage everyone is criticised and everyone is instructed.
The indication seems to be that the Lord's supper would be taken often by Christians. "For whenever you eat this break and drink this cup..." (verse 26) might at least hint that the churches of the New Testament took communion very regularly, perhaps daily. If this is so, then it is highly unlikely that the ordained minister would always be in attendance to consecrate the elements and lead the others in communion.
It is also clear that the Lord's supper was celebrated as part of an ordinary meal shared by the members of the church. How very different is this from the very formal, symbolic "meal" that communion has become in the vast majority of churches, where it is celebrated as part of a formal service of worship after preaching of the Word of God and not usually as part of a normal, proper meal?
The picture we get of communion in the early church is further backed up from Acts 2:42-47: "They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer...All the believers were together...Every day...they broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts."
We have good reason to suppose that this "breaking of bread" mentioned here is more than simply a way of saying that the believers ate together. I believe this is saying that they shared in the Lord's supper together. And according to this passage, all the believers did it, and they did it every day in their own homes not just when the whole church gathered together for worship. Once again, there is absolutely no indication that only certain Christians were permitted to break the bread when these meals took place.
Perhaps it is time for those Presbyterian and Reformed churches which do not allow anyone except ordained ministers to administer the sacraments to apply the Reformed principle of semper reformanda to this issue, time for them to stop complaining about their ordained ministers being overburdened and burnt out from stress and fatigue, time for them to abandon the misguided notion that "the minister" is a separate and special creature compared with the "rank-and-file elders". Allowing other elders and other trusted Christians to administer the sacraments would allow more fellowship meals and informal communions to be held within the life of a congregation, doubtless improving the spiritual life of a congregation while freeing up the full-time minister from having to try to fulfil every teaching, worship-leading and pastoral task that comes up in the life of their congregation.
Furthermore, it would send a clear signal to every church member and every person who has contact with the church from outside that every church has not one minister who has to be the one to attend to them but a whole team of ministers who all do God's work in teaching, caring for and guiding the congregation. In return, perhaps more "ordinary" elders would live out their calling better and really see themselves as ordained ministers or servants to God's people and not merely the spiritual management committee of the local congregation?
Thursday, 12 April 2007
He is with us
The following is the text of a sermon preached at the evening service on Easter Day, Sunday 8th April 2007.
The Scripture reading was Luke 24:13-35.
One of my favourite poems is “The Road Not Taken” by the American poet, Robert Frost. It goes like this:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Our reading in Luke 24 is about another journey on a road that made all the difference. Certainly it made all the difference to the two disciples who met Jesus on that road, and I believe it can make all the difference to us in our lives too.
It would be good if you have your bibles open at our passage to follow what I’m saying.
The title of our service tonight is “He is with us.” Now that might seem a rather strange title to some of us. “He is with us? Where is he then?” someone might be thinking. Tonight, we’ll see four ways in which Christ is with us here today.
At the beginning of the reading, in verse 13, two of Jesus’ followers – one called Cleopas and one who is un-named – are walking from Jerusalem on seven mile journey to a village called Emmaus. This happened on the first Easter Sunday, the same day as the disciples discovered the empty tomb and heard that Jesus was risen, early on in the morning. From the passage we get a few clues that this journey may be taking place in the late afternoon, but we don’t know the exact time. We can’t be sure why they are making this journey either, though the most likely explanation is that they are probably on their way home to the village where they live. And this is the scene for a truly amazing meeting with Jesus after his resurrection. This is the first time in Luke’s gospel that the risen Jesus actually appears in person to any of his followers.
Like most people when they’re out walking, the two mean are chatting to each other. And then a stranger approaches them, presumably from behind, walking in the same direction as the two men are heading, and he joins them on the journey.
Much has been made of the fact that the two disciples don’t recognise who Jesus is when he starts walking and talking with them. All kinds of explanations have been offered for this: Jesus had the hood of his cloak up and they couldn’t see his face; the low afternoon sun was in the disciples’ eyes and they couldn’t see Jesus’ face in shadow properly. None of these explanations is particularly convincing. It is a mystery. But it would seem that after the resurrection, Christ’s physical appearance could alter, so that his features were not recognised at times, even by those who knew him very well. Before the resurrection Christ just looked outwardly like an ordinary man; indeed, he was an ordinary man. After the resurrection he is revealed as the majestic Son of God, risen and triumphant, the King of kings and Lord of lords, in all his glory. And it seems to me that his outward appearance after the resurrection was capable of displaying his glory.
Something similar happened at the time of Christ’s transfiguration, where Christ’s glory as God the Son is briefly revealed. Luke 9:29 says of Christ at the transfiguration, “While he was praying his face changed its appearance, and his clothes became dazzling white.”
Once Jesus meets with the disciples on the road, a wonderful transformation takes place in these men’s lives, as in turn the disciples talk with Jesus about what's been happening, then Jesus talks with the disciples about what the Scriptures say about himself as God’s Messiah, and finally the disciples and the risen Jesus share in the fellowship of a meal, during which they finally recognise who he is when he breaks bread with them. Jesus then leaves them as suddenly as he came, but with their lives forever changed.
When Jesus first came to them, these men were filled with sadness. Verse 17 says, “They stood still, with sad faces.” The word translated “sad faces” is found only here in the whole New Testament. It means “looking sad”, “gloomy faced”. These men had been devastated by what’s happened. They’ve seen not only their teacher and friend murdered in the most barbaric way possible, but they’ve also seen their hopes and dreams dashed as the one they thought was going to “redeem Israel” or “set Israel free” (verse 21) from the Romans, apparently fail in his mission and leave his followers disorganised, disappointed and despondent.
By the end of this passage the two men are energised with the fire of God’s Word burning inside them, with the joy of knowing that “The Lord is risen indeed!” and with a new-found zeal that took them out of their village in the middle of the night, back on the road to Jerusalem, so they can tell the others the truth about the resurrection without any delay.
How come? What changed these men? Well, it was meeting the risen Lord Jesus Christ and spending time with him that day that made the difference. But what about us?
Well there’s one way we don’t have Jesus with us in the same way as the two disciples had him with them. On the Emmaus road they had the risen Jesus with them in body. He was right there with them physically. Never forget that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the rising to life of his physical body, not just his spirit. The tomb was empty – the body was gone – and the risen Christ is not a spirit, he is flesh and blood. He still bears the marks of the nails on his hands. He ate meals with many of those he met after he rose from the dead. Spirits can’t eat food.
Forty days after the resurrection, the Bible tells us that Christ ascended into heaven. So his body is no longer on the earth. We no longer see him. We no longer have Christ with us in that sense – with us physically I mean.
Perhaps that’s something we regret about living in this period in history: we don’t get to be with Christ physically, to see him face-to-face. Perhaps it’s one of the many things we look forward to heaven for – that then we will finally get to stand face-to-face with our Saviour and look into his eyes? Probably with tears of thankfulness in our eyes. But there’s two things we should remember if we think we’re in a more impoverished position now compared with the people who we read about in Scripture who actually saw Jesus and spent time with him. First, remember that it was quite possible to have Jesus with you physically and yet not see who he was. Not only was this true of the two disciples for most of the time Jesus was actually with them in the passage, it was true of many if not most of the people Jesus spent time with during his life. The Roman soldiers, the Pharisees, the chief priests, whole towns and villages failed to recognise who he was even though he was with them physically. So just being with him face-to-face doesn’t guarantee that anyone would believe in him or accept him as Lord. The second reason we shouldn’t feel automatically impoverished because we don’t have Jesus with us in body is because of what Jesus himself said. When the risen Jesus met with Thomas in John chapter 20, he says to him: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
There is a blessing from Christ himself on all those who believe in him without having seen him in the flesh, a special blessing for people like us.
Now, even though there is this difference between us and the circumstances of the two disciples, there are three ways in which Christ is with us in ways that are like the ways he was with the disciples in our passage. Let’s look at these three ways because they are each vital to our lives as Christians. Based on this passage I would say that Christ is with us as we speak with him in prayer, he is with us as we read the Bible, and he is with us as we have communion with him and fellowship with each other as his people, the church.
In the first section of the passage from verse 13 to verse 24 we have a conversation between the disciples and Christ, with the disciples doing most of the talking, telling him about what had been happening in Jerusalem. In the passage Jesus shows that he’s interested in what his disciples think and in hearing what they have to say; he’s interested in what makes them sad, or worries them, and what makes them tick; he’s interested in knowing the things that they don’t yet understand about him or the Christian faith. The disciples on the Emmaus road talked to Jesus about all these things and Jesus took the time to listen to everything they had to say, even though he already knew the whole story they were telling him. He took the time to listen to them – he didn’t jump in right away and reveal who he was.
I think Jesus is still the same today. We don’t speak with him face-to-face, but we do speak to him when we pray. For us, when we pray, we can address any of the three persons in the Trinity – probably mostly the Father, but sometimes the Son, Jesus, and sometimes the Holy Spirit – but all three hear our prayers.
And I believe Jesus is with us when we pray. He’s still interested in what’s on our minds, how we’re feeling, what’s happening in our lives, what’s worrying us, what’s bugging us, what we’re happy about, what we understand about him and what we don’t understand yet. So often we tend to think of prayer as being about asking God for things. And of course that is an important part of prayer, as is praising God, confessing our sins, and giving God thanks for what he’s done for us. But I believe prayer is even more than this. Prayer is an ongoing conversation, a relationship of communication between us and the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. It is in this sense that we can and should “pray without ceasing” as Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 5:17. As we pray, sharing our thoughts, our doubts, our fears, sharing our lives with God as we would with our closest friends, completely openly and honestly, not only does God delight to hear us as his children, but I think it is very good for us to get things off our chests, not keeping anything bottled up inside us. Even things we can say to no-one else, we can always say to him.
And when we do that, Christ is certainly with us, just as surely as he listened carefully and patiently to Cleopas on the Emmaus road.
The second way Christ is with us is in the words of Scripture. In the passage, once Jesus hears everything Cleopas has to say, he then leads both disciples to consider what the Scriptures say about the Messiah: not only that he would suffer but also that he would then enter into his glory. In other words, he’s starting to prepare them for the fact that not only was the Messiah to die, but he was also to rise again. Verse 27 says:
“Jesus explained to them what was said about himself in all the Scriptures, beginning with the books of Moses and the writings of all the prophets.”
So Jesus went through the Old Testament (remember this was before the New Testament was written) and explained to the disciples what the Bible is all about: it’s all about Jesus Christ. He is the theme of the Bible, the hero of the Bible, and he is in every part of the Bible. Indirectly or directly, it’s all about him. We don’t know exactly what passages Christ focused on as he explained the Bible to the two disciples. Maybe he went right back to the first chapter of Genesis and explained how it was by the Word – by Christ himself who is the Word of God – that the heavens and earth were made. Maybe he took them to Genesis 3:15 to show how even from the time Adam and Eve sinned, God had promised to send the Messiah, the Seed of the woman who would crush Satan’s head. Maybe he explained to them how the system of sacrifices laid down in Leviticus were symbols and types of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Maybe he explained to them how King David stands as a type of the Messiah’s kingship over his people. Maybe he explained to them the prophets who foretold where Jesus would be born, what his kingship would be like, and even how he would suffer and die for his people (as described in Isaiah chapter 53 for example). It doesn’t matter what passages Christ focused on, or whether he spoke more generally, not even looking at specific passages, because Christ is in all the Scriptures. They are all about him, in one way or another.
He is the great theme of Scripture and he is the key for correctly understanding Scripture. It’s probably not going too far to say that you won’t go too far wrong in interpreting the Bible if you remember this simple fact: Christ is in all the Scriptures.
This has tremendous implications for us and for what we believe. To give just one example – you sometimes hear people painting a false picture of Jesus as this lovey-dovey, rather effeminate, do-gooder, who is so easy going that you can treat him any way you like, and live any way you like because he approves of everything and can’t do anything but love everyone. But Christ is in all the Scriptures. In the Old Testament he often appeared as the angel of the Lord – the same Lord who went through Egypt on the night of the Passover killing the firstborn of the Egyptians, the same Lord who stood shoulder to shoulder with the three men in the fiery furnace in Daniel chapter 3, the same Lord who went into battle for Israel and slew 185,000 Assyrians in one night in 2 Kings chapter 19.
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. He is the “I AM” who existed before Abraham (John 8:58). And so if our view of Jesus is radically different from the God of the Old Testament, we know we’ve got it wrong, because Christ is in all the Scriptures.
The Scriptures are all about Jesus, so it follows that whenever we read the Scriptures, whether at our services, or at our Bible study, or at home on our own, so long as we read them with a genuine desire to learn about God and learn from God, He is with us as we read.
Of course it is possible to read the Scriptures in the wrong way. It is possible to read them while sitting in judgment on them, accepting or rejecting them as we go. If we read the Bible that way, we will still read about Jesus but he will not be with us as we read.
But if we read the Scriptures in faith, looking for Christ, and accepting that what we read is not the word of man but God’s Word, then Christ will be with us and, like the disciples on the Emmaus road, reading them will be like a fire that burns within us, refining us and purifying us, energising us to live for him, and warming our hearts as we think on God’s love and grace shown towards us.
The third way in which the passage shows Christ is with us, is when we are in fellowship with other believers. In the passage Christ is with the two disciples when he goes into the house and eats a meal with them. And it’s interesting that it was when he broke the bread that the disciples then recognised him for who he really was. We don’t exactly know why this was the case. Various commentators speculate on this. Was it because as he broke the bread they could see the nail marks in his hands for the first time? Was it the way he broke the bread that reminded them of the way he did it before? Was it his tone of voice as he said the blessing or the words he used? We can’t be sure if it was any of these or something else, or if it was because the supernatural change in Christ’s appearance was lifted and they could now recognise him. Yet the fact is that it wasn’t as they spoke to him, or as he explained to them about the Scriptures, but in the simple act of sharing in the fellowship of a meal that the disciples recognised him.
What does that mean for us today? It’s tempting to see this breaking of the bread in terms of the Lord’s Supper, holy communion. Certainly I think that’s partly what we can draw from this passage. Christ is with us as we share in the Lord’ Supper. Of course this doesn’t mean the bread and wine at communion turn into Christ’s body and blood, the blasphemy that Roman Catholicism teaches. But in a spiritual sense, Christ is with us as we eat and drink the bread and wine at communion. In a special way, at the same time as we physically eat the bread and drink the wine, looking to Christ in faith, we feed on him spiritually, nourishing our souls as we consider the new covenant sealed with his blood, as his body was broken for us on the cross.
But I don’t think that’s all this passage means. I don’t think we should restrict Christ’s presence being with us when we gather to celebrate communion. After all, there’s nothing in the passage that says the meal the disciples shared with Jesus was the sacrament of communion. It was just an ordinary meal two hungry travellers might have at the end of any day.
No, I think this passage teaches us that Christ is with us every time we come together for fellowship. This is of course what Jesus himself said in Matthew 18:20: “For where two or three come together in my name, I am there with them.” And here we see that happening. When we come together in his name – as his people gathering together – he is with us. It doesn’t matter whether that’s for a service of worship like this, or in our Bible and prayer meeting, or for the Kirk Session or Congregational Board, or for a social event. When we gather for Christian fellowship, Christ is with us in the midst.
What a great privilege and responsibility that is! But what about when we’re not gathered together. What about when we all go our different ways? What about when we aren’t reading our Bibles, or spending time with God in prayer? Are we on our own then? Is Christ not with us then?
Well there’s a way that Christ is with us that’s not mentioned in our passage. There’s a way in which we are in a better position than the disciples in the passage. Although they spent time in the physical presence of Christ and although he stayed with them for a while that day, at the end of the day they were left by themselves. Just after they recognised who he was, verse 31 says, “He disappeared from their sight.” He left them at the end of his time with them.
We’re in a better position than this. Christ is with us all the time through the Holy Spirit, the spirit of Christ, living inside us. This is what Paul says in Romans 8:9-11, writing to Christians:
“But you do not live as your human nature tells you to; instead, you live as the Spirit tells you to – if, in fact, God's Spirit lives in you. Whoever does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ lives in you, the Spirit is life for you because you have been put right with God, even though your bodies are going to die because of sin. If the Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from death, lives in you, then he who raised Christ from death will also give life to your mortal bodies by the presence of his Spirit in you.”
We must remember that the events in our passage took place before the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost, which was fifty days after Easter day. The disciples on the Emmaus road met the risen Jesus, but we who live not only after that first Easter but after Pentecost actually have the spirit of the risen Jesus living inside us, not for a few hours, or a day, but with us forever. That’s what Jesus promised just before he ascended into heaven, in Matthew 28:20: “I am with you always, even to the end of the age,” he said.
This is what Jesus also promised us in Revelation 3:20: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.”
He was with the disciples during that wonderful day; he is with us all the time during all our days. This is the truth for every Christian believer. He is with us.
He is with his people as they pray, as they read the Bible, as they have communion with him and with each other. But the question everyone has to think about sooner or later in their lives is this: Am I with him? In other words, have I really met with the risen Jesus and decided to follow him?
Yes, he’s with his people in all these wonderful ways, but are you one of his people? We need to ask ourselves, “Have I believed in him? Have I trusted in him and committed my life to him, accepting him as my Saviour and Lord?”
If you have, then he is with you in everything you do. If you haven’t yet trusted in him and accepted him, then he is calling you to himself tonight, with the promise that he will never turn away anyone who comes to him. “Everyone who calls out to the Lord for help will be saved,” as Romans 10:13 says.
John 3:18 says: “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”
There is a choice before each one of us tonight. It is to travel on life’s road with Christ as our companion, our guide, our Saviour and our Lord, or to travel on life’s road without him. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the one less travelled by. And that has made all the difference.”
The Scripture reading was Luke 24:13-35.
One of my favourite poems is “The Road Not Taken” by the American poet, Robert Frost. It goes like this:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Our reading in Luke 24 is about another journey on a road that made all the difference. Certainly it made all the difference to the two disciples who met Jesus on that road, and I believe it can make all the difference to us in our lives too.
It would be good if you have your bibles open at our passage to follow what I’m saying.
The title of our service tonight is “He is with us.” Now that might seem a rather strange title to some of us. “He is with us? Where is he then?” someone might be thinking. Tonight, we’ll see four ways in which Christ is with us here today.
At the beginning of the reading, in verse 13, two of Jesus’ followers – one called Cleopas and one who is un-named – are walking from Jerusalem on seven mile journey to a village called Emmaus. This happened on the first Easter Sunday, the same day as the disciples discovered the empty tomb and heard that Jesus was risen, early on in the morning. From the passage we get a few clues that this journey may be taking place in the late afternoon, but we don’t know the exact time. We can’t be sure why they are making this journey either, though the most likely explanation is that they are probably on their way home to the village where they live. And this is the scene for a truly amazing meeting with Jesus after his resurrection. This is the first time in Luke’s gospel that the risen Jesus actually appears in person to any of his followers.
Like most people when they’re out walking, the two mean are chatting to each other. And then a stranger approaches them, presumably from behind, walking in the same direction as the two men are heading, and he joins them on the journey.
Much has been made of the fact that the two disciples don’t recognise who Jesus is when he starts walking and talking with them. All kinds of explanations have been offered for this: Jesus had the hood of his cloak up and they couldn’t see his face; the low afternoon sun was in the disciples’ eyes and they couldn’t see Jesus’ face in shadow properly. None of these explanations is particularly convincing. It is a mystery. But it would seem that after the resurrection, Christ’s physical appearance could alter, so that his features were not recognised at times, even by those who knew him very well. Before the resurrection Christ just looked outwardly like an ordinary man; indeed, he was an ordinary man. After the resurrection he is revealed as the majestic Son of God, risen and triumphant, the King of kings and Lord of lords, in all his glory. And it seems to me that his outward appearance after the resurrection was capable of displaying his glory.
Something similar happened at the time of Christ’s transfiguration, where Christ’s glory as God the Son is briefly revealed. Luke 9:29 says of Christ at the transfiguration, “While he was praying his face changed its appearance, and his clothes became dazzling white.”
Once Jesus meets with the disciples on the road, a wonderful transformation takes place in these men’s lives, as in turn the disciples talk with Jesus about what's been happening, then Jesus talks with the disciples about what the Scriptures say about himself as God’s Messiah, and finally the disciples and the risen Jesus share in the fellowship of a meal, during which they finally recognise who he is when he breaks bread with them. Jesus then leaves them as suddenly as he came, but with their lives forever changed.
When Jesus first came to them, these men were filled with sadness. Verse 17 says, “They stood still, with sad faces.” The word translated “sad faces” is found only here in the whole New Testament. It means “looking sad”, “gloomy faced”. These men had been devastated by what’s happened. They’ve seen not only their teacher and friend murdered in the most barbaric way possible, but they’ve also seen their hopes and dreams dashed as the one they thought was going to “redeem Israel” or “set Israel free” (verse 21) from the Romans, apparently fail in his mission and leave his followers disorganised, disappointed and despondent.
By the end of this passage the two men are energised with the fire of God’s Word burning inside them, with the joy of knowing that “The Lord is risen indeed!” and with a new-found zeal that took them out of their village in the middle of the night, back on the road to Jerusalem, so they can tell the others the truth about the resurrection without any delay.
How come? What changed these men? Well, it was meeting the risen Lord Jesus Christ and spending time with him that day that made the difference. But what about us?
Well there’s one way we don’t have Jesus with us in the same way as the two disciples had him with them. On the Emmaus road they had the risen Jesus with them in body. He was right there with them physically. Never forget that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the rising to life of his physical body, not just his spirit. The tomb was empty – the body was gone – and the risen Christ is not a spirit, he is flesh and blood. He still bears the marks of the nails on his hands. He ate meals with many of those he met after he rose from the dead. Spirits can’t eat food.
Forty days after the resurrection, the Bible tells us that Christ ascended into heaven. So his body is no longer on the earth. We no longer see him. We no longer have Christ with us in that sense – with us physically I mean.
Perhaps that’s something we regret about living in this period in history: we don’t get to be with Christ physically, to see him face-to-face. Perhaps it’s one of the many things we look forward to heaven for – that then we will finally get to stand face-to-face with our Saviour and look into his eyes? Probably with tears of thankfulness in our eyes. But there’s two things we should remember if we think we’re in a more impoverished position now compared with the people who we read about in Scripture who actually saw Jesus and spent time with him. First, remember that it was quite possible to have Jesus with you physically and yet not see who he was. Not only was this true of the two disciples for most of the time Jesus was actually with them in the passage, it was true of many if not most of the people Jesus spent time with during his life. The Roman soldiers, the Pharisees, the chief priests, whole towns and villages failed to recognise who he was even though he was with them physically. So just being with him face-to-face doesn’t guarantee that anyone would believe in him or accept him as Lord. The second reason we shouldn’t feel automatically impoverished because we don’t have Jesus with us in body is because of what Jesus himself said. When the risen Jesus met with Thomas in John chapter 20, he says to him: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
There is a blessing from Christ himself on all those who believe in him without having seen him in the flesh, a special blessing for people like us.
Now, even though there is this difference between us and the circumstances of the two disciples, there are three ways in which Christ is with us in ways that are like the ways he was with the disciples in our passage. Let’s look at these three ways because they are each vital to our lives as Christians. Based on this passage I would say that Christ is with us as we speak with him in prayer, he is with us as we read the Bible, and he is with us as we have communion with him and fellowship with each other as his people, the church.
In the first section of the passage from verse 13 to verse 24 we have a conversation between the disciples and Christ, with the disciples doing most of the talking, telling him about what had been happening in Jerusalem. In the passage Jesus shows that he’s interested in what his disciples think and in hearing what they have to say; he’s interested in what makes them sad, or worries them, and what makes them tick; he’s interested in knowing the things that they don’t yet understand about him or the Christian faith. The disciples on the Emmaus road talked to Jesus about all these things and Jesus took the time to listen to everything they had to say, even though he already knew the whole story they were telling him. He took the time to listen to them – he didn’t jump in right away and reveal who he was.
I think Jesus is still the same today. We don’t speak with him face-to-face, but we do speak to him when we pray. For us, when we pray, we can address any of the three persons in the Trinity – probably mostly the Father, but sometimes the Son, Jesus, and sometimes the Holy Spirit – but all three hear our prayers.
And I believe Jesus is with us when we pray. He’s still interested in what’s on our minds, how we’re feeling, what’s happening in our lives, what’s worrying us, what’s bugging us, what we’re happy about, what we understand about him and what we don’t understand yet. So often we tend to think of prayer as being about asking God for things. And of course that is an important part of prayer, as is praising God, confessing our sins, and giving God thanks for what he’s done for us. But I believe prayer is even more than this. Prayer is an ongoing conversation, a relationship of communication between us and the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. It is in this sense that we can and should “pray without ceasing” as Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 5:17. As we pray, sharing our thoughts, our doubts, our fears, sharing our lives with God as we would with our closest friends, completely openly and honestly, not only does God delight to hear us as his children, but I think it is very good for us to get things off our chests, not keeping anything bottled up inside us. Even things we can say to no-one else, we can always say to him.
And when we do that, Christ is certainly with us, just as surely as he listened carefully and patiently to Cleopas on the Emmaus road.
The second way Christ is with us is in the words of Scripture. In the passage, once Jesus hears everything Cleopas has to say, he then leads both disciples to consider what the Scriptures say about the Messiah: not only that he would suffer but also that he would then enter into his glory. In other words, he’s starting to prepare them for the fact that not only was the Messiah to die, but he was also to rise again. Verse 27 says:
“Jesus explained to them what was said about himself in all the Scriptures, beginning with the books of Moses and the writings of all the prophets.”
So Jesus went through the Old Testament (remember this was before the New Testament was written) and explained to the disciples what the Bible is all about: it’s all about Jesus Christ. He is the theme of the Bible, the hero of the Bible, and he is in every part of the Bible. Indirectly or directly, it’s all about him. We don’t know exactly what passages Christ focused on as he explained the Bible to the two disciples. Maybe he went right back to the first chapter of Genesis and explained how it was by the Word – by Christ himself who is the Word of God – that the heavens and earth were made. Maybe he took them to Genesis 3:15 to show how even from the time Adam and Eve sinned, God had promised to send the Messiah, the Seed of the woman who would crush Satan’s head. Maybe he explained to them how the system of sacrifices laid down in Leviticus were symbols and types of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Maybe he explained to them how King David stands as a type of the Messiah’s kingship over his people. Maybe he explained to them the prophets who foretold where Jesus would be born, what his kingship would be like, and even how he would suffer and die for his people (as described in Isaiah chapter 53 for example). It doesn’t matter what passages Christ focused on, or whether he spoke more generally, not even looking at specific passages, because Christ is in all the Scriptures. They are all about him, in one way or another.
He is the great theme of Scripture and he is the key for correctly understanding Scripture. It’s probably not going too far to say that you won’t go too far wrong in interpreting the Bible if you remember this simple fact: Christ is in all the Scriptures.
This has tremendous implications for us and for what we believe. To give just one example – you sometimes hear people painting a false picture of Jesus as this lovey-dovey, rather effeminate, do-gooder, who is so easy going that you can treat him any way you like, and live any way you like because he approves of everything and can’t do anything but love everyone. But Christ is in all the Scriptures. In the Old Testament he often appeared as the angel of the Lord – the same Lord who went through Egypt on the night of the Passover killing the firstborn of the Egyptians, the same Lord who stood shoulder to shoulder with the three men in the fiery furnace in Daniel chapter 3, the same Lord who went into battle for Israel and slew 185,000 Assyrians in one night in 2 Kings chapter 19.
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. He is the “I AM” who existed before Abraham (John 8:58). And so if our view of Jesus is radically different from the God of the Old Testament, we know we’ve got it wrong, because Christ is in all the Scriptures.
The Scriptures are all about Jesus, so it follows that whenever we read the Scriptures, whether at our services, or at our Bible study, or at home on our own, so long as we read them with a genuine desire to learn about God and learn from God, He is with us as we read.
Of course it is possible to read the Scriptures in the wrong way. It is possible to read them while sitting in judgment on them, accepting or rejecting them as we go. If we read the Bible that way, we will still read about Jesus but he will not be with us as we read.
But if we read the Scriptures in faith, looking for Christ, and accepting that what we read is not the word of man but God’s Word, then Christ will be with us and, like the disciples on the Emmaus road, reading them will be like a fire that burns within us, refining us and purifying us, energising us to live for him, and warming our hearts as we think on God’s love and grace shown towards us.
The third way in which the passage shows Christ is with us, is when we are in fellowship with other believers. In the passage Christ is with the two disciples when he goes into the house and eats a meal with them. And it’s interesting that it was when he broke the bread that the disciples then recognised him for who he really was. We don’t exactly know why this was the case. Various commentators speculate on this. Was it because as he broke the bread they could see the nail marks in his hands for the first time? Was it the way he broke the bread that reminded them of the way he did it before? Was it his tone of voice as he said the blessing or the words he used? We can’t be sure if it was any of these or something else, or if it was because the supernatural change in Christ’s appearance was lifted and they could now recognise him. Yet the fact is that it wasn’t as they spoke to him, or as he explained to them about the Scriptures, but in the simple act of sharing in the fellowship of a meal that the disciples recognised him.
What does that mean for us today? It’s tempting to see this breaking of the bread in terms of the Lord’s Supper, holy communion. Certainly I think that’s partly what we can draw from this passage. Christ is with us as we share in the Lord’ Supper. Of course this doesn’t mean the bread and wine at communion turn into Christ’s body and blood, the blasphemy that Roman Catholicism teaches. But in a spiritual sense, Christ is with us as we eat and drink the bread and wine at communion. In a special way, at the same time as we physically eat the bread and drink the wine, looking to Christ in faith, we feed on him spiritually, nourishing our souls as we consider the new covenant sealed with his blood, as his body was broken for us on the cross.
But I don’t think that’s all this passage means. I don’t think we should restrict Christ’s presence being with us when we gather to celebrate communion. After all, there’s nothing in the passage that says the meal the disciples shared with Jesus was the sacrament of communion. It was just an ordinary meal two hungry travellers might have at the end of any day.
No, I think this passage teaches us that Christ is with us every time we come together for fellowship. This is of course what Jesus himself said in Matthew 18:20: “For where two or three come together in my name, I am there with them.” And here we see that happening. When we come together in his name – as his people gathering together – he is with us. It doesn’t matter whether that’s for a service of worship like this, or in our Bible and prayer meeting, or for the Kirk Session or Congregational Board, or for a social event. When we gather for Christian fellowship, Christ is with us in the midst.
What a great privilege and responsibility that is! But what about when we’re not gathered together. What about when we all go our different ways? What about when we aren’t reading our Bibles, or spending time with God in prayer? Are we on our own then? Is Christ not with us then?
Well there’s a way that Christ is with us that’s not mentioned in our passage. There’s a way in which we are in a better position than the disciples in the passage. Although they spent time in the physical presence of Christ and although he stayed with them for a while that day, at the end of the day they were left by themselves. Just after they recognised who he was, verse 31 says, “He disappeared from their sight.” He left them at the end of his time with them.
We’re in a better position than this. Christ is with us all the time through the Holy Spirit, the spirit of Christ, living inside us. This is what Paul says in Romans 8:9-11, writing to Christians:
“But you do not live as your human nature tells you to; instead, you live as the Spirit tells you to – if, in fact, God's Spirit lives in you. Whoever does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ lives in you, the Spirit is life for you because you have been put right with God, even though your bodies are going to die because of sin. If the Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from death, lives in you, then he who raised Christ from death will also give life to your mortal bodies by the presence of his Spirit in you.”
We must remember that the events in our passage took place before the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost, which was fifty days after Easter day. The disciples on the Emmaus road met the risen Jesus, but we who live not only after that first Easter but after Pentecost actually have the spirit of the risen Jesus living inside us, not for a few hours, or a day, but with us forever. That’s what Jesus promised just before he ascended into heaven, in Matthew 28:20: “I am with you always, even to the end of the age,” he said.
This is what Jesus also promised us in Revelation 3:20: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.”
He was with the disciples during that wonderful day; he is with us all the time during all our days. This is the truth for every Christian believer. He is with us.
He is with his people as they pray, as they read the Bible, as they have communion with him and with each other. But the question everyone has to think about sooner or later in their lives is this: Am I with him? In other words, have I really met with the risen Jesus and decided to follow him?
Yes, he’s with his people in all these wonderful ways, but are you one of his people? We need to ask ourselves, “Have I believed in him? Have I trusted in him and committed my life to him, accepting him as my Saviour and Lord?”
If you have, then he is with you in everything you do. If you haven’t yet trusted in him and accepted him, then he is calling you to himself tonight, with the promise that he will never turn away anyone who comes to him. “Everyone who calls out to the Lord for help will be saved,” as Romans 10:13 says.
John 3:18 says: “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”
There is a choice before each one of us tonight. It is to travel on life’s road with Christ as our companion, our guide, our Saviour and our Lord, or to travel on life’s road without him. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the one less travelled by. And that has made all the difference.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)