Alex Summerlee preaches on Luke 24:13-32 — the road to Emmaus — at SumRed Church
A Sunday sermon exploring how two disciples failed to recognise the risen Jesus, and what that reveals about human short-sightedness and God's redemption plan.
Summary
Alex Summerlee delivers a sermon at SumRed Church on Luke 24:13-32, the account of two disciples walking to Emmaus who encounter the risen Jesus without recognising him. He argues that the disciples' failure to recognise Jesus was rooted in their narrow expectation of political redemption — they wanted a revolutionary to overthrow Rome — and that this same pattern of reducing God to fit personal agendas is universal. Summerlee draws on the concept of "disordered loves" from Augustine to explain sin, and argues that the entire Old Testament consistently points toward Jesus' death as God's redemption plan. He closes by urging the congregation to read Scripture together as the means by which eyes are opened to who Jesus really is.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Welcome and Context
Alex Summerlee: Morning everyone. If we don't know each other, my name's Alex, and it's really cool to be with you this morning to have a look at the passage that Kirsty's just read. Also, if you're new here, if you're just visiting, a particular big welcome to you. Hopefully we can get to know each other a bit better after the service.
If you haven't been at SumRed recently, we've been — for about the last year, on and off — going through this thing called the Book of Luke, which is just a written account of the life of Jesus. And we're up to the very, very last part. Just to remind you about where we got up to: the last time that Harry was preaching on this, we were up to the part where the women had gone to the tomb where Jesus had been buried, and they go there and discover that the tomb is empty. They have a vision of angels telling them that he's risen from the dead. And more than reasonably, no one believes them.
And so we pick up today where there are these two disciples, these two Jesus followers. They're walking on the road, and they are at rock bottom because, as far as they're concerned, Jesus is dead. What we're going to see is, first, a little bit about our short-sightedness. Secondly, we're going to see how God sees things. And thirdly, we'll see how we can see things clearly.
The Two Disciples on the Road to Emmaus
So here we are. We've got two of these Jesus followers walking on the road to Emmaus, which is just this little town outside of Jerusalem. It's a Sunday just after Jesus has been killed — 48 hours ago that he was executed. So that's still pretty fresh in their mind. And if any of us had been on that road, we would have seen these two people just totally gutted. Why? Because their dreams had just been shattered.
You see, they'd followed Jesus because they genuinely believed that he was sent from God, and they believed that he was going to bring about Israel's redemption. And they'd just seen too much to not believe. They'd seen the miracles, the healings, and then he was put to death. It had all gone wrong. Jesus had been the embodiment of their hopes and dreams, and they were shattered. And they would have been thinking to themselves, well, was it just a fraud? Have I been conned? Am I that silly person who clicked on the link from the email from General Mbuto, who has a million dollars for me in Kenya? Have I just been taken for a ride? And worse than that, because they've been associated with this now criminal Jesus who's been put to death — are they next? The pendulum is swinging the other way, and they've found themselves on the wrong side of history.
Now, as it happens, someone does run into them on the road — Jesus himself, who they don't recognise. And we don't really know why. We don't know if it's because his resurrection body meant they couldn't recognise him, or if it's just because of the fact that they weren't expecting to see a dead man walking, or if there's something else that makes them not notice that it's Jesus — they're just too down in their sorrows. The point is they don't recognise him.
And so Jesus comes along and gets alongside them and goes, "Oh, what are you guys talking about?" And these two are just astounded that there could be anyone near Jerusalem who hasn't heard about the chaos of the last week. And so they say, "Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem who doesn't know what's happened there?" And Jesus, clearly baiting these guys, goes, "Oh, what things? Tell me more."
What the Disciples Had Hoped For
And this is where we find out what's going on for these two. And so they say, "The chief priests and the rulers handed Jesus over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel."
And this is where we see how short-sighted these disciples are, and how they had shrunk God into someone smaller than he claimed to be. "We had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel." Now, when they say redeem Israel, they have something very, very specific in mind.
They knew the history of Israel from their Bibles — what we would call the Old Testament — and they knew how back in the day their people had been oppressed by a foreign power, just like now, where they're under the occupation of the Romans. Every Israelite knew the story. They were slaves in Egypt. God raised up a prophet, Moses, to lead them out of Egypt into freedom. God then gave the Israelites his law, which was to guide them on how to live in a way that would show love to God and to each other. And instead of living that way, they lived by their own standards, and their society started to fall to pieces. And eventually, Israel is conquered again and again by different empires until now, in today's reading, when they're under the Roman occupation.
So once again, the Israelites need another exodus, a new Moses to lead them out of their oppression. They need to be redeemed. And they thought they had found the man in Jesus of Nazareth, because he healed the sick, he cast out demons, and he brought this message that God was again on the move to bring his kingdom on earth. Everything pointed to him being the one who would see the Romans booted out. But the man they'd put their hopes in was now dead and buried. One more would-be revolutionary leader consigned to the dustbin of history.
Jesus hadn't delivered on the expectations that these two people on the road had for him. They had been fixated on political redemption. And they're so fixated on that idea that they are blind to the fact that literally in front of them is the evidence that Jesus had conquered something much bigger than just a Roman occupation. He had conquered death itself. The disciples had shrunk their idea of God down to fit their idea of redemption.
Our Own Short-Sighted Agendas
Now, whether you are into the Jesus guy or if you've just walked in here by accident because you got the date wrong for another event, the Bible makes a claim that applies to everyone. The Bible makes the claim that every human being has a self-redemption agenda — an idea about how we can find freedom and fulfilment. So whether it's clinging on to the dream that a certain bank balance is going to bring us freedom, or that reaching the summit of our careers will bring fulfilment, or that finding love will bring us happiness and contentment.
And for those of us who've grown up in the church, I think we're particularly gifted at spiritualising this sort of short-sightedness when it comes to God. So we say, "Oh, Christianity, that sounds pretty good. I've got a couple of kids, and I'd like them to grow up to be good, moral, decent citizens. And church — they get taught some nice values, so this seems a good idea. I'll bring them along, and I don't even have to pay for it. It's a great deal." Or it's, "That Harry guy in his preaching — that's pretty good. I like what he talks about. He's into those family values sorts of things. And if I just drag my unwilling husband along to church enough Sundays, then eventually he'll reform and become what I was expecting." Or, "I love going to church because I hate being lonely or single. And this way I will find someone."
We, just like Cleopas and the other disciple, are so short-sighted when we reduce God down to these small little redemptions. And so the disciples on the road to Emmaus say, "We had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel." But it might as well be: "We had hoped that he was going to protect our little kid from going off the rails," said the parents to themselves as they hear someone else rave about how successful their kid is. "I had hoped he was going to show my husband he needed to spend more time with me and the kids," says the wife sitting in the pew on her own once again. "I had hoped he was going to give me someone to love," says the heartbroken young woman or young man leaving church later this morning.
How God Sees the Situation
So how does God see this situation? What does Jesus make of all of this? Well, in true Jesus form, he is a little blunt and to the point. Verse 25: "How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken." He's basically saying, "Guys, guys, guys — you have been reading your Bibles the wrong way around. You think that God and Jesus were going to save Israel from suffering, that he was going to deliver you from suffering. But if you had read your Bibles properly, you would have seen that God is going to save you through suffering — and it's going to be through his suffering." Jesus' death was no accident.
So how have they missed it? How have they not got this right? The passage goes on. Jesus took them through the writings of Moses and all the prophets, explaining from all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. Now, basically what that means is he's taken what we'd call the Old Testament, starts at Genesis, and goes all the way through to the end and says, "You need to read this properly. Let me explain it to you." He's wanting them to know that the entire Old Testament screams from every page that Jesus' death had been God's redemption plan all along — to redeem people through his own suffering.
What Redemption Actually Means
Now, you might be sitting there going, "Plan? What plan? What redemption? I'm not living in a country under Roman occupation. I don't feel like I particularly need redeeming from anything." Well, this is what Jesus would have been taking the disciples through when he takes them through the Old Testament.
Right at the start, in what we call the Torah — the very beginning of the Old Testament, in a book called Genesis — we see that God gave humans a purpose, which was just to love him, to love each other, to enjoy him, and to enjoy the world he made forever. But it goes on to tell us that people abused that freedom, and that we chose to love ourselves more than God and his vision for human flourishing. And so love becomes twisted, and we choose this dirty little word called sin.
And sin is one of those words that carries an awful lot of baggage for a lot of people. But there's a guy called St. Augustine who has a really good way of explaining it. He just explains it as disordered loves — loving good things in the wrong order.
And so to illustrate: sin rots our relationships, so that when a friend of yours gets the job that you really wanted, you really, on the inside — politely of course, because we're polite people — you resent it, rather than being stoked for your friend. And that's because you love your own career progress more than your friend's happiness. They're both good things, but just loved in the wrong order.
Sin rots communities because instead of thinking about and spending our time on how we can make our community a better place, we spend more time thinking about how we can make more money and build nicer houses. And again, while there's nothing strictly wrong with making money or the house itself, we're loving these things in the wrong order when making money consumes more of our imagination and more of our enthusiasm and more of our excitement and creativity than meeting the needs of others.
And sin even rots our faith, so that when we go to church and we tithe and we do good works, we're doing it in part because of the respectability that might go with it or the social circle that comes with it. And again, while it's fine to be respected and have friends and gain friendships, we're doing these things in the wrong order when we're doing them out of self-interest rather than simply because our joy is tied up in God's joy.
The Law and the Need for Atonement
And the real clanger in the Old Testament that Jesus will have been taking these disciples through is this thing called the law. Because as we were talking about before, God gave the Israelites his law to help them live in harmony with him and with each other, so that they would love things in the right order and not fall into sin. And there's this really interesting thing where, if they didn't keep the law, then there would be an animal sacrifice to atone for sins.
Now, sophisticated people like us think, "Well, that's a bit weird." You think, "How do I get out of this church service right now before they start pulling out a fluffy little lamb?" But we are the naive ones when we think that. Because God was telling the Israelites — and they got this — that there is a price to pay for wrongdoing. And I want to suggest to you that that is instinctive to every human, whether you believe in God or not.
I was once talking with an atheist friend about how badly treated they had been by EQC — like, frankly, a lot of people in Christchurch. And the government had genuinely let them down and done wrong by them. And this friend was just really, really angry about it, and frankly rightly so. He wanted justice and he wanted to get even. And yet, from his atheist perspective — in his own words — the strong eat the weak. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there. And so this sense of injustice was no more than an irrelevant opinion in a cold, meaningless universe that just doesn't give a damn. And so why should he or I care about what some government department does or doesn't do? And yet he couldn't let it go.
There is right, there is wrong, and a wrong needs to be righted. And he's right — it gnaws at us on the inside when we see evil go unpunished. And so that's what the animal sacrifices were all about: to show the Israelites that God can't turn a blind eye to evil. One day, either we or someone else has to bear the consequences of it. The Israelites got it. And we, if we're honest with ourselves for half a minute, also get that.
Self-Justification — The Universal Human Project
Now, of course, we've gotten a bit more clever and, frankly, less bloody about how we deal with our own wrongdoing and how to clear our guilty consciences. But every human, whether they believe in God or not, is instinctively out there making sacrifices at some altar so that they can get through the day believing that they are a good person.
In technical language, we call this self-justifying. And that's what we do when we focus on building a really good moral record — at least compared to the people around us — so we can go, "Well, compared to them, I'm doing pretty good." It's when we're working hard to build up a bank balance that we're logging into our app to check every five minutes just to see how it's going, so that we know, "Oh yeah, I must be doing all right in life." It's when we chase relationship after relationship at increasingly expensive and desperate cost, because we won't ever be able to see ourselves as put together until someone says yes to us. And we're even self-justifying when we become a zealot for a religious or political cause, so that we can tell ourselves that we're on the side of right and feel better about ourselves because there are those out there who disagree with us.
And you don't have to be a Christian to see that the human condition is a quest for self-justification, and that the Bible has put its finger on it when it says that we are all out to convince ourselves that we can make up for that deep-seated sense of guilt.
A couple of weeks ago I received this journal called the Capital Letter, which is a journal written by lawyers for lawyers — and doesn't that sound exciting? You're all sitting there thinking, "Gosh, Alex, you're brilliant. That sounds so enlightened and intelligent." Anyway, there was a good article in it, and there's this guy called Daniel Katamaris Casey, and he was talking about how he had become addicted to his career. And I quote, out of the belief that he'd get a better reputation or acclaim or money or other success out of it. And he had descended into depression as a result of that relentless pursuit of his career, which was an attempt to prove to himself that he mattered and that he was worth something.
And he comes to this realisation. He says that our conclusions, our arguments, our rational thoughts — they all tend to contour pretty well with our self-interests and what we want. Mostly, our thoughts justify why we shouldn't be uncomfortable. The stories we tell about ourselves and others are not always describing things accurately. They're describing how we want the world to be.
Now this guy is being very honest, because we all invent stories to help us reimagine ourselves as doing okay — how we would like to see ourselves rather than how we necessarily are. But we are kidding ourselves, because we are all guilty of doing wrong. And you don't have to believe in God's standards in the Bible to see that, because just look at the standards that you hold other people to, and you'll see that you're guilty of not even keeping those.
Seeing Clearly — What Jesus Shows the Disciples
So how can we see things clearly? When Jesus explained the Scriptures to these two disciples on the road to Emmaus, it blows everything apart for them. He shows them that the Bible isn't about us, and it's not a manual for our self-improvement, and it's not there to help us with our narrow, short-sighted agendas. It's about Jesus and his plan to redeem us, to redeem the world, and to do it through his suffering and death in our place.
Their vision of Jesus Christ as a revolutionary — there to raise some little army to throw over the little Roman garrison in the backwash of the Roman Empire — they finally lose that. And Jesus shows them that he's not some political saviour here to deal with a tiny problem for a moment in time. He's here to deal with evil and death itself, and to deal with it for all time.
And so in this story, God is inviting you and he is inviting me to ditch our short-sighted vision of who God is — someone who's just there to solve this problem for us or that problem for us so that we can carry on treating him as some glorified butler.
Just think about what Jesus has done for a minute — just what he's explained to these two disciples. He's taken the Old Testament, which is a collection of 66 books written over a period of a thousand years by at least 25 different people, separated by centuries, and yet they all cogently point to Jesus' death, which was at least another 400 years to come. And they point to him doing it for your sake and for mine. That tells you that God is literally bending history to his will. And it's not some flex just to show off that he can, but it's to show the extent to which he is committed to calling you back to himself. Here is a God who is faithful to us, even though we are not faithful to him. And even then, he still drives history towards the death of his only son, because these are the lengths that the creator of the universe has gone to in order to pull you out of your guilt so that you can enjoy his love forever.
A Call to Read Scripture Together
So, one takeaway — one thing that I'd like you to think about doing when you get up tomorrow. Do you want to know this Jesus? Do you want to see him for who he really is? Do you want him to blow out of the water the small little vision that you have of him? And do you want to meet the man who has redeemed you from your slavery to sin?
Well, what did it take for these disciples to have their eyes opened and to see him clearly? At the end we see they asked each other, "Were our hearts not burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?" To open their eyes to the reality of who God is, Jesus went to the Bible. And if it was good enough for them, it's probably good enough for us too.
And so whether you have been a Christian for 20 years or for 20 seconds, or if you're just trying to work out what this crazy Christianity gig is all about, my encouragement to you is that you find someone — or you find a crew of people — that you can meet up with even once a week to read the Scriptures together. Because it's there that our eyes are opened to who he is, where we see what he has done for us, how much he loves us, and who he is calling us to become.
And if you have no idea how to go about doing that, if you don't know anyone who wants to read the Scriptures with you, come talk to me or Harry after the service. We'd love to try and stitch that up. There are a bunch of people in this church who do this regularly, and it's an amazing thing, because that's where people really encounter Christ and who he is. And we start to see his transformative love that shapes us into the kind of people he wants us to be.
Closing Prayer
So on that, let's wrap up praying together. God, we're each guilty of shrinking you down to our size and having pretty small ideas of who you are. But you have been playing out this massive redemption plan for centuries, bending history to your will. And so God, I pray for each of us that you'd open our eyes to see who you really are, to see the sin that you've saved us from. Help us to seek and accept the forgiveness that you had to die for to be able to offer us. And like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, God, I pray that you'd warm our hearts this morning so that we don't go from here blind to who you are, but we see a new vision of the lengths that you have gone to in order to call us your own. Pray, God, that that would teach us and transform us to love you back. And this we pray in Christ's name. Amen.