Biography
Martin Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Modern Christianity at the University of Chicago. He has written forty books and is Senior Editor of Christian Century. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"Easter on the Road" 
The Sunday Evening Club held its first meeting on this day of the week in this season of the year at about this hour roughly 1,960 years ago, not in a television studio or with people watching television, not in an auditorium or a sanctuary, but on a road and then at a home. We hear about it from the 24th chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke. We will call Luke our story teller. He tells about an evening event in which this Club, which evidently had two members -- one named Cleopas, the other unnamed, maybe Mrs. Cleopas, or maybe a male friend -- were joined by a stranger along the road. They conversed with Him. They started the process that has inspired us so many years later still to gather Sunday evenings.

Luke tells us that as they went along the road that Sunday they were talking, debating, discussing and pondering the events that had been happening over the weekend. The heart of these events is the one that we celebrated this morning and are celebrating all day. The word that death did not have the last word; the power of God was stronger than the power of death; that Jesus was risen; that they should not look for Him among the dead.

That was at least as astounding a word to them as it would be to us. It is a little bit colored for us by the fact that people have told the story so often and there are so many songs about it. It is in stained glass windows and there are libraries of books about it. It was all new to them and they were talking about it. They talked about what they had been hoping for. Then as they were on the road, they were interrupted. A stranger came along and caught up with them and asked what they were talking about.

Here comes one of the most puzzling features of the story and I am not somebody who is going to answer the puzzle. Luke says that when the stranger came up to them, their eyes were held. They were kept from seeing who it was, though it was someone that they had known very well. Some people think this is a strange story about magic; some think the devil did it; some think God did it; some think they were stupid; some think they were stupefied. We will let the rivers of ink flow and the libraries grow as people ponder that.

The storyteller doesn't worry about that at all. It is just their eyes were held. That is a big part of the story because they have to recognize Him later. He asks, "What are you talking about? Why are you debating? Tell me about it."

They rehearsed the story for Him of what they had been talking about. "We had hoped that He would redeem Israel." There are not many more poignant, pathetic lines in the New Testament than that one. Not, "we hope" but "we had hoped."

They knew the story. They had been told. There should have been something breaking through to give them hope again because they said that some women of their company that morning had a vision of angels and had heard that there was reason for this hope, but it didn't do them any good. They were on the road, heading back to this town of Emmaus, 7.5 miles away from Jerusalem, hopelessly puzzled.

The stranger didn't ingratiate himself to them at all. I would imagine it was quite a blow when He said, "You stupid people or you dull people or you slow people. You just don't catch on." This violates almost any concept we like to hold about ourselves in an era of our self-esteem, our intelligence, our quickness and our alertness. Here, all of a sudden, somebody comes along and says, "You are dull; you are slow-witted."

We are supposed to see ourselves in this story, by the way, if we haven't made that clear so far.

As He tried to awaken them from their dullness, their failure to recognize Him or the event, we hear that He then took the Hebrew scriptures and said, "You have just told me all the story, but you have missed the main element."

Here is another little puzzle. We hear that He took Moses; He took the prophets; He expounded all the prophets and told how what had been happening about the limits of the power of death, about the fact that the anointed one of Israel would suffer, die and rise, was all through those scriptures.

You can go to your own shelf and be a scholar. You can take the Hebrew scriptures, the Old Testament, off the shelf, and you will have a hard time finding exactly what those scriptures must have been. Most people believe that this means that He took all the things that have been said about the people of Israel of old. They had been created. They were on an exodus. They had been in exile. God had nurtured them and cared for them. There would be suffering in their midst, but there was always hope beyond.

Now this stranger applied it to the story of Jesus. They couldn't get enough of this at the first meeting of the Sunday Evening Club. They wanted to hear more. The story teller tells us that they said that it was getting to be late evening. They invited him to stay with them. Evidently, they arrived at Emmaus and they came in -- maybe at an inn. Some artist put it that way. Maybe in their own home. That was where they were heading.

The key is that they had invited Him and they wanted to hear more. So far, the whole story has appeared upon the road. It speaks to us very well because that is how Easter catches us. Maybe we have been visiting somebody else, visiting a different church, having a good dinner. Now the airports will crowd and the roads will crowd as people get back to their daily lives. Night falls and they wait for a new day. They have invited this stranger in and we can do the same.

Now comes the breaking open of the puzzle. It says that they sat down at table. He sat. He took bread. He blessed it. He broke it. He offered it. Five things.

In that act, it says, they had their eyes opened. They recognized Him. Now for the first time they, too, saw the limits of death in the presence of this living one.

You and I can recall how our parents spread the food before us at table. We are very familiar with the gestures of certain people. We can see them in shadows. We can almost hear their movements and recognize them. They who had not recognized the stranger in the late afternoon sun on the road to Emmaus, now knew Him in the breaking of the bread.

Many people see in this act a reminiscence of the early church's Lord's Supper. I suppose it is a reminder to all of us that we still recognize this living presence when someone takes the scriptures and tells us about these stories. Nothing has changed in that respect. It is still important to connect the breaking of the bread with this presence.

Luke has done this throughout his gospel. In the beginning, there is a song in Mary's mouth that says, "God has filled the hungry with good things." Nine or ten times Jesus is at table. He is at table with sinners and strangers. He is at table with pharisees, people with whom he is having an argument. Most intimately, He is at the table with friends and disciples, breaking bread the night before He died, the event that had given them all this gloom, sullenness and slow wittedness for which He scolded them.

Now all that is repealed and reversed when He takes the bread and breaks it and they know Him. Their eyes were opened and they went over the story again.

Now we go back with Luke, the story teller, who knew the outcome. That is one advantage of a story teller. You know the end of the story before you start. He didn't worry about what held their eyes and kept them from opening, but He was concerned that we know what opened their eyes. It said that He was no longer a visible presence to them. From the viewpoint of this story teller, He didn't have to stay around any more. He wasn't needed.

The Sunday Evening Club took to the road again. Maybe it was nightfall by now, but they didn't stay in Emmaus. They had 7.5 miles to cover again on the road to get back. When you are part of a story like this one, you don't let the story end with you eating the meal after the giver of the meal has been present and disappeared.

The Sunday Evening Club grew right away, because they went back to Jerusalem where the disciples were gathered, the same disciples whose eyes were half opened when they heard that the women had had the vision of angels and heard that death was not the end and that Christ was risen. Frightened in that meeting, but now comes the charge-in of these two people to tell them again.

It is a story of interruptions, isn't it? The two people interrupted on the way to Emmaus and now the disciples interrupted. Each time there is an interruption something good happens.

Creative schedule interruption is still important for us. We can schedule our sanctuaries, our times when someone takes the scriptures and shows how the anointed one was to suffer and to die and thus to bring everyone in perfect love, to union, to reunion, with God. We still have the bread in our homes, where we can say the blessing and experience the presence of an unseen guest, or the bread, if we are Christian, in our churches where we also so regularly recognize this guest.

Throughout the gospel of Luke, in all of these feedings and breakings of bread, in all of these expoundings of scripture, in all of these occasions on the way, on the road, going somewhere, it is clear that the central figure of the gospel, Jesus, is a prototype for humanity, a model, an image for the rest of us. He is on the road there with us, catching up with us sometimes to expound and scold us for our dullness, waiting to be invited -- that is really key and important.

The Sunday Evening Club meets a couple thousand years after that first time, still reflecting on that original story. Not everyone who hears it, believes it, recognizes it the same way. As always, people of intelligence, people of dull wits, people who are lost and lonely along the road still respond when they hear the story that death did not have the last word.

That is what Easter is about, that love is stronger than death, that the power of God is greater than the power of forces that would thwart life. The stranger is still with us. If we say we had hoped He would redeem us, we can change that now to say that hope is present among us and we, too, can know Him in the breaking of the bread and in the gathering of our company.

Interview with Martin Marty
Interviewed by David Hardin

David Hardin: Marty, in talking so effectively about what Jesus is all about, what strikes me is how quickly we forget the incredible message of this day, this resurrection, that God sent His Son and brought Him back to life and took him back up with up with Him. Today some feel that people are not as involved in church as they used to be. What are your feelings about how the church is changing, or maybe needs to change, to stay in touch with the times and what people are dealing with today?

Martin Marty: The first thing for me is the surprise at how many are there. In our nation, three out of five people are actively involved with a Christian church and two out of five are there every week. That is something to go on and we ought to build on that strength.

I think we often lose our imagination. We choose to be as dull as the disciples were on the road to Emmaus. We make the story uninteresting and I think we have to vitalize that. The reform comes on the local level. When you have dynamic local fellowships and churches, you build up from there. It isn't going to come through some mysterious presence at a great distance away from us.

Hardin: Are seminaries changing what they are trying to teach from what they taught twenty years ago?

Marty: Seminaries are always changing and they had better change because their people are changing. If your physician treated you the way physicians were trained twenty and forty years ago, you would die. So they are trying to be alert and bring us very close to the people of today in the light of the message of the risen Lord.

Hardin: I feel good about that. Thank you for being with us.