From Our Own Emmaus

Last week, in one of my last days in Cincinnati before this week’s flight back to Jordan to resume my school life, I sneaked in another visit to the Cincinnati Art Museum. I wanted to have a look around a special retrospective exhibit the museum had mounted about artist Henry Ossawa Tanner, an African-American artist in the late 19th and early 20th century. I had seen several of Tanner’s works before, admired his palette and sense of mystery in his works, but didn’t know much of his story. As I toured the retrospective, the ethereal work seen above riveted my attention more than the others.


This is a painting called Christ and His Disciples On Their Way to Bethany. I am sure you know the statistics of how short our collective attention spans are toward art works in museums—most people offer a work no more than a few seconds. However, this crepuscular landscape held my attention as I thought about the many things it opened up for me. First of all, the title caught my attention. Here in Jordan, I am but just a few miles away from the Bethany that is in the title of the painting. If I were to drive down to Bethany I would encounter many people on my way who still dress exactly like this. This moonlit sky which engulfs the wayfarers also seems to cast its light as well beyond the frame at the viewer. So it was more than just the title and the dress which caught my attention. It was somehow in this painting that I felt similar to the experience I always feel as I leave my one world of summer vacation and move back to my one world of teaching in Jordan. It’s hard to explain—not a timewarp exactly, but a strange transitioning of states of mind. This painting transcends a Bible story and the more I gazed at it, the more I sensed that Tanner endeavored to offer an image that is about what is visible and what is invisible, about what is ordinary and what is miraculous, about what is present and what is past, about closures and about openings. Somehow all those crazy contradictions are present in my mind as I make the journey from the United States back to work in Jordan—somehow all those things resonate with me as I begin another year teaching in this interesting place.

I could tell you exactly where this school is—on the King’s Road, southwest of Amman, towards Madaba, on the plains of Moab, about 45 minutes as the crow flies from Jerusalem. But it has always been a more complex state of mind for me than just those geographic particulars.

Rumor has it that Lake Wobegon does not appear on any maps of Minnesota because of a mistake made by cartographers more than a century ago. As author and humorist Garrison Keillor recounts the mystery of this mapping error, we learn that four surveyors each began at one of the four corners of the state. Proceeding to move inward, they traveled on foot at different paces and over uneven terrain. The result was that they failed to meet up as expected. When their separate maps overlapped awkwardly, Lake Wobegon got left out in the process.

As I looked at this painting of Bethany, executed by Tanner at the same exact late-40s age range that I currently occupy, I thought about the states of mind of teaching here, of the blending of the past with the present and the hopes of the future. I think about how so much of teaching is trying to make visible the invisible. Each beginning of a year, really every day, is another wonderful opening of a mind. On the airplane, as I traveled the 12 hours from Chicago to Amman, my mind raced from my world of Cincinnati and Amman, pausing about Bethany and Lake Wobegon, and another place drifted across my mind.

Like Lake Wobegon, in a similar way, biblical archaeologists still have no idea where the little town of Emmaus might have been situated. It does not exist today, or if it does, no cartographer can say definitively where it is. The writer Luke indicates that it was about 7 miles from Jerusalem (or today about 30 miles from where I am at this moment).

It could be that like Lake Wobegon (shhhhh!), Emmaus is just a symbolic place, a symbolic place for our lives of faith. It is where we go when the wind empties from our sail. It’s the place we head when grief makes our compass bearings go haywire. When confused and distraught, we often stick out our thumb and hitchhike to Emmaus. Theologian Barbara Brown calls the road to Emmaus “the road of deep disappointment.”

Plane rides are wonderful times for a mind to wander. As I thought of these disparate places, somehow I recovered a few lines from the final section of T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land":

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?

Anyone who has read Luke’s Gospel knows what this passage echoes, as undoubtedly it was meant to do: the scene takes place on that first Easter Sunday, when two of Christ’s downtrodden disciples are on the dusty road to a village some seven miles from Jerusalem. “They were talking with each other about everything that had happened,” Luke tells us—the surprise capture of Jesus in the garden, his rushed trial and execution by crucifixion outside the city walls. The Jewish and Roman authorities had done away with this troublesome, charismatic figure, and his disciples had scattered like shot dogs in a field.

Suddenly, while they are discussing these catastrophic events, Jesus is there, walking with them, three now, where a moment before there seemed to be only two, though—as Luke tells us—“they were kept from recognizing him.”

The figure asks the two pilgrims what it is they are discussing. “They stood still,” Luke says, “their faces downcast. One of them, named Cleopas, asked him, ‘Are you only a visitor to Jerusalem and do not know the things that have happened there in these days?’”

“What things?” the figure asks.

“About Jesus of Nazareth,” they reply. And they tell him of the last few days (“we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel”), not leaving out how the women disciples had gone to the tomb and found it empty.

Jesus listens, then chides them for not taking to heart the words of the prophets who went before: “Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” Then, according to Luke, he went on to explain to them “what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.”

With darkness coming on, the figure agrees to stay with the two for the night at their invitation, and Luke’s narrative continues:

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. . . . They got up and returned at once to Jerusalem. There they found the Eleven and . . . told what had happened on the way, and how they recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread.

For two ordinary disciples, that’s exactly what that road was: a dusty road of deep disappointment. We know that there were two people walking and talking, grieving for what was—or for what wasn’t. These two people had faith, but they felt void of vital power. They knew what they were to believe. They understood what had happened to Jesus in their midst. They just didn’t know what the story meant. “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” they said. We had hoped. Can there be any words in the Scriptures sadder than those three? Not many. As they poured out their hearts to the stranger beside them—the one whom they could not recognize—at least they were honest. They shared questions, not answers.

If “we had hoped” are three words of great sadness, “stay with us,” are three words brimming with hospitality. Their hearts may have held no answers but they were not closed.

Something dramatic happened at the table that evening in Emmaus. The instant the unrecognized stranger blessed the food, broke the bread and gave it to them, their eyes were opened. It must have been the eyes of their heart, since the eyes on their face were working fine.

When Viktor Frankl was at the end of his rope in the horror of the Nazi concentration camp deprivation, every possession lost and every value destroyed, someone gave him a piece of bread. “I remember how a foreman secretly gave me a piece of bread which I knew he must have saved from his breakfast ration,” he wrote. “It was far more than the small piece of bread which moved me to tears at the time. It was the human “something” that this man gave to me—the look that accompanied the gift.”

It is that “human something” which has moved me the most in my teaching career—whether it be on the road in North Carolina, New York, or Jordan. It is that “human something” that Tanner captured in that ethereal painting. Keep on the lookout for that “human something” the next time you break bread with another person. Their words may offer more nutrients than the bread in your hand. Their look may open the eyes of your heart. It might all be a small taste of the first Emmaus.