Sermon for the 23rd of April, 2023 - Third Sunday of Easter

‘On the road’… just the phrase evokes a sense of adventure, risk, even danger. Perhaps we have left home and are on a journey, or perhaps quite the contrary we are trying to return home. While we are on the road, we may get lost, we may run into trouble, we may encounter strangers, or meet old friends. Whichever way you look at it being ‘on the road’ puts you somewhere between A and B, in a place of transition where anything might happen. And, so it is with Cleophas and Simon when they set out from Jerusalem on the seven-mile trek to Emmaus and are joined by a mysterious stranger.

The story employs a classic dramatic device used in theatre from earliest times. We, the audience, know the stranger’s real identity, but the characters in the story do not. And an extra dramatic touch is added when they arrive at Emmaus and Jesus (as we know him to be) is all set to continue on. It is only when the men beg him to remain with them, with the familiar words, ‘Stay with us, for it is towards evening and the day is far spent,’ that he agrees and the revelation takes place. Note that they must invite him in (in fact, they not only invite him but beg him to stay with them) and that this happens just before darkness falls. So it is with us…

In the final section of his long poem, The Wasteland, published in 1922, TS Eliot makes reference to the stranger on the Road to Emmaus when he asks: 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?

The mention of this mysterious presence is perhaps an indication foreshadowing TS Eliot’s decision to be baptised into the Anglo-Catholic church five years later. But it also refers to a more modern story, related by the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton and mentioned briefly by Fr Peter in one of his sermons a few months ago..

After his ship Endurance became trapped and crushed by pack ice, Shackleton and his crew survived for months camping on the ice, before crossing in three open lifeboats over the world’s worst seas from Antarctica to Elephant Island. He and five others eventually had to cross the sea again, in one lifeboat, to South Georgia. There, he and two of his companions, Frank Worsley and Tom Crean, undertook one of the toughest journeys in history – they walked non-stop over the uncharted saw-tooth spine of South Georgia to reach help at the Stromness whaling station on the east side of the island. They emerged almost unrecognizable, half starved, cold and exhausted, from this wind-blasted sub-Antarctic wilderness on 20 May 1916 and, thanks to their heroic efforts, then got help to rescue the rest of the crew.

A year later their leader, Ernest Shackleton, described something uncanny that he had experienced during that last desperate trek:
‘I know that during that long and racking march of 36 hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point. But, afterwards, Worsley said to me: “Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us”. Crean confessed to the same idea.’ Shackleton concluded that he felt ‘... the dearth of human words, the roughness of human speech, in trying to describe things intangible. But a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts.’
After this, the three men would rarely make reference to what they had experienced. Crean only spoke of it once – to some friends in a pub years later – when he simply said ‘The Lord brought us home’. Worsley referred to this sense of an extra person in a few lines in his account of the trek: ‘It is strange in mentally reviewing the crossing we should always think of a fourth, and then correct ourselves’. Shackleton later told journalist Harold Begbie: ‘None of us cares to speak about that. There are some things which never can be spoken of’.

‘The Lord brought us home’. In The Supper at Emmaus (pictured on the front of your Order of Service) Titian captures the moment when the stranger in the centre breaks the bread. It is only at that moment, as we have just heard in our Gospel reading, that the two disciples who have shared a lengthy journey with him realise who he is. Then, he vanishes.

Titian paints an almost Eucharistic scene with bread and wine set out on the crisp white tablecloth as if it were an altar showing us the actual moment of recognition. The three men have walked together seven miles along the road to Emmaus. Two set out from Jerusalem and were joined by a mysterious third whom they did not recognise until now. This is the moment when Cleopas and Simon are freed from their grief and doubt and finally see the resurrected Christ. Then, they too could truly say: ‘The Lord brought us home’.