Leaving the Ninety-Nine
The Road to Emmaus – Luke 24.
It takes about 3 hours to walk from Jerusalem to Emmaus. If Cleopas and his friend, the two disciples, took an occasional break, maybe 4 hours might be nearer, but not much more than that.
If the day was ‘far spent’ by the time they and Jesus, who had appeared to them in some form of resurrection disguise it was about 7pm when they arrived in Emmaus.
After a short while at the table sharing food with Jesus, who promptly disappeared as they broke bread, they made their way back to Jerusalem, ‘they rose up that very hour’, arriving at the earliest by 9pm.
The precise location of Emmaus is unknown. Recent excavations at and near Abu-Gosh lend support for this site but there is also a Roman Catholic Franciscan church in Al-Qubeiba that celebrates Luke 24 each year. Evidence for this site is restricted to the remnants of Roman paving slabs.
The point of writing about Emmaus is that these two sites are located on the West Bank in what we often refer to as the Palestinian territories as distinct from Israel.
Gaza and the West Bank are where a diminishing number of Palestinian Christians live, their hope almost broken and shattered by a combination of poor economic conditions and persecution by hard-line fundamentalist Muslims, conditions which have forced many to emigrate.
The Palestinian Christian diaspora is part of the tragedy of the Middle East but…
…just as Jesus left the 120 in Jerusalem in search of the 2 on the road, thus literally acting out the ‘leaving the 99’ parable, neither can we, who have Christ dwelling in us, not be impelled to leave the relative comforts of where we are to search for those whose hopes, built up in Jesus maybe from childhood, have been torn to shreds by life’s events or the prevailing pressure of society.
We will find ourselves, just like Jesus, in some unlikely places, breaking bread with those whose faith and hope in Jesus has been all but broken, and yet leaving them with ‘hearts burning’ as we speak about Jesus the Messiah so that they too ‘rise up that very hour’, faith restored, hope restored and make their way, like Cleopas, to meet the resurrected Jesus.