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Walking the Stony Path with Christ

Good artists often have a way of reimagining reality for us. Great artists, especially those who work with religious subjects, not only have a way of reimagining reality but of shaping our imaginations in ways that are congruent with and acceptable to the truth of Scripture passed down in the frail hands of tradition.

One such artwork is James Tissot’s Les pèlerins d’Emmaüs en chemin (The Pilgrims of Emmaus on the Road).

Tissot takes a well-known post-resurrection appearance of Jesus to the disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35) and imagines it with details that are food for the soul. I must confess that I have often read the first half of this pericope as a plot filler to the real climax of the story, Jesus revealing himself to Cleopas and the other disciple in the breaking of bread. This second half of the pericope is saturated with Eucharistic theology that is narratively described but not explained. Tissot’s painting focuses on the disciples walking to Emmaus with the risen Lord.

I want to mention three artistic details and then share some theological insight.

  1. While the disciples look down in confusion and grief, Jesus looks at them. Their downcast eyes and lips, the furrowed brows, the hands either on the head or upturned — these gestures capture the behavior of those who are lost in questions, not of curiosity, but rather of grief: “How could this happen?” Yet Tissot also shows the Lord’s confidence in his death and resurrection. The confident gesture of one explaining things that ought to be easy to understand, while the eyes look at the disciple, captures someone instructing the hopeless on where true hope resides.
  2. Jesus’ arm is on a disciple’s shoulder. In this moment of confusion and grief, it’s comforting that this disciple would experience the warm and reassuring touch of this “friendly stranger.” It is but a foretaste of the Lord’s real presence that they will encounter at supper later that evening.
  3. While the disciples have walking sticks and sandals, Jesus has neither. Anyone who has ever walked shoeless on a stony, unpaved road knows the deep discomfort of bare soles on rocks. Yet in the long journey from Jerusalem to Emmaus, which some commentators note was 160 stadia or 7.5 miles, Jesus has neither a walking stick nor sandals. It’s as though the pains of this world no longer taunt him.

The disciples walking along on the road to Emmaus are filled with the grief and confusion of dashed hopes and expectations, the echoes of the Fall reverberating through time and place. Their pilgrimage to Emmaus is but figurative of the larger reality of all humanity, traversing through life with the repetitive cycles of hopes and dreams cruelly trashed by a world pervaded by sin and death. Yet they aren’t alone, and neither are we. Of course, the disciples’ knowledge only comes to the fore after the Lord blesses and breaks bread, as we experience a deeper presence of the Lord in his sacrament. But he was always with them on that road, in the same way he is always with us on our roads, whether we recognize him or not.

As we walk through the valleys of the shadows of our own impending deaths, he is with us. More importantly, however, it is good to know who he is who is with us. The same hands that were crucified for our sakes, bearing the nail marks, now gently embrace us as we walk along our roads of pain and suffering. And although he walks on our roads of suffering with us, he conquered these same roads once for all when he walked down his road to Calvary, with a back bruised by a Roman whip, burdened by a wooden cross, sinking down even into Hades, only to rise up again.

If death and Hades no longer have any power over him, how much less the jagged stones and troublesome pebbles under the soles of his pierced feet. A barefoot Jesus reminds us that the one walking beside us, although familiar with our pain and suffering, is not constrained by them anymore in the same ways as we are. Therefore, he has power to succor us all the more, being a faithful brother and high priest. And thus we can joyfully say, like Cleopas and the other disciple, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road?” as we journey with him and he with us on our own stony paths towards the new Jerusalem.

John Deepak Sundara
John Deepak Sundara
The Rev. John D. Sundara is the Vicar for Worship and Evangelism at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, Houston, TX.

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