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An Idyllic Walk in the Countryside

Easter 3 : 4 May 2014  : Luke 24: 13-35

Looking back I can see that my love of film began when television first got underway in New Zealand with a single channel in black and white with little advertising, and most important of all, a film shown every Friday night and Sunday afternoon. The films shown were a promiscuous miscellany of the very good and the very bad, and the pretty average. But over time a great deal of film was shown, and my curiosity was aroused. Much later friends pointed me in the direction of film festivals, and theatres that specialised in art house movies. The DVD revolution, that made the best of the world’s films available in one’s living room, completed the process.

Of course part of the attraction is that on a day off, this is the fastest way to forget about the job and the parish, because you are immersed in someone else’s narrative, you are drawn into another world very different to your own, and you are opened up to experiences, and places, and people you might never encounter. Also many of the images that are shown are very beautiful, they linger in the mind, which is why the quality of the films that I watch matter – or as one friend said to me about the kind of films I watch with some exasperation- "You are fussy."

But escapism isn’t the only attraction of film. You begin to ask your self critical and discerning questions about what you see. Why is the director showing me this in this kind of a way? Why is the camera being moved around in this particular kind of a way? How is atmosphere and ambience being built up in this scene? Why is the action speeding up or slowing down? How skilfully are the scenes joined up? What does the director want me to think and feel by presenting the characters and the narrative in this kind of a way?

It is this kind of perspective that I bring to this morning’s walk to Emmaus gospel scene. Luke is a master story teller, and I notice first of all the kind of emotional colouration he brings to this incident. Of course, there is an underlying melancholy emanating from the crushed hopes of those two ramblers. But notice the background ambience of what might be called a pastoral scene, the calm and tranquil mood of this amble through the countryside. It is a beautiful scene, and they and we are disarmed by it.

So the stranger who draws alongside with his open ended questions, and then slightly disconcerting review of Israel’s Scriptures, is accepted at face value. Isn’t he the kind of rewarding conversationalist you might hope to meet on country byways? Even if he is coming at them from an oblique angle on recent tragic events, it is a rewarding perspective, and one his hearers are prepared to entertain because they are at ease in his presence, and are in a receptive mood given the attractive and calming surroundings.

This is what film critics call a transition scene. We, and the gospel protagonists, are being prepared for a shift in perspective, a gear change in pace and style of content. Before, there was a terrifying appearance of angels to a small group of women at the empty tomb, that left them utterly at a loss. What was more, their report wasn’t believed by the rest of the community. What will follow this evening walk in the countryside, and the encounter with the incognito Christ, will be the appearance of the risen Christ to all the community. Startlement and terror will surround this scene also, but the disciples will move through their initial error filled assessment that this is a ghostly apparition, and will take on board who and what Christ has become, and what he wants them to do, because of what has happened in the transition scene.

Consider the content of this rural conversation. It is about the underlying message, the crucial inner content of what Moses and the Prophets are on about in Israel’s Scriptures. This matters because the experience of resurrection appearances doesn’t make sense unless it is interpreted by this Old Testament background Israel’s Scriptures have predictions of all that has just happened, for those with eyes to see. Once you understand that, then you stop interpreting the resurrection appearances as ghostly apparitions, the stuff of spiritualism and seances, and come to understand what has happened as the fulfilment of prophecy, and the unfolding of God’s master plan. On the other hand the experiences of the disciples in these Easter encounters opens up the Scriptures in ways that weren’t possible before. Making sense of the resurrection requires the message of Moses and the Prophets, plus these recent startling experiences, brought together in fruitful combination to open up a new and more powerful understanding of who their inspiring leader really is, and what has happened to him.

The transition scene is doing something else as well. It is pulling together, and coordinating different, disparate experiences of the risen Christ into a coherent, shared story of what they have experienced, a common way of making sense of the resurrection. We see beginning to emerge, at the prompting of the incognito Christ, the integrated story that the Church will tell the world by proclamation and explanation of the most important event in their history. At the midway point, an interpretive key is being offered that will bring a common understanding of what the empty tomb and appearance of angels scene meant, of what it is that Simon Peter is experiencing on his own at about the same time as this encounter, and what the appearance of Christ to the assembled community shortly afterwards signifies and amplifies. Now all these strands can be brought together into the Church’s common story.

And as this happens the community that the infant Church will become is being assembled by these appearances, and by this developing common story. We can notice how the first resurrection appearances are to isolated individuals, or to small penny packets of Christ’s followers. Tragedy and despondency has the effect of isolating people, and breaking them up into dispersed little units. The resurrection appearances are skilfully designed to bring them together around a hope filled agenda. They are being unified and linked together by a shared understanding of the life, death and resurrection of the one they took to be a prophet powerful in word and action, but who turns out to be rather more than that. And what he wants them to do from now on, he wants them to do together. This new hope that now exists in the world is a communitarian one. As I never tire of saying, Christianity is a communal enterprise and experience , not a private spiritual rewards system.

In spelling out the full significance and meaning of the Emmaus scene I am forgetting something important about what makes for a good movie scene, and a rewarding film. It doesn’t hit you over the head with explanations, and ham fisted statements of the obvious. It lets you draw the conclusions by the way it presents the images, and sets the tone and the background ambience. It proceeds by subtlety and nuance, requiring some alert antennae, and a perceptive mind prepared to do some work in thinking about what it has seen.

A perceptive media commentator had a famous slogan - "the medium is the message." Surely that is true of this idyllic walk in the countryside. More than anything I can say by way of commentary, more than the explanations that the incognito Christ had to offer, which aren’t presented to us anyway, this scene works by its gentle pastoral quality, by its beautiful background tones and emotional colouration. This conveys what life with God will be like

more than the wisest sermon that will be preached on this theme anywhere in the Christian world today. Like a great movie director, Luke has captured something of what the risen Christ came to give just by the way he has laid out this scene for us, and lets us enter it imaginatively on our own terms, and in our own way.