The Discipleship Way

Two disciples walk away from Jerusalem on the first day of the week. It seems that everything they believed in, and hoped for, has died on a cross. They’re walking away because the resurrection they expected didn’t happen as they expected.

They were looking for vindication, for triumph, for the overturning of the systems that crushed their lives and destroyed their hope. So, of course, they don’t immediately recognise the unfamiliar familiarity that they find along the way. How could they? Yet standing right in front of them is the risen Christ, and they don’t know him. They’re too caught up in their own world to see the transformation of the world around them. At least for now.

But something happens on that road. The stranger listens. The stranger teaches them. He interprets the scriptures, and he makes sense of them (the scriptures and themselves). Then, in a moment of kindness, sharing and intimacy, he breaks bread and their eyes are opened.

What is remarkable is what happens next. Jesus disappears, but they don’t linger in contemplation of their mystical experience. They get up. They go back to Jerusalem, right then. They find their community. Because recognition of Christ is not complete in isolation. It is completed in community.

This matters for us right now. We live in a culture that tells us our value comes from what we produce, or what we own, or what we can accumulate. We’re taught that might is right. That power should have its way. That security comes through acquisition, through accomplishment, through ascending.

And Peter’s letter to the early Christians speaks directly to it. You have been ransomed from the futile ways of your culture, Peter says. Not by silver or gold. Not by playing the game of power and accumulation better than anyone else. But by the death of Christ. By an encounter with a way of being human that stands in radical opposition to the world’s logic.

This is the life. Not loyalty to the powers of the world, but loyalty to the Christ who walks the dusty road with us, who breaks bread with us, who gathers us into community. Like the disciples, we need to learn that salvation doesn’t come through wealth and power; it comes through the vulnerability and self-giving love. Love above all else.

We’re called to be that love-shaped community, practising a way of life that stands against the logic of the world. We’re called to be a community that builds the alternative together, and as we carry the things of God along the dusty roads of this world, aspiring to something greater, we’ll find the risen Christ with us.

Listening. Teaching. Interpreting the scriptures, and making sense of our lives.

-Revd Adrian Roux