The Road to Emmaus
‘The Road to Emmaus’: A sermon preached by Rev Maggie Guillebaud
27 April 2025
I wonder if I any of you have heard of the charity called Toybox? I am a great fan because the main aim of their work is incredibly straightforward: to give street children birth certificates, that vital piece of paper we all get automatically when we are born. Except these children may have been born on the streets, or abandoned on the streets, and they live undocumented. With no documents they cannot access education or healthcare. And without an education and healthcare their lives are incredibly difficult and dangerous, condemned forever to live outside the societies into which they were born, in places as diverse as India, Pakistan, South America, Africa – anywhere where poverty is rife.
These children are invisible, unloved, and in distress. Toybox is a part, an absolutely vital part, of reversing that and trying to help them into education and the kind of care they need and deserve. A birth certificate is the gateway to becoming members of society. The children will now be recognised and heard.
We all need to be recognised. And this evening we have had the great pleasure of witnessing Eva, Henrietta add Jessica becoming full member of the choir. You have been recognised because of all your hard work in the choir, and now you are probationers no longer but fully part of the choir. Well done.
Recognition has been much in the news these last couple of weeks, with the discussion about gender-recognition certificates: what they actually mean, and now a ruling as to what a woman actually is. This is all part of our underlying human need to be seen, to be recognised, and in being recognised, to be validated. It is a strong and abiding strand in our lives which goes to the root of what it is to be human.
But what does this mean in the context of our faith?
First, each one of us is unique, and as the psalmist has it, known to God even before we were born. Psalm 139 says:
‘you (God) created my inmost being,
You knit me together in my mother’s womb…
My frame was not hidden from you
When I was made in secret places…
Your eyes saw my unformed body.’
We were recognised by God even in the womb.
Second, this week’s gospel passage too focuses on seeing and recognising. After the Resurrection the two men on the road to Emmaus don’t recognise the man who joins them to walk along the road until he breaks bread with them. He knew who they were, but they did not recognise him until, in a gesture which takes us right back into the upper room in Jerusalem before the Crucifixion when Jesus had supper with his friends and broke bread, they see him for who he is. Grace and truth break in, and the disciples hurry back to Jerusalem to tell Peter and the others what they have seen.
Round the period of the Crucifixion and Resurrection this theme of seeing and recognising comes strongly into play.
Pilate did not see Jesus as divine, but he did see him as wholly innocent of any crime as he tried, many times, to persuade the Jews of this. Peter got to see and understand himself intimately as he heard the cock crow three times, and wept at his own lack of moral courage. But it was the making of him. One of the thieves being crucified with Jesus recognised Jesus as the Son of God and was promised a place with him in Paradise on that very day. And the centurion at the foot of the cross too was moved by what he saw and also proclaimed Jesus as wholly innocent.
After the Resurrection Jesus appeared several times to his followers, and we all remember doubting Thomas who would not believe until he had actually seen Jesus himself. Which he did, and consequently believed.
But Jesus’ invitation to us is to believe in him, even though we have not seen him face to face. This seeing and believing, we discover, is a two-way street. And of course this is not easy. St Peter in his first letter to the Romans, those earliest of converts in Rome, recognises the problem as he commends them for their faith:
‘Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy’.
Peter had seen him. These new converts have not. And yet we are called in faith to follow someone we shall never see here on earth.
Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians that at present we see these things dimly as in a mirror. For now we know only in part, but then, as Paul writes of himself, ‘I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.’ The mystery will be clear only when Christ gathers us to himself at our death and we meet him face to face.
Seeing is believing. But what we are called to do is to believe without seeing. We are recognised, but cannot see who it is who knows us so intimately. We are loved, and in return love what we cannot see. It is a tall order. But billions of us have been doing just that for over 2000 years. We believe in the Resurrection of Christ which we have so recently celebrated, and all that flows from that earth-shattering event. Each one of us who believe has taken that step of faith. Recognised, seen, and loved, we all continue In fide vade, to go on in faith. That is Christ’s gift and challenge to us on the road to Emmaus.