on playfulness

 

Playfulness can unlock things that other approaches cannot.

The Gospel set for this Sunday, Luke 24.13-35, is playful. The story takes place on the third day after Jesus’ death by crucifixion. Two of his apprentices are walking together, and as they do so they are ‘talking with each other about all these things that had happened.’ These things that had happened can mean these things that coincided or walked alongside each other. This is playful language. The hopes and dreams of the Palm Sunday crowd, the repeated confrontations with the authorities over the following days, the rumour mills operating on overtime throughout the city, the sad awkwardness of the Last Supper, the terror of Gethsemane, the numbing disorientation of Calvary, the death of their Messiah, the emptiness of the Sabbath, and the incomprehensible insistence of the women; all these things have walked alongside each other over these days. And as the two apprentices walk alongside each other, throwing all these things that have walked alongside each other back and forth between them, Jesus came near, coincided, and walked alongside them.

Moreover, they will tell him about the apprentices who did not see Jesus. These two apprentices who do not see Jesus, walking right alongside them. Their friend and teacher, and the one at the very epicentre of the events they are discussing, is, in their eyes, a stranger; and, even among strangers, uniquely uninformed and unaware.

It’s playful.

Playfulness involves both the imagination and the body. The way the storyteller, Luke, describes the two apprentices discussing all these things that had happened draws on the imagery of tossing a ball back and forth between them. ‘The press of the crowds. Catch!’ ‘The Temple tension. Catch!’ ‘The taste of roast lamb and bitter herbs. Catch!’ ‘Um...Grief. catch!’ ‘Er...Total incomprehension. Catch!’ Luke doesn’t say that they were actually throwing a ball, but when we are wrestling with too many things—and too many emotions—at once, doing so might help.

They arrive at Emmaus towards the end of the day, as the day is bent and bowed, with age. They press upon the stranger to stay the night, and put together supper. And Jesus does something physical: reclines at the table, takes hold of the bread, acknowledges, with gratitude, its God-given goodness, tears it so it can be shared, offers it to his host companions (companion: literally, one with whom we share bread). Unhurried. And this is the moment their eyes are opened. The moment of recognition. Not in his exposition on the road—though that certainly did something—but in simple, and repeated, actions. Again, when we wrestle with disappointment and confusion, receiving bread and wine in Communion is an anchor, enabling us to see Jesus in circumstances where we are kept from seeing him.

It is at this point, too, that they realise that their hearts had burned within them as he spoke on the road. That something deep inside was reaching out to Jesus, even when they were unable to recognise him. The body does what the conscious, controlling, mind could not. Bypasses the intellect, which follows slowly behind like a dullard. Playfulness, again.

I wonder when you have been disappointed, in your faith? When you have lost someone you loved, or something that felt central to what you believed was taken away from you? Or when you found yourself simply and utterly confused by it all?

I wonder what stories you can tell of encountering Jesus in just these times? Or what stories you might one day tell? And I wonder what place playfulness had, or might have, in the process?