![]() ![]() What they receive instead is a fellow traveler who appears and tells them the story of a Savior who, when invited, enters their home who takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and offers it to them. ![]() Like us, they want something concrete, something reliable, something unassailable that demonstrates the truth. As they travel the road to Emmaus, they’re left to wonder if the road they’ve traveled so long with Jesus is, after all, one that leads nowhere. Some of their friends have gone to the tomb and found it empty, but Cleopas and his companion aren’t sure that proves anything. Now, on Sunday, they’ve received strange reports that Jesus is not dead after all. They have been followers of Jesus, but in the past few days, the one on whom they pinned their hopes has been manhandled, imprisoned, and killed. These two, Cleopas and his unnamed friend, are concerned and confused. Last week we saw it in “Doubting” Thomas, and today we read it expressed in the conversation of two disciples traveling the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus on Easter evening. It traces all the way back to the Easter event itself. Our frustration is not new, not by a long shot. Jesus was resurrected on Easter Day, you say? How do you know that? Where is the archaeology (or some such) that proves it? ![]() As a twenty-first century modern person, and despite the admitted contradiction in terms, I desire concrete, factual evidence of the things of my faith. But such places are conspicuous precisely because they are so rare. We know to a virtual certainty, for instance, that a specific house in Capernaum was, actually, the home of St. We trek up what traditions claims was the Mount of Transfiguration. We visit what may have been the site of the feeding of the five thousand. And yet, the Holy Land is not without its frustrations, one of the most ubiquitous of which is that almost nowhere can anyone be sure that the things chronicled in Holy Scripture actually happened. Since the moment I arrived back in the United States, I have yearned to return to Israel. It was a life-changing experience for me. Last May I went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. So, at every moment along the way you have to decide whether you’re wasting your time, or not.” You’re constantly wondering if you’ve just spent hours going down a path that may take you nowhere, and all you’ve got are these vague witness marks that might not even mean what you think they mean. I’m told fixing an old clock can be maddening. They are clues to what was in the clockmaker’s mind when he first created the thing. These are actual impressions and outlines and discolorations left inside the clock of pieces that might’ve once been there. A witness mark could be a small dent, a hole that once held a screw. So instead, the few people left in the world who know how to do this kind of thing rely on what are often called ‘witness marks’ to guide their way. A clock that old doesn’t come with a manual. But you can’t know for sure, because there are rarely diagrams of what the clock is supposed to look like. Sometimes entire portions of the original clockwork are missing. Maybe there’s damage that was never fixed, or fixed badly. To make the job even trickier, you often can’t tell what’s been done to a clock over hundreds of years. There can be hundreds of tiny, individual pieces, each of which needs to interact with the others precisely. It might have bells that are supposed to strike the hour, or a bird that is meant to pop out and cuckoo at you. It might tick away the time with a pendulum, with a spring, or with a pulley system. An old clock like that is handmade by someone. ![]() “When an antique clock breaks, a clock that’s been telling time for two hundred or three hundred years, fixing it can be a real puzzle. In his popular podcast, Brian Reed talks about some of the mystery and wonder that surrounds those early clocks. Indeed, it is little wonder that the clock quickly became a symbol for God’s creation, and God became known as the clock maker. After eons during which the most accurate way to track daily time was a sundial, the invention of the clock in the fourteenth century must have seemed miraculous. For anyone who wears a non-digital wristwatch, especially one with an exposed face that show the clock’s inner workings, this should come as no surprise. Before the Industrial Revolution, do you know what the two most complex machines were? Our present location should be a giveaway for one of them: the pipe organ, with its tens of thousands of moving parts. ![]()
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