On The Road Out of Gaza

A sermon by John Na’em Snobar
Luke 24:13-35

My name is John Na'em Snobar and I am the Director of Advocacy for Palestinian Christians in Australia. I am also a former Australian diplomat. My theological worldview is shaped by the tessons I learned from my grandfather, the first Palestinian Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem,Bishop Faik Ibrahim Haddad.

The road to Emmaus was about 11 kilometres West of Jerusalem. Luke tells us that two disciples walked it on the third day after Jesus’ crucifixion — away from
Jerusalem, away from the city where their world turned upside down, away from the tomb that was seemingly the end of everything.

They walked, and they talked, and a stranger fell into step beside them, and by the end of the evening their world had been turned around again.

It is a beautiful story. It was a very old road. Older than Luke. Older than these two disciples. Older, even, than the name we give it.

It is the road of circular conversation, of grief too large for language, of the question that has no answer: where do we go now? It is the road of people who had hoped and whose hope had seemingly been buried.

I know such a road. My people, as refugees, know such a road.

And what the Gospel tells us — what | want to preach today — is that the risen Christ knows it, too.

That he has walked it before us, and that he walks it still, and that he is walking it now with the people the world has decided to leave behind.

Two disciples are leaving Jerusalem.

Luke gives us one of their names — Cleopas. The other remains unnamed, which has always seemed to me less like an oversight and more like an invitation. There is a space in this story for those whose names have not been recorded.

They are talking as they walk. Survival, sometimes, sounds like conversation.

A stranger joins them. He asks what they are discussing, and they stop walking. Luke says their faces were downcast — the word carries visible grief, grief that has settled into the body and cannot be hidden. 

Cleopas answers with a question asked in utter bewilderment: Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know what has happened?

That bewilderment is recognisable. It is the bewilderment of people whose suffering has not been registered.

Who have been carrying something enormous and found that the world either has not noticed or has noticed and decided to look away. The bewilderment of those who have to explain their grief to people who should already know.

They tell the stranger everything. And then they say the sentence that breaks the passage open: But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.

We had hoped. Past tense. The hope belongs to a world that no longer exists. What remains is the walking, and the effort of surviving day to day.

A word here about what /srae/ means in this sentence — because this noun carries enormous freight in our time, and we should avoid allowing that freight distort what Luke is saying.

The disciples are not speaking of a modern nation-state. The State of Israel was created in 1948 — the same year as the Nakba — by a political movement that chose an ancient name for a modern project.

When Cleopas says Israel, he means something older and different: the people of Jacob, the covenant community, the descendants of the twelve tribes. He is speaking of a people, not a government. A kinship, not a border.

It is worth pausing here, too, on who those people were in the first century. Judaism in the time of Jesus was not a single, monolithic community. There were at least five distinct sects — the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, the Zealots, and the Nazarenes.

That last group, the Nazarenes, were the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. They were a Jewish sect, rooted in the Galilee, who came to understand themselves as the fulfilment and renewal of the covenant people. It is from this community — the Nazarenes — that my Palestinian Christianity descends.

The Palestinian Christians of today are not latecomers to this land or to this faith. They are the living continuation of the people who first walked with Jesus on these roads, who first broke bread with him, who first carried his name into the world.

When Cleopas says we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel, he is speaking as an ancestor of my people.  

The stranger does not correct that sentence. He does not minimise it or rush past it. He walks with them in it.

The road to Emmaus is one of grief and bewilderment. My people have been walking such a road for 77 years. in 1948, more than 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homes.

Entire villages were destroyed — some demolished, some emptied by fear, many by direct force.

Families fled with what they could carry, most believing they would return within weeks. They did not return. They are in camps in Lebanon and Jordan, in cities across the diaspora, in Australian suburbs, still carrying the keys to their homes, still remembering the names of villages that no longer appear on official maps.

We Palestinians call it the Nakba. The catastrophe.

My grandfather, Bishop Faik Haddad, was the first Palestinian Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem. He was consecrated to that role not as a figurehead, but as a shepherd — a man who had served the Palestinian Christian community through decades of turbulence and who understood, in his body and in his theology, what it meant to be a follower of Jesus of Nazareth on the land where Jesus of Nazareth had walked.

He was not a distant ecclesiastical figure. He was a man who knew his people's faces, who buried their dead and baptised their children, who stood in Jerusalem as the world he knew was being dismantled around him.

In 1948, my grandfather watched Palestine being torn apart.

He watched members of his congregation flee. He watched the churches of his diocese empty. He watched the community he had given his life to scatter across borders that had not existed the year before. He watched a catastrophe unfold in the land where the Gospel was first announced, to people who were themselves the living descendants of the first Christians — the Nazarenes, that first Jewish sect who walked with Jesus through the hills of Galilee and carried his name into the world.

And he kept faith. Not naively — he knew what had happened and he named it honestly. But he kept faith, because the God he had given his life to was not a God who only showed up when the story was going well.

That faithfulness runs through my family like a thread.

It runs through Palestinian Christianity like a thread. We have held onto the Gospel not because our history has been easy, but because we have found, again and again, that the Gospel is embodied in us as the living stones.

That the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth is not a God who abandons the dispossessed. That the road walked by those two disciples leaving Jerusalem is not a road walked alone.

Here is what I invite you to reflect on in this passage.

The risen Christ does not appear to the remaining disciples in the upper room and dispatch a message of solidarity to the people on the road. He does not issue a statement.

He goes to the road.

He finds the bewildered people where they are — moving away from the city, in the wrong direction, full of grief, yet to be resolved — and he falls into step beside them. He walks at their pace. He asks them to tell their story. He listens. He does not demand that they be further along in their grief than they are.

He does not correct their we had hoped before he has walked with them for a while. This is the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth.

A God who takes on flesh in a land under Roman military occupation. Who is born to a Palestinian Jewish family who becomes refugees in Egypt. Who grows up under imperial surveillance. And, who is executed by the same imperial authorities.

Who rises — and then, before any appearances in glory, before the ascension, before the sending of the Spirit — walks with two people who have given up and are heading in the wrong direction.

God walks with the bewildered.

Palestinian Christians have held onto this through 77 years of bewildered dispossession. As the descendents of the disciples, we know that the God who walked to Emmaus kept walking with them when that road ended.

That God is on the roads out of Gaza. That God is in the camps in Lebanon and Jordan. That God is in the homes and parishes of the Palestinian diaspora in Australia, where families gather on Sunday mornings and refuse to disappear.

The disciples reach Emmaus. The stranger moves to continue on. And they press him — urgently, the text says they urged him strongly — Stay with us. It is nearly evening. The day is almost over.

They are yet to recognise him.

Stay with us.

This is the prayer of people who have been given enough to want to keep going. It is the prayer of people in the middle of grief who have found something on the road that makes the grief survivable — still unresolved, but survivable.

I recognise this prayer in Palestinian Christian communities across the world.

Stay with us as the churches of the Holy Land are increasingly emptied by the State of Israel, and the Christian communities thin, under the weight of illegal Israeli occupation.

Stay with us as our children grow up in diaspora and ask us questions about home that we do not know how to answer.

Stay with us as we navigate a political environment that treats our people's suffering as a threat to be managed rather than a wound to be healed.

Stay with us, because it is nearly evening and the day is almost over.
And the text says: he stayed.

He reclines at the table with them. He takes bread. He blesses it. He breaks it. He gives it to them.

And their eyes were opened, and they recognised him.

The recognition comes when he blesses, breaks and gives the bread. It is the act of sharing that sustains life. Through this gesture he said: we eat together, therefore we belong to each other, therefore you are not alone.

The Eucharist in the Palestinian Christian tradition has always carried this weight. To break bread together is a declaration that the community continues. That we are still here. That the table has not been taken from us even when so much else has been.

I think of the Palestinian families in Gaza right now trying to find bread, some eating grass to survive, as the State of Israel continues to block aid, even today.

| think of the churches in Bethlehem and Ramallah and Nazareth, their congregations slowly hollowed out by occupation and economic strangulation. | think of Palestinian Christians in this country, in this city, who gather every Sunday and break bread and carry in their bodies the memory of a land they may never return to.

The risen Christ breaks bread with refugees.

That is the sacrament. Not the memory of a better time. The presence of Christ in the middle of now.

After he vanishes, the disciples turn to each other: Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road?

They knew.

Not consciously — but in the body. The recognition was being prepared the whole time: eleven kilometres of walking with someone who did not demand they be further along than they were, who shared the scriptures not to shame them but to show them the longer shape of the story, who stayed when they asked him to stay.

| have sat with Palestinian Christians in Australia who describe something like this, as we wait for a resolution. It’s a sense of accompaniment that cannot quite be explained except theologically — that Jesus of Nazareth, who walked to Emmaus, is still walking with us.

That the burning is still happening.

The burning does not extinguish what is real. The Nakba is real. The ongoing dispossession is real.

The loss borne by my grandfather's generation, and my parents' generation, and my generation is real and must be named honestly. The political climate in this country that treats Palestinian refugees as threats rather than neighbours is real and should be challenged.

But the burning means the story is not over. The walking has not been abandoned. The stranger is still on the road.

That same hour, the disciples rise and return to Jerusalem. Not at dawn. That same hour — in the dark, in the middle of everything that remains unresolved — they turn around and go back toward the city and the community and the story they had given up on.

Because something has shifted. They are no longer walking alone. And that has changed the direction of their feet.

I want to end where I began.

The road to Emmaus is the road of grief and bewilderment.

It is walked by people who had hoped and whose hope has been buried. It is walked away from home, away from the life that was promised, into an uncertain dark.

My grandfather walked that road. The people of his diocese walked that road — the Nazarenes' descendants, the oldest Christian community on earth, scattered from the land where they first heard the Gospel spoken in their own language, in their own hills, by one of their own. Their children and grandchildren are still walking it — through camps, across borders, through decades of displacement that much of the world ignores.

And the Gospel says: Christ walks it with them.

Not ahead of them, calling them to catch up. Not behind them, watching from a distance.

With them.

The road to Emmaus is a road we know.

And we know that we have never walked it alone.

Amen.