Third Sunday Of Easter
LUKE 24:13-35 (Acts 2:14, 22-33; 1 Peter 1:17-21)
The Emmaus Experience! Two of Jesus’ disciples were returning from their Passover pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Their destination was the town of Emmaus seven miles from Jerusalem. En route they were discussing the events concerning Jesus that had taken place in the Holy City. Jesus drew near to them and walked with them. As we have seen in the Gospel of John in recent readings, the risen body of Jesus, although the same body, yet had new qualities. They did not recognize Jesus but he senses their sadness. He joins the conversation. “What are you talking about?” They try to enlighten this stranger about what has happened to Jesus of Nazareth during the recent Passover. They had put their hope in him as their deliverer. But deliver from what? Luke does not say at this time.
If their unformed faith was like that of Jesus’ apostles, the hoped for deliverer (redeemer) would be a combination of prophet and Messiah/Christ/King who would free them from Roman occupation. Luke, writing fifty years after the event, no doubt had a very differ-end and updated understanding of Jesus as deliverer/redeemer. One of the two disciples, Cleopas, is the speaker in this dialogue. He mentions a rumor about women disciples of Jesus going to the tomb on the third day after Jesus’ death and finding the tomb empty. In none of our four gospels does anyone see the resurrection – only the empty tomb. When women reported something that serious, it had to be verified by men. Some went to the tomb and it was just as the women had said – with a difference. The women claimed they had seen angels who said that Jesus was alive. This was not granted to the men, and they deserved this limitation for doubting the women who were divinely commissioned to announce the resurrection of Jesus.
Jesus, the stranger still unrecognized by them, reprimands them. He calls them anoetoi, that is, mindless, and slow learners (mentally challenged), since all that had happened to Jesus could be easily verified from the Old Testament prophets. Since the prophets verified these events centuries before they happened, they had to happen. Therefore Jesus asks them, “Was it not necessary that the Messiah must suffer these things and enter into his glory?” This is Luke’s opportunity to instruct his Christian congregation that the road to glory is through the sufferings to which they had to submit as human beings and as Christians. Luke had written in 9:23, “If anyone wants to come along behind me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily and follow me.”
Then Jesus becomes the teacher of Scripture, “Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” “All the Scriptures” implies the three major divisions of the Hebrew Old Testament: Moses, (meaning the Torah); Prophets; and Writings, (whatever was not included in Torah and Prophets, for example the Psalms). Thus it was thought already in New Testament times that interpretations of Old Testament Scriptures were not final. They found their perfection in the light of Jesus’ word, deeds, and experiences, and in the life of the Church. Thus they were given new meaning – as was done by all our New Testament documents. As long as we accept that all Scriptures are inspired by the Holy Spirit, it should not be difficult to accept that the new meanings given to Old Testament texts were accomplished through the action of the Holy Spirit on the authors of the New Testament.
Much conversation can take place even with a stranger during a walk of seven miles. Darkness was approaching. It seemed to them that the stranger intended to keep walking. They invited him to stay with them and share their meal. Table fellowship was an import-ant element of Middle Eastern hospitality. After people shared a meal, they were said to have “exchanged salt,” a sign of peace between them forever. Now comes the opening of their eyes to recognize the stranger. Jesus engages in a ritual which by the time of Luke, fifty years after the event, had come to be called “the breaking of the bread.” Luke uses the words which were by his time the standard form of the ritual, “He took bread, blessed it, and broke it, and gave it….” These are the key words we still use to this day in the Eucharistic Prayers. St. Paul hands on to us the earliest form of this ritual in the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 11:23-24, a decade or two before the gospels were written.
As they recognized Jesus, he vanished from their sight, not from them but from their sensory perception. His body was now glorified, no longer subject to physical limitations. The rest of the story includes two remarkable statements. The two disciples rush back to Jerusalem to report their sighting of the risen Lord. The Eleven have news for them too, “The Lord has risen indeed and has appeared to Simon (Peter).” The first of the two remarkable statements of this conclusion: “Did not our hearts burn within us…while he talked…, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” So should the heart of all Christians burn when the Scriptures are opened to them in reading or in a homily, at least if the homily is about the Scriptures. The second remarkable statement, “…he was known to them in the breaking of the bread.” In 1994 a New York Times and CBS poll found that 70% of U.S. Catholics did not believe in the Real Presence. Has the true Church, whose center is the Eucharist, become a mere remnant? Does Jesus’ reprimand of the Emmaus disciples apply to the 70%? Who or what is at fault in the loss of faith in the Real Presence?
