by CCW | 6 April 2015 20:28
Zechariah’s text carried us through the intensity of our meditations upon the Passion of Christ in Holy Week. His word is literally the last word of The Passion According to St. John read on Good Friday. But as we saw on Easter Day, his text also carries us into the understanding of the mystery of the Resurrection. We look upon him whom we have pierced and learn above all else the love of God for our wounded and broken humanity restored to love and by love in Christ Crucified.
To learn the Resurrection is to be pierced as well. It means to have our hearts and minds moved by what we see and hear. It means to contemplate the mystery of the Passion and the Resurrection for they are inseparable. No Passion, no Resurrection; and paradoxically, no Resurrection, no Passion. We can only make sense of the Resurrection through the Passion of Christ. This is what the Gospels show us both in Holy Week and in the pageant of the Resurrection which is before us in the Octave and through Eastertide. We are meant to be pierced into love and understanding by what is given to be seen and felt in the accounts of the Resurrection. Those accounts show us the ways in which the idea of the Resurrection comes to be known and believed.
On Easter Monday we have the Peter’s address about the Resurrection from Acts and the powerful Gospel story from St. Luke about the Road to Emmaus. Peter’s testimony bears witness to the bodily reality of the events of the Resurrection. Jesus “whom they slew, and hanged on a tree: him God raised up the third day, and showed him openly; not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before of God, even to us, who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead.” The word after is most telling. Christian witness is always about the Resurrection and that in turn is unthinkable without the Passion and the deeper meaning of the forgiveness of sins with which Peter ends his sermon in Acts. The Resurrection is proclaimed as made known to chosen witnesses “who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead.” A pretty powerful statement and one which is rendered even more powerful by Luke’s Road to Emmaus story. In both, the idea of looking upon him whom we have pierced is a critical part of the learning.
Two disciples are fleeing from Jerusalem on the day of the Resurrection. They are journeying we are told to Emmaus just a short ways outside of Jerusalem. They are as we learn fleeing in fear and in confusion and uncertainty. In a wonderful and dramatic way, Luke tells us that Jesus “drew near and went with them,” but they did not know it was he; “their eyes were holden, that they should not know him,” Luke says, already suggesting a deeper meaning and purpose to the encounter. Ultimately it is about how we come to know the Resurrection. The story is about simply that.
But I love the dynamic of the story in the idea of Jesus engaging us in conversation, not unlike Plato’s Socrates, and drawing out of us exactly what perplexes and confuses us before providing us with a way to begin to understand and to be radically changed by what we come to see and know. Jesus elicits from them the events of the Passion and, most importantly, the reports about his being alive despite having been buried, the reports of angels, the reports of the women, and, lest we not want to take their word (!), the reports of the other disciples who checked out what the women has said about the empty sepulchre.
The stage is set for the main event. In Luke’s account, we learn the Resurrection best and most completely from Jesus himself. His response to the confusion of the disciples is marvelous. “Foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken,” he says, addressing the state of our minds and our hearts! He then goes on to teach, “ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?”, speaking about himself in the third person and indicating the sense of purpose to events which seem unclear and confused to us. “Beginning at Moses, and all the prophets,” Jesus “expounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” The verb is ‘heremeneutized’, interpreted; it is all about a way of reading and understanding things. And all through the powerful image of the one whom we have pierced, all through the optic of the crucified, if you will.
It is a revealing and powerful passage that goes to the heart of Christian witness and life. Equally telling, however, is that fact that the disciples don’t seem to get it, at least not completely. So too for us, it seems. Something more is required to bring the lesson home to the heart. That something more is a gesture, a word in motion, we might say, that suddenly brings everything into focus and provides clarity. It is a kind of break-through of the understanding, a shattering of the confusions of our minds and hearts. The gesture which is a word in action is his taking bread and giving thanks with the disciples in the village of Emmaus. They are instantly recalled to the Upper Room in Jerusalem on the night when Jesus was betrayed, the night when he identified himself with the bread and the wine of the Passover and spoke about his forthcoming Passion.
As Luke puts it, “their eyes were opened, and they knew him,” though immediately “he vanished out of their sight.” The Risen Christ is with us, to be sure, but not in ordinary ways; the ordinary has been changed. But the interest of the story in Luke’s account comes next with the way in which the disciples speak about their anagnorisis, their ‘moment of recognition’ which will, of course, result in a peripeteia, a complete reversal of situation for them. “They said to one another, Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the Scriptures?” Wonderful. They are moved, pierced in their hearts, their hearts are opened to view and to the reality of Christ’s Resurrection and in complete contrast to their earlier fears and uncertainties. Would that all teaching and preaching have such a similar effect! But then we are not the Lord, the one who moves hearts and minds with truth and love.
The effect on the disciples is dramatic. They immediately return to Jerusalem, to that same Upper Room from which they had just fled in fear. They return in confidence and with a message, telling them that “the Lord is risen indeed” – the core of the Christian proclamation of Faith – and telling the others “how he was known of them in the breaking of the bread.”
Out of the wounded and pierced side of Christ crucified and dead flow the sacraments of the Church. Out of the one whom we behold pierced comes the joy and peace of the Resurrection but only if we look upon him and learn his love. At issue is whether our hearts will be pierced by what we see and hear about his Resurrection. The disciples on the Road to Emmaus told us what they heard and saw and how it changed them. That change is simply the Resurrection in them. It changes our entire outlook. Instead of fear and death, there is joy and life. For Christ is Risen, Alleluia, Alleluia!
Fr. David Curry
Monday in Easter Week 2015
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2015/04/06/sermon-for-monday-in-easter-week-2/
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