by CCW | 2 April 2018 20:00
The word for Easter is Resurrection. But how do we know about the Resurrection? How do we begin to understand what is meant by the Resurrection? Few Gospel stories illumine our understanding better than Luke’s famous story of Christ on the Road to Emmaus. “He was known of them in the breaking of the bread.”
“Him God raised up the third day, and showed him openly, Luke tells in the Lesson from Acts, rehearsing features of the life of Christ and especially the events of the Passion and then the Resurrection, or rather the making known of his Resurrection. The Risen Christ is made known “unto witnesses chosen before of God, even to us,”Luke suggests, “who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead,”the very things which his Gospel account, too, will emphasize. The Resurrection, it seems, can only be known by way of testimony, by way of witnesses, by way of a reflection on extraordinary things. Thus Luke’s Gospel shows the Risen Christ running out after us, as it were, and inserting himself into our conversation about our perplexities and confusions, drawing out of us, in good Socratic fashion the nature of our own uncertainties and, then, providing a way to make sense of it all. So in the story of the Road to Emmaus, we have two disciples fleeing Jerusalem in fear because of the events of the crucifixion, “talk[ing] together of all these things that had happened.”Jesus joins them but is not recognized by them; after all, they aren’t expecting him given the events of the crucifixion and its aftermath.
He gets them to explain their perplexities about the crucifixion itself and then the report of the women and the other disciples, and even the vision of angels about the empty tomb. “Foolish one, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken,” Jesus says to them, “ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?”Note, once again, that conjunction of suffering and glory. With that compelling introduction, “he expounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.”It becomes a repeated trope by Luke, namely, the idea of Christ “opening to us the Scriptures”and “opening their understanding”to provide us a way of thinking the radical nature of the Resurrection.
And yet, it is not just about being told these things. Something else happens that opens their understanding. Sometimes a simple gesture, a simple action reveals everything. Jesus tarries with them and“as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them.”In a wonderful economy of expression, Luke says, “and their eyes were opened.”
Word and Sacrament. Word audible and spoken, Word visible and tangible. The interplay and balance of these is exquisite. The Risen Christ teaches us about the radical meaning of his Resurrection. God raised him from the dead. He lives and he lives in us. Our humanity has no life apart from God in Christ. His Resurrection changes everything and it changes us. The two disciples return to Jerusalem from which they had fled in fear to proclaim the Resurrection. They are set in motion; they are changed. The teaching here is captured in a simple word: “he was known of them in the breaking of the bread.”
Fr. David Curry
Monday in Easter Week, 2018
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2018/04/02/sermon-for-monday-in-easter-week-3/
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