“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”
The Road to Emmaus is one of the most interesting of the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection. It shows us the transformation of grief and sorrow into joy and understanding. It shows two of the disciples in flight from Jerusalem in perplexity and confusion about Christ’s crucifixion. It shows Jesus running out after us, as it were, in our confusion and uncertainty to engage our minds with the radical meaning of his Passion as seen through the witness of the Scriptures, on the one hand, and through the forms of Christ’s identity and presence with us sacramentally, on the other hand.
The story has a wonderful narrative force. We sense the dismay and broken-heartedness of these two unnamed disciples. Their expectations have all been shattered. Their world has been turned upside down. They are in a state of confusion and complexity. They are “talk[ing] together of all these things which had come to pass.” But where there are two, there is always a third. “Who is the third who walks always beside you,” Eliot asks in The Waste Land (Death by Water). Jesus himself drew near, and went with them.” As Luke puts it, “their eyes were holden, that they should not know him.” This is not really so strange and unbelievable. After all, their confusion and uncertainty is because they saw Jesus crucified and dead. They have no reason and no expectation of seeing him.
The exchange is what is most telling. Jesus draws out of them what belongs to their confusion and uncertainty. Such things are not hidden, they are clearly and unambiguously acknowledged: the crucifixion, the empty tomb, the testimony of the woman about the witness of angels to his being alive. Only then, does Jesus embark upon the teaching. It is done in an objective manner, in third person narrative. “Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?” The phrase challenges their expectations and their thinking. And ours, too. The teaching is by way of “expound[ing] unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself,” again in third person narrative. He is providing them with a way of understanding, a way of thinking the deeper meaning of all that has transpired. It is through the rebirth of images, we might say, in terms of the interpretation of the Scriptures which here refers necessarily and only to the Jewish Scriptures. He is opening out to them and to us the radical idea and meaning of the Resurrection. As we argued at Easter, Passion and Resurrection go together.
He teaches. But do we get the lesson? Do we learn? What will it take for us to understand what God in Christ wants us to know? Along with the opening out of the Scriptures to the understanding of the disciples, Jesus stays with them and “as he sat at meat with them, he took bread and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them.” This recalls explicitly the Last Supper on the very eve of his Passion. As Luke simply puts it, “their eyes were opened.” It is an image for understanding. It means they got the teaching. The teaching is Jesus. It is Resurrection. It is the divine life. Its effect on them is profound. It is not just words but words and action. They recall how they felt “while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the Scriptures.” It is not words versus deeds or vice-versa. It is both words and deeds.
The encounter transforms them from fear and confusion to confidence and knowledge. They return to Jerusalem to proclaim the Resurrection about “how he was known of them in the breaking of the bread.” This is testimony to one of the ways in which we learn. God uses the things of the world to teach us the things of the spirit. Such is the logic of the sacraments. They are about nothing less than our participation in the life of God through word and action. Such is the renewal and the restoration of our broken hearts. Jesus runs out to teach us and to make himself known to us in his essential life.
Christ is Risen. Alleluia! Alleluia! The Lord is Risen indeed. Alleluia! Alleluia!
Fr. David Curry
Monday in Easter Week