THE EMMAUS ROAD BECKONS YOU

The Road to Emmaus

Today’s Gospel reading from St. Luke tells of the Risen Lord’s encounter with two disciples on the road to Emmaus. It is, without doubt, one of the literary gems of the New Testament.
It also summarizes neatly the long and sometimes difficult path the first witnesses to the Resurrection had to walk in order to arrive at the fullness of Easter faith.

Luke sets the scene, at first, with bewilderment:

Things had gone terribly wrong - Jesus, the one the disciples had hoped would “redeem Israel" had died a shameful death. In His demise, Israel’s leaders were complicit, since they regarded him as a blaspheming rebel.

But wilderment gives way to a deeper confusion, since these two anonymous disciples had also heard the women’s tale of an empty tomb and a vision of angels who said that, "he was alive.”

Alive? How could THAT be - they had seen Jesus die in an excruciating way, crucified on a Jerusalem hilltop.
They were not prepared to grasp what this, “being alive” meant, or how to connect it to the still-incomprehensible suffering and death of the one who was, supposedly, the “redeemer of Israel.”

So they probably thought little of the the stranger they met on the road to Emmaus. But as he spoke — the Risen One — he begins to make things clear...

“Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself,” including the necessary passage through suffering of the redeemer of Israel.

And yet they still did not grasp what had happened, or who this stranger was. It is only when. “he took the bread and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them,” that, “their eyes were opened and they recognized him.”
At which point, “He vanished out of their sight.”

Stunned at their own blindness — “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures?" — they rush back to Jerusalem to make their profession of Easter faith.

There, they are greeted with a parallel act of faith by the Eleven and their companions: “The Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon!”

- An empty tomb and appearances;
- Word and Sacrament;
- The Cross and the Resurrection

Luke bears witness in this marvelously crafted narrative, to the what became our Easter faith.
The Church held tightly to everything that illuminated the radically new situation of those who had met the Risen One...and to those who's friends had, as well.

The Scriptures now had to be read afresh, with new eyes.
Messianic expectations had to be recast.
Common acts that had once indicated table fellowship, like the breaking of bread and its blessing, now took on deeper meanings.
The very idea of, “history,” was changed. So also was God’s “redemption” of Israel, which now expanded to include non-Jews.

These first witnesses to the Resurrection were grasping for an understanding of what Pope Benedict XVI would later describe as an, ”evolutionary leap in the human condition," where a new way of living was revealed in the vibrant, manifestly human, but utterly different life of the Risen Lord.

Although those disciples certainly would not have put it in these terms, the Octave of Easter continues to teach us that The Resurrection of Jesus changed everything.

In a sermon with the suggestive title “The Heart of Stone Beats Again,” Hans Urs von Balthasar suggests that this particular Resurrection appearance should resonate with those living in late modernity.
He suggests they might well recognize themselves in the thick-headed disciples wandering down the Emmaus road some two millennia ago.

All of us, Balthasar notes, are in a hurry — but to where?
We are all beset by, “a constant stream of images” — which mean what?
“There is so much hustle and bustle. What we can contain in our heads is so little, and the more that forces its way in, the less we can hold.”
Busyness, we discover sooner or later, is no substitute for purposefulness. Busyness, we may even begin to suspect, is a psychological trick we play on ourselves to avoid confronting the fact that we are all destined for the grave.

What, then, are we looking for, in this often aimless wandering?
Balthazar suggests we are looking for what those two confused disciples found on the Emmaus road: “the tangible reality of resurrection from the dead.”

And this is what Christians have found:

One man has come back, not a spirit-like phenomenon, but in flesh and blood.

“Touch me and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have.”

He did not come back as a hologram for his disciples, because he could not. He HAD to appear as a material man, since none of them had the least idea of even THAT possibility. In fact, he had a hard battle against their stubborn unbelief when he DID appear.

This One Man has brought back with him from the realm of the dead the hope and certainty of eternal life for all.

He brings us the very thing we need, namely, a continuing life that is not simply a continuation of the old life….A continuing life, but not totally new and different either. We are not talking about a new form of cosmic life on some other planet, for instance... that would be no solution and we would no longer be ourselves.
So it is a new life, but not an unfamiliar one. It is both a transition into God’s eternity, and at the same time, the transfiguration and fulfillment of all that remained hopelessly unfulfilled and unfulfillable on earth.
This wonderful, unique, earthly life, purified of all its slag, it to be lifted up the plane of the eternal.

The challenge today, as for the disciples en route to Emmaus, is to overcome our disbelief that anything could be so good, so true, so beautiful.
That radical New Life promised by Easter faith, Balthasar suggests, is why Christians are dangerous..., and it is why Christians are persecuted.

“Right from the beginning,” he writes, “Christianity was seen as a total, highly dangerous revolution.”
In the days of St. Lawrence, it challenged the Roman authorities, who were convinced that no other faith could keep public order like their pagan cult.
Today, it does much the same - it challenges cultures committed to skepticism, secularism, naturism, and relativism.

Since Christianity proclaims what Balthasar calls, “the revolt of meaning against the meaninglessness of dying,” you would think its announcement would be eagerly embraced.

But that ignores the darkening of mind and hardening of will that is humanity’s enduring legacy of ignorance.
The Resurrection revolts against the finality of bodily disintegration, and makes it clear that the body is not merely a tool to be used as whim dictates here and now. But that challenges the secular hedonism of the twenty-first century.
Gods love as evidenced in the Resurrection challenges twenty-first century cynicism, too, which confuses love with pleasure and which cannot imagine permanence in love.

The Emmaus story should also reassure Christians at those moments when faith falters.
In our Lenten journey of conversion, the momentum is always toward Jerusalem; thus, the two disciples in today’s Easter story are walking in the wrong direction—away from Jerusalem, and away from the Cross.
Yet their misdirection is repaired by the Risen One, who walks with them as he walks with us, even when we are headed in the wrong direction.
He walks with us in the Scriptures and in the Holy Eucharist; he walks with us into the confessional; and in that pastoral accompaniment, he points us back to the right path.

To put it bluntly, The Resurrection changes EVERYTHING. Little wonder that it took so long for the disciples to recognize the Risen One and to grasp what had happened to Him, and to them.
Little wonder that it takes a lifetime of faith for us to grasp the meaning of Resurrection faith, in our time.
Amid that struggle to understand, however, the Risen Lord walks with those whose hearts burn for Him. Their yearning for the God-love that won't die conquers their fear of losing the world.

That is the testimony in the First Letter of Peter, as true today as when the first leaders of the Church preached to the newly baptized two millennia ago:

“Christ…suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.
He committed not sin….He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you were healed.
For you were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Guardian of your souls.”

— excerpted from George Weigel, Roman Pilgrimage: The Station Churches