Wednesday in The Octave of Easter 2011 On The Emmaus Road

Mass readings for today are here.

This is a favourite passage in the Gospels: The Road To Emmaus.

When I feel downcast, discouraged and without hope it always brings a big smile to my face and gives me a profound joy beyond words, new energy and tranquility in a chaotic world.

I can be convinced that Christianity is true, I can be convinced that Jesus Christ is the Saviour of the world, but unless it becomes personal between me and Jesus it counts for nothing. It has to go from theory to commitment.

My post on this for 2010 is here.

Gospel : Luke 24 : 13-35

That very day, the first day of the week,
two of Jesus’ disciples were going
to a village seven miles from Jerusalem called Emmaus,
and they were conversing about all the things that had occurred.

And it happened that while they were conversing and debating,
Jesus himself drew near and walked with them,
but their eyes were prevented from recognizing him.

He asked them,
“What are you discussing as you walk along?”
They stopped, looking downcast.

One of them, named Cleopas, said to him in reply,
“Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem
who does not know of the things
that have taken place there in these days?”

And he replied to them, “What sort of things?”

They said to him,
“The things that happened to Jesus the Nazarene,
who was a prophet mighty in deed and word
before God and all the people,
how our chief priests and rulers both handed him over
to a sentence of death and crucified him.

But we were hoping that he would be the one to redeem Israel;
and besides all this,
it is now the third day since this took place.

Some women from our group, however, have astounded us:
they were at the tomb early in the morning
and did not find his Body;
they came back and reported
that they had indeed seen a vision of angels
who announced that he was alive.

Then some of those with us went to the tomb
and found things just as the women had described,
but him they did not see.”

And he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are!
How slow of heart to believe all that the prophets spoke!

Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things
and enter into his glory?”

 

Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets,
he interpreted to them what referred to him
in all the Scriptures.

As they approached the village to which they were going,
he gave the impression that he was going on farther.

 

Above : Road to Emmaus James Tissot

But they urged him, “Stay with us,
for it is nearly evening and the day is almost over.”

So he went in to stay with them.

And it happened that, while he was with them at table,

he took bread, said the blessing,

broke it, and gave it to them.

 

  

Above image from salt and light blog here

With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him,
but he vanished from their sight.

Then they said to each other,
“Were not our hearts burning within us
while he spoke to us on the way and opened the Scriptures to us?”

So they set out at once and returned to Jerusalem
where they found gathered together
the Eleven and those with them who were saying,
“The Lord has truly been raised and has appeared to Simon!”

Then the two recounted what had taken place on the way
and how he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

Reflections

One of the reasons I love the Emmaus story is because it helps me see again the depth and mystery of  Christ's love for us, following where we go, stopping to listen when we are dumbfounded, listening when we cry and staying to feed us when we are hungry. 

I know there are many places where I am given evidence that Jesus was raised to life again but for me the Emmaus road is where I know I will always be able to go to meet Him even for a brief moment and there I can share in the endless joy of His eternal life.

This is a great reflection on the Road to Emmaus by Professor Ian Hunter in the Canadian National Post from which I have extracted the following key parts:

 

"The traditional exposition of the passion of Christ has two foci: one, on the hill called Golgotha where Jesus was crucified under a hand-lettered sign whose superscription (“This is the king of the Jews”) was intended by Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor who wrote it, to be ironic; 

Second, on the tomb discovered empty by the disciples on Easter morning, the stone rolled away, the inhabitant gone, the empty tomb a symbol of Christ’s victory over death and the climax of God’s redemptive drama. 

But I like to think that the biblical penchant for threes (think of the Trinity, the three Magi)  is also in the Easter narrative if you look closely. 

In Luke’s Gospel, we find the third focus of Easter, and an unlikely one it is: a parched and dusty stretch of road running from the city of Jerusalem to the insignificant village of Emmaus.

Cleopas, a relative of Christ’s family, and another disciple were walking along this road and, inevitably, talking about the shattering events that had just happened: the crucifixion, their likely peril as followers of Jesus, and now the reports of an empty tomb. 

The women of their company were talking about visions of angels and a gardener who resembled Jesus. What can it all mean?

And so the Easter Trinity is complete: the hill called Golgotha; the empty tomb; and the road to Emmaus. 

Miraculous it is that these three locations and events were to shape the succeeding 2,000 years of human history -even today in our “post-Christian” era not quite forgotten.

In the 1960s, the great British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge made a BBC television series on the life of Christ; in the last scene, Muggeridge and a friend walked the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus. Muggeridge wrote:

“As my friend and I walked along like Cleopas and his friend, we recalled as they did the events of the Crucifixion and its aftermath in the light of our utterly different and yet similar world.

Nor was it a fancy that we too were joined by a third presence. 

And I tell you that whatever the walk, and whoever the wayfarers, there is always this third presence ready to emerge from the shadows and to fall in step along the dusty, stony way.”

Further Reading

• Easter: Energy And Exhaustion (bigcircumstance.com)
• Sad Hearts Sing - The Walk to Emmaus (trinitytuscaloosa.wordpress.com)

• Pounding and Burning Hearts On The Road To Emmaus

PRAYER 

Stay with me, Lord, along the journey, 

help me to discover you each day 

in the breaking of the Word and the Bread. 

The hymn I Am the Bread of Life is lovely but some of the images in the video below are a bit cheesy...