29 “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. 30 When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. 31 Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. [Luke 24:29-31, NRSV]
Supper at Emmaus by Hendrick Terbrugghen, c.1621 (Public domain).
Emmaus, we have come to appreciate, is about the healing of wounds and brokenness. That’s about life and life’s journey. In life’s journey, we are bound to be wounded sometimes. The two disciples from Emmaus may be wounded and broken, but they do not opt out of life. They may be feeling despondent on the road away from the place that gave them wounds and brokenness, but the Lord will join them right round the next bend, even if they do not recognize him.
From each of the Gospels, we read of several narratives of resurrection appearances of the Risen Lord to his disciples. They point us to the truth that Jesus is not only a figure of the past, but is alive and mysteriously present in the world. As the early disciples made a transition to recognize the Risen Lord’s presence, so must we. Today, we are invited to make that transition by living out the sacraments. They call us to recognize the presence of Christ in our lives and be transformed thereby. We get there by welcoming the Lord through the Spirit.
In How to Understand the Sacraments, authors Philippe Béguerie and Claude Duchesneau urge that the first thing we do is to stop thinking of the sacraments as something quasi-magical. Move away from thinking that it is enough for an action to be performed or a word to be spoken by someone who has the “power” (a priest, a minister of the sacrament) for the result to be achieved. God’s forgiveness of sin in an “absolution”, for example, cannot possibly be effective without sincere cooperation from the person who receives it. Likewise, “receiving grace” at Communion cannot possibly happen without a sincere disposition and life witness on the part of the communicant. You cannot possibly claim to have “received” grace at the altar if the very next minute right outside the church you are disgracefully ready to smash somebody’s car for blocking your way.
Vatican II reminds us that the sacraments are sacraments of faith. We need to rediscover the place of human freedom and adjust well our response to the actions of the living God. The sacraments are effective, Béguerie and Duchesneau insist, only if they express our life of faith. They are there to awaken and provoke our faith. Nothing is instantaneous like magic. They take time and they take time over our life journey. It is concrete. It is life. Luke 24:13-35 suggests that everyone is a pilgrim on the road to Emmaus. It is an ancient catechesis that the authors follow in three stages.
- A Mysterious Presence on the Human Road
The two men walking on the road and talking about what happened in their lives are ourselves, are all humankind. And it is on life’s journey that the Lord makes himself known. We are mistaken for thinking that we are out there in search of Christ; it is quite the other way round. He surprises us at a place and a time we least expect to meet him. He comes to meet us, even as we are preoccupied with our own concerns and least expect his presence right in front of us.
- “The travelers to Emmaus were returning home, Mary Magdalene was weeping over a dead man, the apostles were fishing on lake Tiberias. Later on, Paul left for Damascus for a police operation and the Ethiopian official was going back to his own country. The Lord is there, at a bend in the road. He gets involved in everyday life.” [Béguerie and Duchesneau, op. cit., p.27]
We ought to be sufficiently warned by now not to forget that the meeting between Christ and us can only take place on the human road, at the concrete level of everyday life. The sacraments are put to a use that is artificial and useless whenever they are administered without regard for the personal history of each one. Equally, they are rendered vacuous whenever we forget the vertical dimension, that is, to forget that it is God who takes the initiative and that we are but servants in an encounter with the Divine. Take, for example, marriage and human relationships.
- The Christian slogan on marital relationship is “it takes three to marry”. It is so that two people can sustain each other in love and fidelity in the constant presence of God that marriage is properly a sacrament and not just a human arrangement. The road to Emmaus is the road upon which all pairs of Christian people, married people, friends, lovers, parents and children, should be walking. There, Christ is with us, not looking down from ethereal heights on our world of human joys and sorrows, successes and failures, but treading with us the dusty, tiring roads of the earth.
- A Difficult Recognition
A recurring theme of the accounts of the appearances of the Risen Christ is the difficulty of recognition. Mary Magdalene believed him to be the gardener, the apostles in the Upper Room thought that he was a ghost, Peter and company had difficulty identifying the mysterious companion on Lake Tiberias, and Mark’s Gospel talks about the Risen Christ appearing in other forms. In the Gospels, therefore, the first Christian witnesses have forewarned us of the difficulty in recognizing the presence of the Lord. This alerts us to the same problem in all sacramental life. May we slow down a little, acknowledge a slow development of faith, and recognize a number of hurdles to be cleared:
- That Jesus accompanies us on our journey;
- That we have to carefully re-read life in the light of Scripture;
- That there is always the inevitable allusion to the drama of the Passion, the presence of the Paschal Mystery, and that pain is always part of the path.
- That an encounter cannot be had unless we, in the exercise of our human freedom, offer a hospitable invitation to the “stranger” to enter our lives.
- That there is always a sign, taken from everyday life, “a sign which is put like a seal on the long road towards recognition” – a fourfold meal pattern at the breaking of the bread, the Lord calling Mary Magdalene by name outside the tomb, at the lakeside, Jesus cooked the fish and invited the disciples to eat, and in the Upper Room, Jesus said, “See my hand and my feet, that is I myself.”
Béguerie and Duchesneau make an important observation: “Every sacrament is participation in Christ’s Pasch.” The Cross tells us that we shall all pass through death to recognize Christ on our way. That is the acid test for faith. It is like the law that governs a grain of wheat, which does not bear fruit unless it dies, and a disciple who displays nothing but cheap grace unless he takes up his cross daily and follows Jesus. Human love is hollow unless the paschal mystery is inscribed thereon. The Lord has shown that to become a true covenant, the project of faithfulness to God’s kingdom vision must be manifest in death and resurrection. In turn, fidelity in all human relationships, which “borders on the absurd”, lives the difficult truth that “a love which is to survive has always to be rising from its ashes.”
- The Birth of the Church and Its Mission
The end of every liturgical celebration ought to be a new beginning. The “sacrament cannot be reduced to the moment of its celebration. It comprises the whole road, and not merely the moment of the breaking of bread.”
Meeting the Lord at the breaking of the bread ought to drive us to take to the road again to proclaim the Word to the world. The Gospel of Matthew ends with these words from the Lord: “Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” Luke, however, ends his Gospel with the disciples returning to Jerusalem praising God in the temple. In the continuation volume of Acts, Luke then maps out how the Good News is spread from Jerusalem to the rest of the earth, just as the departing Lord has commanded the disciples to do at the end of Matthew’s narrative. Christ is always present on the human road. Risen from the dead, he gives us his Spirit and invites us to live out his Pasch, to lead us to true life – “Take up your cross and follow me.”
Copyright © Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh, December 2021. All rights reserved.
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