Homily: 3rd Sunday of Easter - Lessons on the road to Emmaus

These Sundays after easter, the six Sundays between Easter Sunday and Pentecost Sunday are joyful ones, as we continue to celebrate the glory of that first Easter Sunday.

And throughout the Easter Season we read in Scripture accounts of the appearances of Jesus to the disciples after his Resurrection, and we have one of the most renowned of the post-Resurrection accounts today: his appearance to the disciples on the Road to Emmaus. 

It was the first Easter Sunday, late afternoon; two of the disciples were walking away from Jerusalem, pretty down in the dumps, for it appeared that Jesus had been defeated, all their hopes in Jesus had been crushed.  Jesus had died terribly on the cross and had been buried. 

So, they were walking to Emmaus, trying to get away from the bad news, when Jesus himself appeared to them and began to walk with them.

There have been volumes written about this story; I will focus on three points.

Firstly, St. Luke tells us that these two friends of Jesus did NOT recognize him, initially.  Jesus was no doubt the last person they expected; they had witnessed his crucifixion, they knew his body had been entombed.  You can imagine how so absorbed in the apparent defeat, so wrapped up in recounting the bad news, that 

Jesus rising and appearing to them and walking along with them didn’t seem in the realm of possibility. 

They were so wrapped up in the bad news of the past few days, that the good news seemed neither possible nor relevant.  I’d propose that the same temptation exists for us: to become so focused on or overwhelmed by bad news, by our own worries sorrows, that the good news seems neither possible nor relevant. 

Perhaps when faced by a particularly painful circumstance of life to ask, “God, where are you?”  Maybe to wonder if God has abandoned me, or even tempted to believe, when confronted with such evil in the world to doubt if He ever existed in the first place.  To allow the bad news of the world to overwhelm so much that our eyes are prevented from seeing Jesus Christ walking next to me, is a real danger for any Christian.

Secondly, not only did the disciples lose sight of Jesus, but they started to believe erroneous things about him.  The two disciples concluded that because of the cross Jesus was not divine, he was not God.

They had pinned their hopes on him. “We were hoping he would be the one to save us” they said, “but he was crucified.”  They had believed Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God.   But when because of the cross, and death, and burial, their faith in Jesus as Messiah was shaken.

Then Jesus spoke to them, “How foolish you are being.  Did you not know that God has told us through the prophets that the Christ would have to suffer?” 

This is one of the arguments that Muslims often pose to disprove Christianity; if Jesus was God then he wouldn’t have died because God can’t die.  Christians answer that argument by stating; we believe that That God so loved us that he become like us to suffer for us and really died for us.  Jesus shows us the depths of God’s love for us by taking upon him the sins of the world for us and nailing them to the cross.

We heard this argument during the reading of the Lord’s Passion during Holy Week.  Matthew’s Gospel tells us that while hanging on the cross, the chief priests made the same argument, they said, “if you are really the Son of God, come down from the cross, save yourself.”  Yet, God became man not to save us from the cross, but to save us through the cross. 

Again sometimes we are tempted: whenever the cross enters our life, and does it ever unfailingly, our presumption is that God cannot be there.  Yet, Christian faith is God is precicely on the cross with us,  that as we suffer our crosses we can know, and sense, and experience God’s closeness; we can know his Divine Presence.

Do not be afraid, for I am with you always.  God can be discovered even in terrible agony.

A final lesson: when was it that those two disciples on the road to Emmaus finally woke up and realized Jesus was 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. With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him.”  They recognized this stranger as Jesus, they recognized him as the Son of God, in the breaking of bread.

He performed those actions once before at the Last Supper, he took bread, blessed it, and gave it to them.  Now again, they recognized Jesus in the celebration of the Eucharist.

In just a few minutes you’ll hear those words again in the Eucharistic prayer, as Jesus becomes present to us here. 

Just as he was truly with at the Last Supper, truly present on the cross, truly present on the road to Emmaus, he becomes truly present here at Mass, so recognize Him once again in the breaking of the bread.

Last week, the Church rejoiced at the canonization of Saint John Paul II.  One of the last letters Pope John Paul II wrote to the Church was called, “Mane Nobiscum Domine” the latin for, “stay with us Lord” the words spoken by the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. 

The disciples urged him, “Stay with us,” Mane Nobiscum Domine, stay with us Lord.” And he went in and he gave them the Eucharist.  That prayer, “stay with us Lord” Saint John Paul teaches us, is answered in the Holy Eucharist.

Christians who have an authentic encounter with Jesus desire that the Lord remain with us.

This is why it is so important for Christians to come to Mass weekly.  When Catholics stop going to Mass they lose sight of God.  Their faith suffers.  And so many other activities and distractions which are not life giving fill in the gaps.

In an article for the Universe Bulletin, Bishop Lennon wrote, where our life is centered on a false God of prosperity, prestige, or mere pursuit of the good life—one will likely reap a harvest of exhaustion and unhappiness.  But, the person and family, who places Christ at the center of life, including God in  their weekly schedules and activities, meals, chores, conversations, parenting, work, vacations, civic responsibilities, decisions, problems, crises, accomplishments, losses—the whole of their lives become changed and charged with God’s presence.

Saint John Paul said, “the Eucharist is a mystery of light.”  When we come here to Mass, light is shed upon our lives; our lives become filled with his light.  It is here that we receive the light to see that God is with us in our darkest hours, to see how to love each other as God loves us.

Upon recognizing the Lord,  the disciple of Emmaus “set out immediately”, in order to report what they had seen and heard.  May we go forth from this Mass with greater urgency and faith to proclaim the Good News and imbue our society with Christian values for the glory of God and salvation of souls.