3rd Sunday of Easter A - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2005 

Why did Luke write his gospel? Not particularly to prove anything, not just for the sake of leaving some historical record, but to help his community, sixty years later, to understand their own experience as disciples and their relationship with Jesus. Luke’s concern was not so much: How did Cleopas and his friend recognise Jesus? but: How does my community recognise him ... now?

So what was Luke up to in this story of the disciples and Jesus on the way to Emmaus? No one seems to know where Emmaus is. Perhaps even Luke’s community would equally have no knowledge of it. So it was anywhere: here, where we are, or where we’re going. What does the story have for us?

Jesus was there with Cleopas and his friend, but they did not recognise him ... they did not realise that he was there with them. What opened them to recognise Jesus? As Luke tells the story, there are a number of relevant issues: they were able to own their own deep disappointment, their confusion, their uncertainty, their inability to believe: they listened to him speaking and reviewing their scriptures, that gave meaning to – put words around – their experience of Jesus, and to his death, and resurrection: they opened their hearts and their home in hospitality; they invited him in without knowing who he was; and the breakthrough came with the ritual of the breaking of the bread.

In his connected work, the Acts of Apostles, Luke emphasised the same elements when speaking of the early Christian community in Jerusalem (remember the reading from two Sundays ago). There he wrote: The disciples remained faithful to the teaching of the apostles, to the brotherhood, to the breaking of the bread, and to the prayers.

He wrote this way because the experience of the disciples of Jesus, and of the early Christian community, was the potential experience of his own community. Might I say, it is the potential experience of this community, twenty centuries later.

Let us return to the Gospel story. What blocked the disciples from recognising Jesus? Their expectations: we hoped that he would be the one ... The same problem so often is ours: We can be surprised when we gather to celebrate Eucharist at our own lack of spontaneous interest, our sometimes uncharitable thoughts as we look around, how our minds wander. We would have expected to be more recollected, more focussed. Yet there is only one place and time where we find him: and that is in the here and now.

But to find him we need to be in touch with where we are at (as with the disciples walking to Emmaus): we need to own our hurts, our needs, our hopes and desires. We can only start from there. Anywhere else would be unreal – it would not be us, but some unreal “us” that we think should be or would be if... We can only start from where we are and try to stay there, and to be in touch with our real selves, knowing he is with us.  

So here we are now, gathered together, on the first day of the week. He is here – there is no point in looking anywhere else. We won’t see him in Emmaus, wherever that might be for us, if we can’t see him now. As was the case with the two disciples, we do our best to open our hearts to each other in welcome, we open our minds to his Word in the scriptures, and hope that they will give some sense to our lives; we open our hearts and minds to both him and to each other in our sharing together of his body broken for us and his blood poured out for us.  

And we know that he is with us. It’s an act of faith. Sometimes it’s an act of wonder.