As Luke sets the scene, there is, at first, bewilderment: things had
gone terribly wrong; the one whom these disciples had hoped would
“redeem Israel” had died a shameful death in which Israel’s leaders were
complicit, because they regarded him as a blasphemer. Bewilderment then
gives way to deeper confusion: these two anonymous disciples had heard
the women’s tale of an empty tomb and a vision of angels who “said that
he was alive.” But they could not grasp what this “being alive” meant,
or what it had to do with the still-incomprehensible suffering and death
of the one who was the “redeem Israel.”
The stranger—the Risen One—then 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, where 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!”
Empty tomb and appearances; Word and Sacrament; the Cross and
the Resurrection: in its corporate memory of the beginnings of Easter
faith, to which Luke bears witness in this marvelously crafted
narrative, the Church held fast to everything that had shed light on the
radically new situation of those who had met the Risen One—and those
who believed the testimony of their friends who had. The Scriptures 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” changed, as did the idea of God’s “redemption” of
Israel, which now seemed to extend beyond the familiar boundaries.
Although they certainly would not have put it in these terms, the first
witnesses to the Resurrection were grasping for an understanding of what
Pope Benedict XVI would later describe, in Jesus of Nazareth—Holy Week,
as an ”evolutionary leap” in the human condition: a qualitatively new
mode of living was being revealed in the vibrant, manifestly human, but
utterly different life of the Risen Lord. And that, as the Octave of
Easter has taught again and again, changed everything.
In an Easter sermon with the suggestive title “The Heart of Stone
Beats Again,” Hans Urs von Balthasar suggests that this particular
Resurrection appearance ought to resonate in a special way with those
living in late modernity, who might well recognize themselves in the
disciples who wandered 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” —meaning 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 one of the psychological tricks we play on
ourselves to avoid confronting the fact that we are all destined for the
grave. (Read more.)
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