April 3, 2008
Pulse
Easter 3A Lk 24.13-35
Luke uses an interesting literary device in recounting the walk down the road to Emmaus. He writes a story within a story. [Shakespeare did it in “Hamlet” and maybe got the idea from Luke.]
History already knows about Good Friday and Easter for more than 2000 times. Luke’s early readers knew. We know. But these two men walking along the nine miles from Jerusalem to Emmaus did not know. There they were, right on the front line of the news that we call the Good News, and they didn’t know. Maybe better it is to say, they didn’t know that they knew. And then begins the story within the story.
Jesus, as he has a way of doing, suddenly shows up from nowhere. Finding an audience for their fear, their anxiety, the men excitedly and sadly tell him about how the crucifixion had crushed their hopes. But then, they say, yet startled beyond belief, that some women claimed they’d been there and done that and seen the empty tomb and had a vision of angels who told them Jesus was alive. The men didn’t believe them, so they went to look for themselves, and all they found was an empty tomb. I like to think that’s all they saw because of the way they looked, they saw only what they expected to see.
“O foolish men,” says Jesus, “and slow of heart to believe… ” (And there’s the tip off — slow of heart, slow of perception, slow of faith.) Then Jesus offers for them his own private accounting — Moses, the prophets, all with the whole sweep of scripture up to and including himself. They still do not know who he is, but they’re obviously intrigued, invite him for dinner, and in the breaking of bread together, their capacity is opened finally to know that they knew.
Life is a story within stories. It is a collection of stories, my story, your story, our family’s stories, the world’s story as the geologists tell it from the Big Bang to the fractal changes our own saga makes on the cosmos. We are a part of the pulse of a kind of cosmic, interstellar cardiovascular system. Here we are pumping along and, it seems until we learn otherwise, giving it heart and voice and mind. Our own histories are made as we tell of them, as they unfold, as we walk them and come ever so often to our own forks in the road, and, like Yogi Berra said, take them.
The ever-present Jesus is always on the road with us, but, as Luke’s story tells it, our eyes are kept from recognizing him. As I’ve read this story so many times before, I’ve always presumed it was Jesus who kept his identity to himself. But no, I suddenly realize that whatever, it is I who keep his identity from myself. I keep my eyes from recognizing him, from seeking and serving Christ in all persons, from loving my neighbor as myself.
For he is there in every act of kindness, in every gift of freedom and justice, in every act of compassion, in every risk of faithfulness, in every warmth and inclusion and reception, in every act of love and commitment and justice. And, of course, he is there confronting when just the opposite of these things takes place. Faith opens our eyes to see him wherever he joins us on our road and especially as we come to Table with him in the breaking of bread. He is the Story within the story, the story within our story, the story within the church’s story.
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