Sunday, April 30, 2017
III Easter - April 30, 2017
III Easter
April 30,
2017
Holy Trinity and St. Anskar
…He took
bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them.
Then their eyes
were opened and they recognized Him;
and He vanished
from their sight.
+In the Name of
God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
Seeing and knowing, blind belief, Thomas’s finger and the
breaking of bread. The disciples first see the risen Jesus, but do not know Him,
then in the instant that they know Him, they no longer see Him. Or, rather,
their ordinary way of seeing is
replaced by knowing. There may be an
analogy with Thomas’s insistence on thrusting his finger into our Lord’s
wounded side, but then not doing so when invited, as we heard last week. Both
of these stories seem to refer to a change in consciousness.
Thomas wanted verification.
He understood that our eyes can play tricks on us, and that sometimes we see
what we want to see, even though it really isn’t there. Thomas would not be
content with “seeing is believing.” No. Thomas must actually touch the Body of the Risen Lord, before
he will believe. No “blind belief” for him — not even belief verified by
seeing. He had to have tactile proof. But in the event, it didn’t turn out that
way. He KNEW the Resurrection without using his finger. Today, we hear that the Apostles saw Him, He taught
them, and their hearts burned within them, but still they did not recognize
Him. They did not know Him until the
moment of the breaking of the bread,
and in that very instant he vanished from their sight. As with Thomas, ordinary
consciousness and ordinary ways of seeing and knowing were left behind.
This is not “blind belief”
nor even “seeing and believing”; it is a whole new consciousness that
supersedes our ordinary experience of reality.
Today’s story is obviously a
reference to the experience of first-century Christians — and all other
Christians ever sense, including us — the experience of all of us who are on the Way. We know Him in the breaking
of bread — that is, we know Him in the Eucharist. I think the whole Emmaus incident
refers to the Eucharistic liturgy. In every liturgy, there are two parts: the Liturgy
of Word And the Liturgy of Sacrament. Likewise in the first part of this story,
the Lord instructs the two disciples. They hear Him and see Him, but they still
don’t KNOW Him. He remains incognito,
as He explains the scriptures to them. Then, in the second part of the story, He
stops with them at the Inn.
Now it is not much of a stretch
to see the Inn as a local community of Christians – a parish. That very word comes from the ancient Greek, meaning substitute house or temporary dwelling: an INN. So, the table inside this Inn is the
Altar. But having first been invited, the Lord becomes the Host: He took the
bread, broke it, blessed, and gave it to them. These are the four actions
repeated in every Eucharist. Representing the Risen Christ, the priest TAKES
the bread and wine at the Offertory, BLESSES them At the Consecration, BREAKS
the bread at the Fraction, and then GIVES it to them as Communion.
In that moment, we hear, their “eyes were
opened,” but when they recognized Him, He “vanished from their sight,” in the
same instant. Like Thomas’s finger, the ordinary way of seeing became
irrelevant, unimportant. For now they knew
Him. The risen Lord really was with them — He really walked along with the two
disciples, and He really stood in the locked room with Thomas. But the Reality of
that Presence was greater than we can imagine — at least with our ordinary
consciousness. For the Real Presence of the risen Lord is cosmic, or rather
meta-cosmic — it is beyond the universe that we can know with our ordinary
means of perception: it includes but also exceeds everything that we know in
this life — or on this plane of existence,
as we might say mowadays.
The Presence of the Risen
Lord in the Broken Bread is far more Real
than our ordinary consciousness can take in. However , by regularly coming into
this Presence, our consciousness can be changed, so that — as the Apostle has
put it —
It does
not yet appear what we shall be but we know that when He shall appear we shall
be like Him, because we shall see Him as he is.
Could that explain the sudden change in Thomas and
the two Emmaus disciples? Suddenly they
know at a new level. Thomas utters the first unambiguous confession of the
Divinity of Christ, and the two disciples get up from the table, and hurry back
to Jerusalem in the middle of the night. Everything has changed. Nothing will
ever be the same for them again.
This is all pretty strange.
Lots of paradoxes crowd around the Gospel accounts, the good news of the
opening of Heaven, the blending of ordinary reality and Ultimate Reality, the
intercourse between the created and the uncreated, what we might call the
crossing of the uncrossable boundary of the space/time continuum, in other
words the experience of something that cannot be, something that we cannot
imagine, something unimaginably wonderful, which those who experience are
changed.
There is no sign that the
two disciples knew Who was instructing them on the way, but they appreciated
His company enough to invite Him to dinner, where He then became the Host and turned
their supper into the Holy Eucharist. They saw Him, but did not know Him until
He “opened their eyes.” But in the very instant their eyes opened, He vanished.
When the eyes of their understanding were opened, they lost sight of His physical
presence. You would think THAT would
make them sad, but instead something else happened to them: they remembered
that His instruction had caused their hearts to burn within them, they forgot
whatever it was they were going to do, and they went back to Jerusalem to find
the eleven Apostles, because
He was known to them in the breaking of
bread.
At some level they
understood that they could not know
Him UNTIL He vanished from their ordinary sight.
The Supper at Emmaus is the
Holy Eucharist. In it, we join those two disciples at the Inn. The Risen Lord
is known to us in the breaking of the bread, we become witnesses of the
Resurrection, and we participate in His Risen Life by receiving Communion. As
the Orthodox pray at the end of the Liturgy:
Hallelujah!
We have beheld your
Resurrection, O Christ our God,
We have seen the True
Light,
We have found the
true faith,
Let us bow down in
worship before the Trinity Undivided, Who has saved us.
