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,
We have received the Heavenly Spirit.
Let us bow down in worship before the Trinity Undivided, Who has saved us.








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