I love the way the disciples of Jesus tell many stories about how stupid they were; and we have a classic one today don’t we? (Luke 24:13-35). You can see and hear me give this Homily on Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcrD2Li-4BQ (sorry about the adverts !)
Despite maybe three years with Jesus, these people on the road to Emmaus are still stuck in thinking that if Jesus was the Christ “He would be the one to set Israel free”; and they cannot see how being killed in a brutal and horrific manner fits in with this. Nor have they any notion that God has different ideas on what “Freedom” means.
In our 1st Reading however (Acts 2:14,22-33) we see how meeting the Risen Lord and having the scriptures explained to them has changed their views. Now, St Peter can call up words from a Psalm - “You will not abandon my soul to Hades nor allow your holy one to experience corruption”- and say that when the author wrote this Psalm he was making a prophecy about Jesus. Now, they can argue that their fellow Jews have got a completely wrong idea from scripture of what the Messiah – the Christ – will be like; for instead of a figure of worldly glory, they point to passages from Isaiah about the suffering servant, and say that these actually refer to Jesus. “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief…. he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” (53:3-4) They say, indeed they acclaim, that he was indeed that “Man of sorrows” who through a terrible death had brought us a different kind of freedom and glory.
The phrase in our Gospel, “He explained the scriptures to us,” does seem a pretty tame way of expressing this amazing transformation in their way of thinking. Somehow, the presence of the Risen Jesus has got through to them in a way that they couldn’t take in before he died; so that gradually, as they walk along the road with him, they are woken up ; they get the message at last, so that everything he taught them before his death now makes sense.
We must learn from this not to look for the wrong kind of Jesus. It is easy to get stuck with some almost childlike image of Jesus, and of God of course; and then, when we cannot feel that Jesus with us, wonder if he is with us at all. Indeed, for some people this is when they lose their faith, for instead of looking for different ways in which Jesus might be present with them, they simply reject the images of God and Jesus they grew up with. Many of us despair of people like this, who are so convinced that the image of God they were given as children is the Christian way, and so are blind to the many other different and more adult ways of meeting the one true God in Jesus. So they turn to Buddhism or Mindfulness or some other religion, instead of recognising that the true God can walk alongside them and speak to them in many ways that are very different from what they first learnt.
But faithful Christians can also get stuck with standard images that can prevent us from seeing and meeting God in unusual places and unusual situations. There is for example a tendency to think that we are meant to meet Jesus in good people who for example visit the sick or visit a prisoner or care for a stranger. But Jesus says something quite different. (Matt 25:31-46) He says that we will meet him actually in the sick person, in the prisoner and in the stranger. Now that can be hard. The sick person might be repulsive with open sores, the prisoner might be an unpleasant serial offender, and the stranger might be a person we do not like, arriving illegally in a small boat. We need to remember how often Jesus challenged the small mindedness of the people around him, and this means that we must expect him to challenge us to new ways of thinking too.
I think we sometimes forget that for many years Christians did not use pictures or statues of Jesus. We Catholics are so used to seeing Our Lord hanging on the Cross behind our Altar, or showing us his Sacred Heart, or beaming his glory to us in the Divine Mercy image, that we become convinced that Jesus looked like this. In fact, we have no idea what Jesus looked like, and so we need to be very careful not to let familiar images like this dominate our thinking. It’s worth remembering that one of the first images of Jesus the Church did use was almost an exact copy of the pagan God Apollo carrying a sheep on his shoulders, and he of course was a handsome Greek fellow. Attempts have sometimes been made to suggest a more Middle Eastern image of Jesus, shorter and darker. This may be nearer the truth than the idea that he looked like Apollo, but we can never know. Perhaps the only thing we can know, to go back to more of that quote from Isaiah 53 is that “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us… nothing in his appearance that we should desire.. He was despised and rejected by mankind,a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.” Certainly nothing like Apollo !
However, there is one more thing to get out of our Gospel, and that is that they did not just get to recognise him as he explained to them the scriptures, but only finally got there when “They recognised him at the breaking of bread.” I have pointed out more than once in my Homilies, but it still needs repeating, that Jesus could have chosen any number of different things through which he would become present with us and for us. Perhaps more exciting food than dull old bread? Or some more dramatic sign – like a rainbow or a beautiful dawn? Of course, he is present in all these things and more, but he chooses the dull old bread precisely because 1) It is dull and ordinary, and 2) It is a basic food through which we can be sustained when everything else fails us. Yes, we can find the Risen Jesus in glorious and beautiful things, but we must learn to find him also in dull and ordinary things even things or people we do not particularly like. That is the challenge of the Gospel.
Comments