Encounters with Jesus

	Fr. Roger Vermalen Karban

The readings for Sunday, April 14, 2002, the Third Sunday of Easter, are Acts 2:14, 22-28, I Peter 1:17-21, Luke 24:13-35.

Belief in Jesus’ resurrection is essential for Christian faith. Using such terminology, we could refer to many of the events which occurred before his dying and rising as “accidental”: it’s nice they happened, but we’d still believe in him even if they hadn’t happened.

We notice this essential/accidental distinction in the sermon Luke creates for Peter to deliver on the first Pentecost. He begins with the accidentals. “Jesus was a man whom God sent to you with miracles, wonders and signs as his credentials.” Then he shifts to the essential. “God freed him from death’s bitter pangs . . . and raised him up again, for it was impossible that death should keep its hold on him.” The rest of today’s Acts pericope is just a “Davidic” quote, reinforcing our indispensable belief in Jesus’ resurrection.

The unknown author of I Peter even goes so far as to root our faith in God in Jesus’ resurrection. “It is through him (Jesus) that you are believers in God, the God who raised him from the dead and gave him glory.” We can’t imagine what kind of a God we’d be believing in today if Jesus weren’t raised.

But as essential as belief in Jesus’ resurrection is, it’s also essential in the early Christian community for everyone to have an experience of the risen Jesus. That’s where today’s Gospel passage comes in.

Those evangelists who include encounters with the risen Jesus in their Gospels aren’t just interested in showing he’s still alive after his death; they’re very particular about the circumstances in which these faith-building meetings take place. They construct them to mirror the circumstance in which their readers encounter the risen Jesus in their lives. This is particularly true in Luke’s account of the disciples on the road to Emmaus.

Notice how Luke carefully builds the narrative. Mr. and Mrs. Cleopas are in the process of doing the very thing Jesus commanded his disciples not to do: leave Jerusalem. Jerusalem is where Jesus is; the place where Luke’s post-resurrection appearances are to take place. That’s why Jesus doesn’t meet the two head on; he overtakes them from behind — from Jerusalem.

For theological reasons, Luke has the two travelers concentrate their conversation on Jesus’ death. And though they end their introductory remarks to Jesus about “some women from our group” who returned from an early morning visit to his tomb with a tale about “a vision of angels,” they still haven’t experienced him alive.

This holds true even after Jesus interprets “for them every passage of Scripture which referred to him.”

Only when they press him to stay with them at the inn that things begin to happen. “When he had seated himself with them to eat, he took bread, pronounced the blessing, then broke the bread and began to distribute it to them. With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him; whereupon he vanished from their sight.”

At this point they remember their discussion along the road and realized why “. . . our hearts were burning . . . as he talked to us . . . and explained the Scriptures to us.” They immediately race back to Jerusalem and inform the others that “. . . they had come to know him in the breaking of bread.”

Trained from childhood to zero in on Jesus’ presence in the bread and wine, we miss much of what Luke’s trying to convey. The “breaking of bread” is a term the early Christian community applied to the entire Eucharist. As the bishops of Vatican II stressed, the risen Jesus is certainly present in the bread and wine, but he’s also in the Scriptures which are proclaimed, and in the community which gathers to remember his dying and rising.

If our belief in Jesus’ presence in the bread and wine helps us better understand his presence in the word and one another, we really will leave our celebrations with “burning hearts.”