Homily for the Evening Mass on the Third Sunday of Easter
Acts 2:14-33; Psalm 15; I Peter 1:17-21; Luke 24:13-35
Recent weeks have been a bonanza for journalists and commentators, especially religious ones. A crisis always offers an abundance of possible meanings. And we religious folk are all hooked on meaning. Maybe God is using the epidemic to punish Catholics or another group for some perceived shortcoming, as is sometimes implausibly suggested. Perhaps God is weaning us off our shared addiction to fossil fuels. If only! It’s so easy to see divine causal links between world events and our own parochial pre-occupations. It’s also vain and foolish, as the Gospel passage we have just heard makes all too clear.
Cleopas and his anonymous companion have been labouring under precisely that sort of misapprehension, for months, perhaps years, following Jesus, convinced that he is about to usher in a free, liberated Israel, and that for good religious reasons; it’s not ‘merely political’, as some are wont to say. Like Zechariah early on in Luke’s Gospel, their hope is that God will rescue Israel from its enemies, so it can serve Him without fear, in holiness and justice all their days in His presence(Luke1: 74-5). A free Israel is to be an Israel that abides with God forever in righteousness. A beautiful vision!
How despondent they feel at Jesus’ failure to deliver their dream! How many Christians over the years have walked the path of disillusionment towards Emmaus, their questions piercing the sky? Why did God not protect my people from the savagery of the regime? Why does God not defend the Church from her enemies? Why do I suffer when I all I yearn for is justice?
To which God’s answer is invariably a very un-journalistic silence. A silence that is extremely hard to interpret. But today, on the road to Emmaus, the Lord breaks His silence and instead deals firmly with the two young ideologues, sending them back to Jerusalem to take their rightful place at the heart of the young Church, with hearts on fire for the Gospel. What is it that he says to them?
First, he takes them through the scriptural passages that were all about Him. This is what communications experts call “reframing”. It’s a powerful tool. Cleopas had read the history of Israel as all about Israel. Very natural. But it’s a story that is no longer compelling; what is the point of a failed Israel? Jesus reframes the story as one about God’s promise to send His Christ to dwell with His people Israel, to suffer alongside them, and then to rise again on the third day. It’s a different story now! Its freshness, its surprising newness has a seismic effect on the community of believers, and you feel the power of this revolutionary new narrative on every page of the New Testament.
The reframing is vital but it’s not all. The penny has not yet dropped for Cleopas and his companion. True, the breaking of the Word has aroused their interest, it’s lit a fire within and forged a link with the surprisingly well-informed stranger, but they’ve arrived at their destination. It’s time for dinner and then bed. So, they invite Jesus to share their table, and that is where the transformation is completed.
And here I must confess to being at a loss to explain what happened. Did they see Jesus? Yes! And no! Is it that Jesus had a particularly unusual way of breaking bread? Did memories come flooding back of many meals shared with Jesus? The way Luke tells the story raises more questions that it answers. It’s surely something to do with the Eucharist, with the Spirit who changes hearts and gives life. Perhaps forgiveness and mercy are in the mix too. But the point is that it’s deeply personal. The penny has to drop for us too in some similarly personal but non-identical way if we are to find our way out of disappointment, back to the city with our view of everything reframed and our hearts on Easter fire.
The Paschal event is the Great Reframing. It questions the meaning of our lives, and that of all our life projects, including our politics and personal convictions. It asks us questions instead of giving clear answers. It foregrounds the Crucified and Risen One and then asks how everything else looks placed behind Him in the background. It shocks us by insisting that God is not simply the solution to our problems. Whether you are looking for the blueprint of the perfect social order or instructions on how to vote, the Gospel doesn’t give the answer. It’s still hard for us to hear or even think that. But it’s true. Instead, it is an appeal to our imagination:
What would it be like to live through this epidemic not as though God were looking on in judgment but as though He were Emmanuel, God in the middle of it all, in solidarity with us, sharing the suffering, working with and through the nurses, the scientists, even the politicians?
What difference would it make if we valued every human life, not just the well-off, the economically active, or ‘people like us’, because God, unlike us, has no favourites? And not just human life but the whole web of the biosphere from which we come and to which we are intimately connected in unfathomably intricate ways? What would it be like to live like Etty Hillesum, a Jewish girl who died in Auschwitz, and who, in the very midst of the greatest tragedy of the 20th Century wrote: ‘There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too. But more often stones and grit block the well, and God is buried beneath. Then he must be dug out again.’(Diaries, 97). As Pope Benedict once said of her, ‘This frail and dissatisfied young woman, transfigured by faith, became a woman full of love and inner peace who was able to declare: “I live in constant intimacy with God”.’(General Audience,13 February2013)
Amid all the noisy comment of this epidemic, the Christian can confidently cultivate silence. Not a silence of withdrawal, still less one of bewilderment. Just a silence that has learned to trust in God’s ineffable closeness and to see the world anew in the light of that unexpected but long-hoped-for intimacy.
Fr Damian Howard S.J.