A sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter

Third Sunday of Easter (Year A)

Cathedral Church of St Peter, St Petersburg

23 April 2023

✠ I speak to you in the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

They were utterly downcast. Their hopes had been dashed beyond the possibility of recovery. He was gone, his life ended by a nasty little conspiracy between a traitor, religious leaders who felt the threat to their power, and a colonial occupier briefly aroused to brutality for the sake of preserving the fragile public order. There was nothing left for them any more in Jerusalem—some crazy rumors, of course, but you expect grief-stricken people to cling to rumors like castaways clinging to wreckage, especially when some of them are, let’s face it, none too stable to begin with. No, that sort of thing doesn’t happen, they know it doesn’t happen, and so there is nothing left for them any more in Jerusalem. And so they head home, to Emmaus.

Along the way a stranger catches up to them. It’s Jesus—but our Gospel for today says, “Their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” Their eyes were kept—by what? The commentaries are all pretty clear on this point. They say, this is a “theological passive”—meaning, we have a passive-voice verb, “were kept,” to indicate what God is doing. Really, then, God kept their eyes from recognizing Jesus.

Far be it from me to question the wisdom of people who write New Testament commentaries, but that seems like stretching the story a lot further than it really wants to go. Read the story on its own terms, and there’s a perfectly good explanation for what kept them from recognizing Jesus. They were too busy talking about Jesus to see that Jesus was actually there. Everyone talks about how mysterious and glorious this story is—and it is mysterious and glorious—but no one ever talks about how hilarious it is, about the farce embedded in the glorious mystery. The disciples are so wrapped up in their grief, so preoccupied with the destructive events of the Friday that has just passed and the strange stories that are beginning to emerge from the Jerusalem crowd, that when Jesus actually appears to them, they can’t even see him.

He asks them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” (What he really says in the Greek is “What are these words you’re throwing back and forth at each other?” The conversation is agitated and frantic, throwing words back and forth.) At first the two disciples just stand there, but then Cleopas responds: “Are you the only person who doesn’t know all the things that have just happened?” “What things?” Jesus replies. “The things about Jesus,” Cleopas replies, going on and on and on and getting more and more agitated while Jesus just walks along with him and (one imagines) nods and says “Mmhmm” occasionally. Their eyes were kept from recognizing him, because their hearts were too full of anxiety, too full of grief, too full of their own story, too sure that this sort of thing simply does not happen to see that they were in the presence of Jesus.

I’m not a great believer in drawing obvious lessons from Scripture, but . . . there’s an obvious lesson to be drawn from this. Am I, are you, too busy talking about Jesus to recognize him? This is what parish life can so easily be: a way of talking about Jesus, talking about the church, throwing back and forth words about worship and budgets and bishops and bills, preoccupied and worried and stressed and agitated and frantic, until the presence of Jesus himself goes unnoticed.

As a priest, I certainly know this. I can talk about Jesus all day long, and it can be a marvelous way of avoiding actually spending time with him. My eyes are kept from recognizing him in his people, from recognizing him in a hurting world that he calls me to serve, from recognizing him in the friends and family he has given me to love—but man, I can toss words back and forth, just as spiritual and concerned and holy-sounding as you please. Anything to avoid the shattering, life-changing recognition that stops me in my tracks and causes me to cry out with my namesake apostle, “My Lord and my God.”

Thank goodness the story doesn’t stop there, with conviction and judgment. “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!” Yes, indeed: but then Jesus breaks open the Word of God and shows them how the Scriptures speak of him on every page, and that he was handed over, as we heard Peter say last week, “according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God.” Still they do not recognize him, but they know that they want to spend more time with him.

As they get close to home, the stranger walks ahead as if he were going on. That of course was the polite thing to do—any first-century Miss Manners would tell you that you never look like you’re expecting someone else to offer you hospitality—but it’s also an important symbol. Even now that he is entering into his glory, even now that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified, he will not enter unless he is invited. And though they do not yet know what they’re getting themselves into—there’s a whole sermon just in that, isn’t there?—they do invite him in: “Stay with us, because it almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he goes in with them. Having broken open the Word of God, he now takes bread, blesses and breaks it, and gives it to them. And then they know. Then they recognize him.

It’s his signature move, you see. He takes, blesses, breaks, and gives. These same acts, in this same order, are recorded when he feeds the five thousand: he took the five loaves and two fish, he blessed and broke them, he gave them to his disciples to set before the crowd. They are recorded when he celebrates his last supper before his Crucifixion: when he was at the table with his disciples, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. And is that not the very story of his Incarnation: he takes our human nature upon him, blesses it by his divine presence and his perfect righteousness, breaks it open for our sake on the hard wood of the Cross, and thereby gives it to us and to his Father, a perfect sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.

So he takes, blesses, breaks, and gives. And then they know. Then they recognize him—and he vanishes from their sight.

He has vanished from our sight, in the great and glorious Ascension that we will celebrate in a few weeks. He has vanished from our sight, and though we hope and expect one day to see those dear tokens of his passion that still his dazzling body bears, we are not now like the eleven, who saw them and rejoiced. But we can be—we must be—like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, who recognized Jesus not from his wounds, not even from his physical presence, but because he was made known to them in Scripture and in the breaking of bread.

We disciples have gathered, perhaps preoccupied with other things, perhaps foolish of heart and slow to believe, perhaps expecting nothing of resurrection and new life—for deep down we feel sure that that sort of thing simply does not happen—perhaps too busy talking about Jesus to recognize that he is here. And yet he has made himself known to us in Scripture.

You know what has to come next. Be known to us, Lord Jesus, in the breaking of bread.