REFLECTIONS ON OUR REDEMPTION 11 - THE ROAD TO EMMÄUS
Father Edmund Montgomery, Magistral Chaplain and Administrator of Shrewsbury Cathedral, offers us this meditation. We are most grateful.
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| Caravaggio, the Supper at Emmaus, Milan |
Anticipated Sunday readings for Third Sunday of Easter (A)
For the last few weeks I haven’t been able to see properly. I’ve run out of contact lenses, and so since just before Holy Week I’ve been squinting, and I hope none of those I’ve been self-isolating with think I’m frowning or glaring at them, it’s just I haven’t been able to make out who they are! I should know better really, and just wear my glasses, I’m too vain and too stubborn.
In the Gospel we will hear on Sunday the two travellers on the road to Emmaus didn’t recognise Jesus, which in itself is incredible. These were two close followers of Jesus, in fact the wife of one of them, Clopas, was there when Jesus died on the Cross. Perhaps it wasn’t their grief, the tears in their eyes, that stopped them from recognising Jesus, but their insistence that Jesus was a failure, and that despite their expectations, he hadn’t succeeded in his mission, as one of them said with profound disappointment, ‘Our own hope had been that he would be the one to set Israel free.’ Little did he know that he was talking to Jesus himself!...
Jesus explains to them what they cannot see, and so helps them step by step, until at the end of the Gospel not only do they recognise Jesus, when he disappears from their sight, they have to immediately run and tell others, not that they have heard Jesus, not that they have met him, but that they have seenhim! Jesus, gently and with patience tells them and shows them that it is their way of ‘seeing things’ which prevents them from really understanding what is going on, that they have blinkered themselves, only able to see what they wish to see, and so blinding themselves to the true reality that Jesus had spoken about even before the crucifixion, one which God had spoken through the prophets, ‘…that the Christ should suffer and so enter into his glory.’
We may feel a profound disorientation at present: not knowing how the present pandemic can be within God’s Providence, not understanding why we are having to endure the conditions that we bear, questioning what good can come from a global emergency such as this when so many of the works of the Order are suspended or curtailed and we find ourselves disordered, members without work or an apostolate. We may find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of not being the ones to provide care but the ones being cared for: a discovery of a new vulnerability where one recognises one’s one frailty and morality. We may be weary already from the strictures of self-isolation or limited movement only for exercise or to purchase essential food or medicine.
Sunday’s Gospel helps us with all of this. When Jesus walked and talked to the two travellers on the road to Emmaus he first listened to what they had to say, he asked them ‘What matters are you discussing as you walk along?’, and he took the time to listen to the sorrow and distress they were in, and their confusion and hurt. He didn’t just show them who he was straight away, he didn’t reveal himself immediately, he first let them pour our their hearts to him, then he gently reproached them, encouraged them, and was about to leave when they pressed him to remain with them saying, ‘It is nearly evening and the day is almost over.’ They wanted him with them, they knew they needed him somehow. And what followed mirrored what happened that night in the Upper Room, because Jesus took bread, broke it and gave it to them, and as soon as they recognised Jesus, he vanished.
Jesus invites us to pour our hearts out to him, also. He wishes to take take to listen to us, too just as he did to the travellers on the road to Emmaus. They were hurting, he saw that, and he listened. They were dispondent, their hearts and minds cast down. Perhaps this sounds familiar to us in our present time?
See what the Lord does to their despondency and sadness: the beauty of Sunday’sGospelto come is that after listening to them, Jesus gently corrects them, and refocuses their vision so distorted by their own interpretations and mindset of how things should have been. Because they were open to having their sight restored, it was then – and only then – they could recognise Jesus when he broke the bread.
We can admit our confusion and disorientation to God: we do not know what you are doing, Lord at this moment, we find the emergency so distressing, our loved ones and the sick so in need and we do not see you in this so easily. The Lord cannot console us if we do not cry to him, he cannot comfort us if we do not speak to him of our anxieties, he cannot offer us reassurance if we do not tell him of our doubts.
Today I would like us all to rediscover the joy of recognising Jesus and if your sight or vision is somehow distorted - a new symptom of the effect of our present pandemic, that the eyes of Faith become foggy and glazed, and our Faith perhaps a little weak or fragile, we might consider following the pattern of those two travellers on the way to Emmaus going to Jesus to ask him to restore our sight, to take away all those things that stop us seeing him for who he really is, so that we may recognise today the same Lord who opened the eyes of the travellers on the road to Emmaus and begin to find Him anew in the circumstances of our daily lives even amidst the present emergency.