Breath of the Spirit

RVC’s Weekly Spiritual Essay

April 10, 2005: THIRD SUNDAY OF EASTER

Readings

Acts 2:14, 22-33

I Peter 1:17-21

Luke 24:13-35

How do people experience the risen Jesus in their ordinary lives?

The authors of the Christian Scriptures often deal with this question. But because it isn’t a pressing issue for us who have redirected our faith into areas different from those which interested our sacred writers, we rarely notice their responses. They differ author to author.

Luke seems to have partly created Peter’s famous Pentecost speech with this question in mind. Hearing today’s first reading, we’re to think not only about how great Jesus is, we’re also expected to imitate some of his attributes.

Notice how Luke describes Jesus’ “mighty deed, wonders and signs.” He tells us “God worked (them) through him.” Jesus didn’t accomplish these solely by his own power. They were part of his life because he had opened himself so deeply to God that one couldn’t separate God’s actions from Jesus’ actions.

Such god-openness guarantees that when Jesus is killed, “God (will) raise him up, releasing him from the throes of death because it is impossible for him to be held by it.”

When Jesus’ first followers attempted to imitate his giving of himself to God, they not only became “witnesses” of his resurrection, they also discovered the same Spirit poured into their lives that god had poured into Jesus’ life. How else could they explain the Pentecost morning phenomena?

It’s important to note that the author of I Peter uses the same words about Jesus’ resurrection that Luke employs. Both say that “God raised him from the dead,” not that Jesus rose from the dead. There’s a huge difference between doing something yourself and having someone do it for you.

Our I Peter writer believes God does the same thing for us as God did for Jesus, so that our “faith and hope (might be) in God.” We discover the risen Jesus among us not so much by having faith in Jesus as by having the faith of Jesus. Instead of just worshipping Jesus, we’re also expected to imitate Jesus. Only then do we notice that the risen Jesus has entered our lives.

The key to understanding Luke’s Emmaus pericope is to remember that the angel in his empty tomb narrative tells Jesus’ disciples to stay in Jerusalem until they receive the Holy Spirit. Jerusalem for Luke is more than just a geographic location. It’s where someone experiences suffering, death and resurrection, imitating the pattern which the historical Jesus experienced there. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus are disrupting God’s plan. They’re walking away from a place where God had intended them to stay.

Jesus doesn’t meet the pair head on. Luke tells us that he overtakes them, demonstrating that he’s coming from Jerusalem. Eventually he explains God’s word, then breaks bread with them. It’s at this point “that their eyes were opened and they recognized him.” Yet their recognition caused something else to happen: “he vanished from their sight.”

Listening to the word, then breaking bread is a classic way of describing the Eucharist. Through the Eucharist, Jesus takes Jerusalem to them. The first Christians most easily discovered the risen Jesus among them in the “breaking of bread.” It was each person’s Jerusalem: the place where they died to themselves by becoming one with all those others who joined in that action. This act of suffering and death brought them the insight necessary to perceive the risen Jesus in their midst. That seems to be why the instant he’s recognized, he disappears. We recognize him over and over again only because we’re willing to give ourselves over and over again.

No wonder, on returning to Jerusalem, the pair announce that Jesus was “made known to them in the breaking of the bread.” It’s the one place we’ll always discover him, as long as we make that action an experience of dying and rising.