Luke 24.35-48
Jesus comes to you and me in ways we least expect.
In the Gospel today, Cleopas and his companion are telling the other disciples how Jesus appeared to them on the road to Emmaus when Jesus shows up out of nowhere, interrupting their conversation. “Shalom!” he says. “Peace be with you,” They see him, they hear his voice, but in their minds they are confused. They know Jesus was crucified, he died, and he was buried. They know dead people don’t come back to life. And so they “thought that they were seeing a ghost.”
They were trying to rationalize what they were seeing within their all too human ways of thinking. For the Disciples, the tomb was open but their minds were closed. All too often, you and I can live in that space between the open tomb and the closed mind. Resurrected life can never be comprehended or contained by human thought or understanding. Jesus’ resurrection compels us to step outside our usual human understandings of reality and enter into a different reality. A spiritual reality. The divine reality. With Jesus’ resurrection, God shatters human categories of who God is, where God’s life and energy are to be found, and how God works in this world.
Now, our Gospel today talks about touching and seeing, flesh and bones, hands and feet. All of these things that are part of what we would call the Natural Order, following the Laws of Nature. Yet, this very same flesh and bones, these very same hands and feet, appeared to Cleopas and his companion on the road to Emmaus and then “vanished from their sight”. And in last weeks gospel, Jesus’ hands and feet, his flesh and bones, passed through walls and locked doors. And now these flesh and bones show up unannounced and unexpected in the midst of the Disciple’s conversation with others. And eats some fish with them.
The resurrected life of Christ, it seems, is revealed in and through the created order. However, it is not bound by the created order. On the one hand Jesus has a real body. On the other hand it is not subject to the natural laws of time and space. But it’s not one or the other. It’s both. It is a new and different reality.
Jesus comes to you and me in ways we least expect.
The degree to which we have allowed ourselves to be bound by the created order and old paradigms of vision is the degree to which we are unable to see God’s presence in this world. Why is it that all of the saints and mystics who are a part of our Catholic Faith speak of God’s coming to us in moments of surprise? We know that to be true, don’t we? We know of our own moments of surprise, our own moments of wonder when suddenly we are aware of God’s presence to us, when, out of the blue we hear what God is saying to us.
Is it too difficult for us to see that Jesus, who promises to be present in the bread and the wine, Jesus who promises that he is the stranger, he is the prisoner, he is the leper, he is the beggar on the street, he is the prostitute, the sinner, the woman who is bleeding to death, the mother or father begging for their child’s life, the tax collector; Jesus who endlessly teaches about our relationship to the land, the earth, in countless agricultural stories, parables and analogies;
That Jesus reveals to us a divine reality into which we are invited, not at some future time and place but right here and right now. That Jesus reveals to us the Resurrection. And like the Disciples, you and I are called to be witnesses to the resurrected Jesus. Called to be witnesses based not on what we try to know, or try to understand but on who we are, how we live,
For in as much as we live our lives they way Jesus did, as beings of tender compassion….For in as much as we love the way Jesus loved, serve the way Jesus served, had compassion the way Jesus did, are caring of others the way Jesus was, …..then we witness to the very essence of who Jesus was. We witness the essence of who our Risen Lord is. We witness the very essence of God.
Through these acts of love we become witnesses of the Resurrection.And through the opening of our eyes and mind to see God’s presence in this world in a bigger way, an unlimited way, then we can begin to recognize holiness in one another, and to recognize holiness in ourselves. We can begin to see a bigger view of creation, a broader view of reality, a grander vision of God ….… as surprising as that may be.
For Jesus comes to you and me in ways we least expect.