Stay With Us, The Day Is Far Spent!

Acts 2.14, 22-23;  
I Pet 1.17-21;  Jn 24.13-35

Where are you heading to? is a perennial question that cuts across all human experiences. If you are heading somewhere, you should know where you are coming from, what direction to take to get to where you are heading.
The post-Resurrectional narratives today presents before us the incident of our Risen Lord appearing to the two disciples on the way to Emmaus. The passage is an eye-opener for many of us who do not see the obvious and are not paying attention to authentic witnessing of faith in Jesus Christ.
As He walks with them, He explains the plan of salvation in history and its fulfillment As evening comes, He pretended to head on but they pleaded for Him to stay with them. They had walked into obscurity. The opportunity brought about His revelation at the breaking of the bread and vanished from their sight so as not to commit the fallacy of double presence and to emphasize the liturgy of the word leading to the liturgy of the Eucharist.

The poignant words of the two disciples, as they looked back on their strange experience on the road to Emmaus, “Did not our hearts burn within us”, these words always move us. And perhaps they also find an echo in our own spiritual lives. The two travellers who had been in the presence of Christ, so shortly after His resurrection, these two finally understood the reality of His presence and the wisdom He had imparted. But they understood it only after He had vanished from their sight. While He walked with them on the road, they drank deeply from Him, the fount of all wisdom and the source of all grace. Yet while He was communicating His divine life to them, they did not consciously perceive it. Afterwards, with hindsight, they understood. They recalled how their affections had been inflamed. In retrospect they understood the reality of the grace they had been given, and they perceived its effects.  Of the many teachings in this rich gospel story, this is an important one for us today: the hidden and often unnoticed operation of sanctifying grace within the soul. The life of God floods our spirit, yet so often, at the time that it’s happening, we are unaware of what is taking place. Afterward, perhaps, is when we come to understand.

One of the lessons of Emmaus is surely this: emotional religious experience, psychological reactions in the spiritual life, mean very little in the longer term. The presence of the risen Christ will be known, not by how we feel, but by what we are, and what we do.  After the two disciples have discerned the real presence of Christ, in the breaking of bread, what did they do? They certainly didn’t sit around, savouring and analyzing the experience! No, they returned to Jerusalem with all speed, to spread the good news, that Jesus is risen. They did something. They started their apostolic work. Their contact with resurrection turned them into missionaries. Our ransom was paid by the precious blood of Jesus Christ, Let us receive Him in Word and Body so that we walk back to Jerusalem from Emmaus to praise God even in the thickest of the darkness of night. Let us return to the Lord for He is the lamb who takes away the sins of the world. By dying, He destroyed our death by rising, He restores our lives. Amen.

Fr Joseph Osho