Transmenu powered by JoomlArt.com - Mambo Joomla Professional Templates Club

Last Sunday, the Second Sunday of Easter, the Gospel took us to the Upper Room on Easter night and to the Sunday thereafter where and when the Risen Lord stood before the Apostles showing them the marks of His Crucifixion after walking through the locked doors in His resurrected body. At the time of His second appearance, you will remember that He asked Thomas to physically touch His wounds.

Today we are still at Easter Day as two of Jesus’ followers (two of His disciples, for the word “disciple” means “follower) are walking on the road to the village of Emmaus. Suddenly, “Jesus himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were kept from recognizing him.”

How could they not recognize Jesus? They had once been in His presence to hear His preaching and teaching, or possibly to have witnessed a miracle. If His appearance and human properties were visibly different in His resurrected state, wouldn’t that have at least startled them? We don’t exactly know what was happening because we weren’t there, but either their own spiritual state of despair and confusion had cast a pall on their ability to see who was walking with them, being so consumed with their own state of mind and spirit; or Jesus Himself exercising divine power caused them at this point not to see or to know Him. Or possibly something else had not yet happened to enable them to see and know.

We know that as the three of them walked together, Jesus took them through the scriptures after He had named their state of mind and spirit, and after He had challenged their understanding of what had unfolded in the past few days – “O foolish men; and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?”

They still did not recognize Him, but demonstrating Christian love and hospitality, they invited their traveling companion to stay with them at the end of their journey instead of going further. They sat down together at a dinner table, and the meal was taken to another level by Jesus as He did with the Passover meal on Maundy Thursday in the Upper Room. We’re told that He did what He did on that night before His betrayal and arrest, “…he took the bread and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them.” And we read in the very next verse, “And their eyes were opened and they recognized him; and he vanished out of their sight.”

And from this eucharistic experience, this post-Resurrection Mass, not only were their eyes opened to see who it was who was with them, but their spirits were enlivened to realize what happened to them on the road to Emmaus – “They said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures?’”

They returned to Jerusalem that same night and found the eleven Apostles gathered in the Upper Room after Thomas had returned to the Upper Room after Jesus had first appeared. As we heard today, the two disciples found eleven Apostles, and we heard last Sunday that it was to ten Apostles that Jesus appeared on Easter night. “Now Thomas, one of the twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came” (John 20:24).

The two disciples said to the eleven Apostles and those who were with them, “The Lord is risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon.” In other words, we now believe what the women reported and that Simon Peter, the leader of the Apostles, had indeed seen the Lord. “Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread.”

The women who went to the tomb had seen angels; Mary Magdalene had seen and spoken with the Risen Lord outside the tomb; He had at some point appeared to Peter; the ten Apostles had seen the Risen Lord in the Upper Room; and the two disciples had experienced Jesus making Himself known to them as the Risen Lord in the breaking of the bread—in the Eucharist.

The two disciples had received the elements of the Mass celebrated by Jesus; and upon receiving, their eyes opened to see who was the Celebrant and what He was giving them—His sacramental Body and Blood as the presentation of His Body broken on and His Blood poured out from the Cross. Calvary was here re-presented, as it was anticipated on Maundy Thursday. The first post-Easter Mass was celebrated by the One who instituted it to be done in remembrance of Him (meaning in the Greek word anamnesis—to make me present, to bring me back) to “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (I Corinthians 11:26).

What we have before us in this post-Resurrection story about one of our Lord’s appearances is that for these two disciples, the Eucharist was the prism through which they saw things and understood things as God willed them to see and know.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “The Eucharist is the heart and the summit of the Church’s life, for in it Christ associates his Church and all her members with his sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving offered once for all on the cross to his Father; by this sacrifice he pours out the graces of salvation on his Body which is the Church.”

The disciples having the “once for all” sacrifice re-presented to them by the One who made the Sacrifice, and in their feeding on His Body and Blood, were graced with understanding and renewed faith as that grace spilled backward to their hearing Jesus as they needed to hear as he taught them on the road – the teaching which they hadn’t really understood before receiving the sacrament of His Body and Blood. Just as the event of Calvary has a backward and forward trajectory, so did the re-presentation of it, when this Mass was celebrated by its Author, and whenever and wherever it is celebrated by the Church with the Christ-instituted minister, matter, form, and intent.

To again quote from the Catechism: “It is Christ himself, the eternal high priest of the New Covenant who, acting through the ministry of the priests, offers the Eucharistic sacrifice. And it is the same Christ, really present under the species of bread and wine, who is the offering of the Eucharistic sacrifice.”

With praise and thanksgiving (which the Greek word eucharistia means), we come in humility to receive Christ Jesus and for Him to make Himself known; and with such supernatural food, our state of being is once again taken beyond ourselves to the place to see Him and know Him afresh. Like the disciples for whom Jesus made Himself known in the Eucharist, the same is to be expected and anticipated by us in the Eucharist here.

Graces are given not only as Christ gives us His Body and Blood as we receive the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation, but graces to hear God’s Word and to then more fully appropriate it in our lives.

We know from the study of the scriptures, the Church Fathers, and Church history that after our Lord’s resurrection appearances ceased after His Ascension to the right hand of the Father in Heaven, and after the Holy Spirit came down upon the Apostles on Pentecost, the Church had the Eucharist at the very center of its life. We heard today from the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, “And they [the Church established at Pentecost] devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”

They did this, and the Church Catholic in unbroken practice from then to now and beyond until Jesus comes again in glory does this, because Jesus uttered a command, “Do this in remembrance of me,” for His followers to follow and for them to live in the truth of His teaching, “For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me” (John 6:55-57).