It's barely a couple of hours after the Emmaus episode, Luke 24:35. The scene: 10 Upper Room Avenue, Jerusalem. Enter stage right nearly a dozen disoriented disciples. Jesus appears and the reaction is most definitely not the joyful recognition culminating from an experience of hearing the Word of God like Cleopas and his pal just did. Rather, upon seeing him, the Eleven "were startled and terrified." Not least because the one they abandoned, betrayed and left for dead is back—likely for revenge. And all this after they admitted He had appeared to Peter.
Once again the Gospel looks like a poorly concocted story - there's negative progress happening with this resurrection thing. The apostles are getting worse. Somebody help.
Why the setback? I mean, how'd a couple of second-tier disciples get faith that dwarfs the faith of Jesus' favorites?
I'd say because the framework of their encounter with the risen Christ was different. Can I get bold? The structure of Emmaus shows the inner unity of the Mass. That's an earful.
For starters, Cleopas and his anonymous sidekick were not that special. They had not a fraction of the experiences of Jesus that the apostles had. In fact, they more closely resemble the present day Catholic in the pew, bumbling through life. Maybe Our Lord chose those two just so we'd recognize ourselves in them.
If the end game of that stroll out of Jerusalem was an enduring, resurrection-faith, they'd not only have to see him, but understand how it made sense that they were seeing him alive, right here, right now. Well thank God that he made his couple thousand year lead-up to that moment a well-documented affair: "beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself." Which could begin only after showing them they had attitudes to repent of: "slowness of heart" would not do! Wait, might that be why the readings are preceded by...the penitential rite?
To ask a perfect stranger to stay and join you for dinner means a serious impression was made in a short time. Our Lord's homily was the final interpretation of the history of Israel as the great love story between Yahweh and his bride, punctuated by so many dress-rehearsals of ultimate redemption which finally came in the gift of his Son. There's even a word for that - it was the first Christological discourse. You can practically hear him winding down the story: "...and last Thursday night, that same Jesus, anticipating his own sacrifice, took bread..."
We don't know how he avoided blowing his cover right then and there, but the two spellbound travelers couldn't drink enough of this stream of truth. They insisted he stay for the evening meal, so Jesus obliged - and gladly - because he wasn't done yet anyway.
A crucial point has to be made here about sacrifices in those days: the todah sacrifice was a particular kind of Jewish thanksgiving offering done by a person whose life had been delivered from a great danger. Such a person would express his gratitude to God by celebrating a sacrificial meal with family and friends - simple enough - but the big difference is that todah always presupposes a narrative: an account of what has happened in the life of the one giving thanks which makes it a movement from lament to praise. Amazingly, this is precisely the structure of some of the ancient Psalms, 22 and 69 especially - so those were the hymns of choice during the todah celebration. It's easy to see then how the Passover was a subset of todah - it was deliverance from Egypt.
Our Lord had the knack of performing important gestures on already important Jewish feasts, as if they provided the meaningful backdrop for his own action that fulfilled them. Why Passover? "Because I'll be orchestrating deliverance of a kind you haven't dreamed of" (to wildly paraphrase his thoughts). But why celebrate surviving an ordeal at the Last Supper if the Passion hadn't even happened yet? Well, on the one hand, God has a thing for arranging memorial liturgies before their catalyst event happens - like Exodus. On the other, it (= supper + suffering + death) had to become one unified act of worship, a liturgy, a complete todah. But wait, does that mean Christ's crying out Psalm 22 from the cross was on purpose? Fasten your seatbelts.
By the time they get to the Emmaus Inn, these two disciples were once again doing the disciple-thing: listening and learning. Their minds were set ablaze with the marvelous works of God to establish right worship among men, and the pieces all fit together with breathtaking beauty; yes, the
todah sacrifice of the Messiah would have to be sorrowful, but end in joy. So they reclined to their evening meal, but just then something extraordinary shone through the ordinary: Jesus "took bread, gave thanks, broke it and gave it to them." There was a pattern here. When the words ceased, the climax of this whole encounter came through...a gesture. Luke just says: "their eyes were opened and they recognized him."
It was a very special thing to recognize the risen Lord; it's as if he was reconfiguring how his friends would experience him: less sensibly, yet somehow more there. Sounds a little closer to us. The point is, Cleopas and the other experienced Christ sacramentally present. Why else, when he just disappears, would they rejoice, let alone run a marathon back to Jerusalem to share what could have been passed off as a hallucination? This was Christ's definitive thanksgiving sacrifice, and they just had front-row seats. Sunday isn't "the day we go to Mass" for nothing: the todah of Jesus, celebrated on the day of his Resurrection is the archetypal Mass. Only something as momentous as an utterly new creation could displace the old sabbath as the new Day of the Lord.
The bottom line here: the Emmaus disciples had to receive the saving God in Word, then in sacrament, and in that order; otherwise their own lives could not become an extension of that same great Liturgy of their Lord - something would be missing: can I be truly in Christ if I know neither him nor his commands, or even if believing all that, run from his own life becoming my life? A room full of negative reactions to the risen Christ by those who should have known better (Mk.16:12) stands as a warning.
Of course, Jesus figured the way to make his eternal sacrifice present sacramentally down here below for the rest of time - that great command "do this in my memory" happily was given along with the power for his apostles to actually do it. And it's this understanding of the Church as the "trustee" of Christ's mysteries, the place where the Eucharist happens, that we must dearly cling to while breathing the air of individualism that permeates our society.
As it is, Christ entrusts himself to his Church: she mediates him to us, and it is there that we go to encounter Him. It's the answer to some of our separated brethren who claim “I just confess my sins to God directly,” which ruffles Catholic feathers because we intuit that tapping into God as conveniently as taking an aspirin seems just a little off, even if we can't articulate why.
It turns out, wherever a micro-managing God appears in history, there's a sort of insecurity, as if we're afraid of him getting too involved in our world and degrading his majesty. Some religions have God dictate precisely to them his will; we believe he speaks to us through other humans, using their imperfect intelligence, cultural biases, and hang-ups. Most denominations can't broach the thought God of touching us through material stuff; we believe physical things - sacraments - really do communicate grace that really does make us holy. It turns out, mediation is Catholic.
And stuff goes down when mediation is forgotten even within the Church: there’s been the ultra-spiritual who seem to have a hotline to God (preferably coopting the Holy Spirit), and end up some derivative of Montanist, Jansenist, or anyone for whom "discernment" becomes synonymous with power, because it is finally untethered from that fallible, human chain of command that Christ inexplicably entrusted his flock to. But I digress.
In the end: do we seek the total Christ? We must look to the Church to introduce us to him. I can then recognize the Church's sacred liturgy as the locus of encounter with Jesus, the unique setting, in which he desires to come to me. Consequences? No more "as long as we arrive before the Gospel" or "really, the important thing is receiving Communion" or "let's skip the incense for adoration." We priests out there have to remember that every sacramental ritual happens to contain a proclamation of the Word of God. Now why might that be?
What we are going to need -not only for ourselves as Regnum Christi apostles, but especially to bequeath to our dear children of Gen-Z- is a thoroughly ecclesial formation, because that's what makes us Catholic; between raging leftists and radical traditionalists, a tangible love for the Church seems to be in short supply these days, but is there anything so distinctively RC as loving the Church?
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