slow-of-heart

Deacon Douglas McManaman

What is interesting about the discussion on the road to Emmaus is that the two disciples are talking about Jesus, while the very person they are talking about is right there walking with them, but without their awareness that this person is in fact the risen Christ. They see him as a stranger. Luke tells us that “their eyes were kept from recognizing him”. This is an interesting expression. The obvious question is: “What is it that kept their eyes from recognizing him”?

Of course, the risen Christ had a glorified body, so he did not look quite the same as he would have before the resurrection, but there is a more interior reason they failed to recognize him. The clue, I believe, is in the nature of their hope: they hoped that Jesus would be the one to “redeem Israel”; however, their understanding of that liberation was far too narrow. Jesus came not to liberate a particular nation (Israel) from Roman oppression, but to deliver humanity from the oppression of sin and death. 

Old habits are very difficult to change, especially habits of thinking, and many of our assumptions keep us from understanding the obvious. For example, in the synoptics, Jesus had to foretell his passion three times (that the Son of Man was destined to suffer and be put to death, but on the third day he would rise again); for the disciples simply could not understand how victory could come about through any means other than physical force. Not even Peter understood that Christ came to defeat death by dying and rising (See Mt 16, 22). And even after seeing the risen Christ, the disciples still could not get beyond an understanding rooted in old habits: “When they had gathered together they asked him, ‘Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?’” (Acts 1, 6).

There was something in these two disciples that kept them from recognizing him, and it was with respect to this that they were “foolish” (Gk: anoetoi), lacking wisdom and the insight that would allow them to see who the real enemy is, which is sin and death, not the Roman Empire–Rome was destined to fall in the late 5th century. Jesus came to defeat the one enemy man was powerless to defeat, namely death. Their hope was narrow because their hearts were narrow, that is, their love was too limited in scope: “…how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets declared”. 

“Slow of heart” (bradeis te kardia) is an interesting expression as well. What it suggests is that understanding follows upon the disposition of the heart, which is the center of intellectual and spiritual insight. It is the heart that keeps the disciple from fully recognizing Christ, who is in our midst, mistaking him for an ignorant stranger. But Jesus begins to teach them, opening the Scriptures to them, all the while still failing to recognize him. In other words, the stranger teaches them about himself. Luke tells us, however, that their hearts were burning; hence, they were open to learning, which is why they were listening to him in the first place, and it was this openness that gradually disposed them to recognize him. But recognition only came after they pressured the stranger to stay with them. It was at this point, when he was at the table with them, that he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them; then their eyes were finally opened and they recognized him.

What was it that opened their eyes? The breaking of the bread. In other words, it was “community” that opened their eyes; they had table fellowship with a stranger, as Jesus himself was wont to do, and it was only at this point that they were given the eyes to recognize that the stranger in their midst was Christ himself. 

Breaking bread together, that is, table fellowship, means much more than eating for the sake of my own individual nutrition. For the Jews, breaking bread brings about a genuine communion of persons, for each person partakes of the one life source on the table, namely the food, so that all who are at table become one. This is a very profound and symbolic understanding of a meal that we’ve lost in the West; and this table fellowship is precisely what ruined Jesus’ reputation among the religious leaders at the time, namely, his fellowship with tax collectors, who were regarded as traitors, and his fellowship with “sinners”, those who did not observe the proscriptions in the Torah because they were not familiar with them. In short, he associated himself with the marginalized. 

In feeding the five thousand, he entered into intimate communion with everyone who came to listen to him. But in the minds of the religious leaders, to commune with the ritually unclean is to become unclean. For Jesus, however, the reverse takes place. Those who partake and thus willingly enter into communion with him become clean, because he is clean, the fount of all holiness. 

In joining a human nature to himself, the Son of God joined himself to every man, as it were (GS, 22), in all times and places–for the Word is eternal. We know this from the parable of the Last Judgment: When did we see you hungry, naked, and in prison?… As long as you did this to the least of my brethren, you did it to me” (Mt 25, 31-46). And so, Christ is in our midst, drawing near and walking with us, and we don’t necessarily have the eyes to recognize him. To do so, we need to take on the mind of Christ, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not deem equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself and took the form of a slave” (Phil 2, 5-7). It is our willingness to descend with him, to become a slave (doulou) and associate with all who are suffering that opens our eyes to the Christ hidden behind the face of the stranger. In short, we discover Christ in community, not in a privatized Catholicism. 

The Eucharist is the Bread of Life in which we become united with Christ in all his physicality, but the community of the faithful is Christ’s Mystical Body, and so the Eucharist should move us away from a bourgeois spirituality towards a deeper insertion into the international community that Christ is. The Eucharist in which we receive the whole Christ, his body, blood, soul and divinity, should change us into that body, and that should give us the eyes to see him underneath his various disguises, as Mother Teresa would often say. But it is very possible for us to resist that impetus. Jesus speaks about this in the gospel of Matthew: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you.’” (Mt 7, 21-23).

In the end, we will not be judged on our theology, or our private acts of piety, but on how we related to Christ hidden underneath his various disguises, as he identified himself in the first century with those whom we would be least likely to suspect were his dwelling places: the hated tax collector, the prostitute, and those who neglect the religious requirements of the Torah.