Third Sunday of Easter A; 04.19.26; Dr Matthew (Matteo) Carter, Seminary Intern
Updated: Jul 31
Luke 24:13-35
They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?”
Today’s Gospel contains an image that is a kind of fever dream for people who love to puzzle over texts and their meaning: Jesus himself, the risen Lord, in the role of mysterious professor, or Bible Study leader, or literary critic, with ALL the answers to ALL the questions raised by Scripture. What could be better than that, a book club with the Undercover Boss? And all on foot! I asked a friend, an elite hiker, about the physical demands of walking and talking for seven miles: two hours of nonstop conversation, even on a flat road, is already a serious cardio workout, and the area all around Jerusalem is hilly.
And of course we do not know, we cannot know, exactly which scriptures they discussed: in 2026 we don’t even know exactly where Emmaus was! Indeed, Luke writes us a story about the limits of human knowledge and understanding, about the arrogance of assuming that our version of events is the correct one, the arrogance of assuming that the strangers we encounter know less about God than we do. The moment that we, from a position that we might imagine to be a position of superior knowledge or authority, address a stranger with an attitude of “you dummy, how do you NOT know this?”--well, God has a way of making sure that we’re the dummies. Please think about that the next time you, as a local, make fun of someone for not knowing about the pronunciation of Rio Road, or Buena Vista, or Botetourt.
We have that incredulous expression “have you been living under a rock?” which is deliciously ironic in the light of the Resurrection and the empty tomb. And that’s the tone Cleopas takes, and Jesus, with what I imagine was a mischievous twinkle in his eye, replies, “Huh?”
And Cleopas responds with a miniature version of the entire Gospel story. Here too, we are reminded of the limitations of how we know what we claim to know. I want to illustrate what I mean, but I admit it is easier to diagram in writing than to hear. Because we are dealing with FIVE different levels of narrative reporting, almost like the children’s game of Broken Telephone. The answer to Jesus’ question is not just “he is alive”: instead we have:
Luke writes that
Cleopas says that
The women told them that
The angels told them that
He is alive
Five full levels of narration!
I love everything about the Gospel of Luke, I love how elegant and poetic the Greek is, I love how Jesus never stops talking about the poor and the oppressed, I love the centrality of Jerusalem and Jewishness, I love that somehow, even for all its graphic violence, the Crucifixion in Luke is beautiful, with Jesus bathed in a golden light. It’s no accident that Rembrandt and Rubens chose to paint their Gospel scenes from Luke especially–an ancient tradition even claims that Luke himself was a painter. But most of all, I love the complexity on display here, a complexity that is adequate to, and indeed a mirror of, the difficulty of struggling to understand what God is saying to us throughout history, God’s message mediated through multiple narrators, multiple sources, and the real world Broken Telephone situation where what we read is a translation of a translation that only survived, sometimes by accident, in scraps of mutilated papyrus. We like to be astounded by Jesus’ many healing miracles, but I want to leave a little room for our astonishment at the miracle that this ancient text, any ancient text, survived the wreckage of the centuries.
Now, I have wound you up with all this complexity, but I want to end on a note of simplicity, which is this: we are a people who break bread together, The clarifying moment, the big reveal, the literal eye-opener in this story is not how Jesus looked, or the brilliance of his hermeneutics, or some supernal halo about him. Jesus becomes recognizable when human beings share bread, when we feed each other. The way to know a stranger is to feed a stranger. And no less a preacher than St Augustine of Hippo–you may have noticed, he’s been in the news this week!--made this point in a sermon for the ages.
In his Sermon #235 delivered in Hippo, in Africa on the day after Easter circa 400AD, St Augustine notes that the reading for the day was our Luke episode, while Matthew’s story of the resurrection had been read on Easter itself. The preacher begins by reassuring his parishioners that the differences between the Gospels are not contradictions. He then puts the presence of the risen Lord among his people at the heart of his sermon. He meditates on how this appearance took place and on the fact that he was “both visible and hidden.” The disciples “were not kept from seeing him, but they were kept from recognizing him.” The moment of recognition was “the breaking of the bread.” As in the subsequent centuries we Christians cannot see him directly, it is when “we break bread” that “we recognize the Lord.” It follows, and I translate Augustine’s Latin here, that “God’s absence is not an absence. Have faith and he is with you, even when you do not see him.” Look at the disciples, he says: “They had lost faith. They had lost hope. They were dead while walking with a living person, they walked dead while walking with life.” But then they made a decisive gesture: “They offered him hospitality.” Like other preachers and theologians of late antiquity, Augustine urges his hearers to imitate the Emmaus disciples: “Remember the stranger if you want to recognize your Savior.”
Remember the stranger, and remember also the Eucharistic meal. Be known to us, Lord Jesus, in the breaking of the bread. May it be so. Alleluia.
