Easter 3a God works in Mysterious ways.

According to Luke, it was Easter evening and darkness was descending.  Cleopas and his friend were downhearted as they traveled home. Driving home after Marquette topples the wildcats downhearted.   Walking home alone after you been fired downhearted. Breaking up with your Girl Friend and getting rejected by Harvard in the same week downhearted.  Cleopas and his friend are so downhearted that rumors of the Resurrection of Jesus had not been strong enough to overcome their profound sense of loss and sorrow. They knew what dead meant. They knew what disappointment and discouragement meant. As they said to the mysterious stranger on the road, they had had such high hopes for Jesus, but these had been dashed by his brutal execution. They lost hope because they lost hope in  Jesus. The Messiah was supposed to triumph gloriously and would not die the death of a common criminal.

But a stranger on the road interrupts their sad post mortem and gently scolded their certainty and loss of hope.  Listlessly, dully they listen to his explanation of all the holy writings as he turns upside down all the old prophecies and shows them that the Messiah had to suffer these things in order to enter his glory.  They listen but with sad and half closed eyes.

“Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” Doesn’t that say more than they intend? Cleopas and friend are all alone as the terror of eternal night draws near.   What is it that blinds us to the unexpected, the amazing, the unforeseen?  What is it that closes our eyes to the goodness of a person who just has to walk in the room and our skin begins to crawl?  What blinds us to the blessing of our own life, that makes us feel immune to success and makes it impossible to see God’s loving hand at work in our personal history?

Stay with us, they plead with this stranger, because despite everything, this stranger has by his presence strangely warmed their hearts. They do not want it to end. He has drawn them out of their discouragement and despair, out of their sure and certain hopelessness.  He has disturbed their blind prejudice.

This total stranger assumes the role of host at supper lifting the bread and uttering the ancient blessing. And then, he breaks the bread and gives it—suddenly they recognize him. Why couldn’t we see it? We couldn’t we recognize Him? We were lost in ourselves, trapped in our hopelessness, lost in our faithless preconceptions.  Then as mysteriously as he had appeared, he disappears!

They raced back to find the eleven and their companions gathered together. Were they already celebrating the mystery of the Resurrection? Cleopas and friend burst in and cannot stop saying: “The Lord has risen indeed!” Were they affirming Simon’s experience of the Resurrection as if to say “Now we get it”? They tell how He has been made known to them in the breaking of the bread. They discover the Risen Jesus in a simple routine action of breaking bread.  Not as some scholars presume, over years of speculation and theological reflection.   They knew Him in the breaking of the bread.  This is not intellectual knowledge but the kind of knowledge that we have of our soul mates.  They knew him, they loved him, in the flesh.  He was risen as he promised.  A new moment in history has opened for these first disciples.  We stand in the same faith, this faith once handed down.  This day we hear the words that explain that Jesus had to suffer.  This day the bread is broken.  This day our eyes are opened.

Amen.