L.J. Milone shares a reflection on the Third Sunday of Easter Gospel reading from Luke, chapter 24.
On the road to Emmaus, two disciples remember who they are.
The Risen Jesus reveals this objective truth: our deepest reality is the nothing whose light is all lights, whose being is all beings. If we are engrossed in egocentric ways of knowing, our thinking and feelings, we cannot know reality objectively. We will not realize the deepest and most liberating truth of being rooted in and totally suffused with the nothing whose light is all lights, whose being is all beings.
Brian Robinette, in a remarkable book on the Risen Jesus, called Grammars of the Resurrection, writes, “The resurrection is precisely an act of memoria, God’s transformative memory. Resurrection purifies and redeems memory. As with the story of the travelers to Emmaus, the presence of the risen stranger facilitates an act of recollection in which the disciples are capable of remembering Jesus’ life from a fundamentally new perspective. They remember what he said and what he did, but they now do so in the light of a transformative experience, brought to consciousness in the breaking of the bread, that purges and deepens memory.” The resurrection awakens us to our true, glorified state in God.
The two disciples on the way to Emmaus forgot their identity. They were rehearsing their grief for a stranger who joins them. Do we not do that, perhaps more than we are willing to admit? We complain, nurse resentment, and retread worn-out storylines of hurt, disappointment, and betrayal. As long as we remain stuck in these negative stories, we will not recognize the glory of the Resurrection. Perhaps that is why the two disciples did not recognize Jesus when he joined them. According to Jean-Luc Marion, “they kept themselves from recognizing him. Why were they denying the evidence? Not because it was deficient — it wasn’t lacking in the slightest — but because it contradicts their entire comprehension.” They were too attached to their thoughts and feelings of grief and disillusionment. They needed resurrection faith.
The travelers to Emmaus only recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread, but then Jesus disappears. It appears the recognition and the disappearance happen quickly, in fact at the same time. As soon as Jesus breaks the bread, they see Jesus as he simultaneously vanishes. “With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but he vanished from their sight.” This vanishing represents the clearing away of all objects of consciousness, all our thoughts and feelings, to apprehend the naked reality of God. True recognition occurs in the moment of naked faith, resurrection faith, which awakens us to the nothing whose light is all lights, whose being is all beings – once we let go of thinking.
The disciples see. They see the Risen Jesus and in seeing him alive, alive in God, they come alive. They begin realizing who they are. But only as Jesus vanishes. To me, this suggests something crucial about God: the divine cannot be the object of our experience. God cannot be the object of any consciousness at all. Concrete entities in this world are objects of experience: smartphones, music, cars, food, etc. People can be objects of experience because we meet them at specific times and places and they appear in our field of awareness. We can see them, touch them, hear them, and they can do the same with respect to us. This is not how it works with the nothing whose light is all lights, whose being is all beings. God transcends space and time. God transcends experience even as God comes to meet us in experience through objects, through concrete realities such as the bread and wine we offer at the Eucharist.
It is significant that Jesus, although unrecognized, meets the disciples in their grief and disillusionment. When Jesus meets them and asks what they are talking about, they look “downcast” (Luke 24:17). Edward Schillebeeckx writes, “When we lose all our supports, even those which can be experienced empirically with some degree of positiveness, the immediacy of the presence of God is in fact experienced as a “dark night”. All the mystics have experienced this immediacy of the presence of God as a nada…At the very moment when we turn our attention from mediation to look towards God’s real presence itself, with the shedding of the mediation God himself also vanishes into nothing.” Our grief, sadness, and disappointment can be the gateways to realizing who we are, one with God. But they are only gateways because God has overcome death in raising Jesus, the unveiling of our glorified state.