Resurrection

When he was at table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. Luke 24:30-31.

What, really and truly, do we make of the Resurrection? How convinced are we? How keen would we be to defend it to a sceptical neighbour? Wouldn’t it be easier if Jesus, as a great teacher, had simply died and left us his teachings and his moral example? Then we could declare ourselves, like Tony Benn, to be simply “students of Jesus of Nazareth,” in the way that other ethical giants, such as Tolstoy and Gandhi, have had their students and followers. Christianity would centre on the Sermon on the Mount, which is much less problematical than Easter. “Blessed are the peacemakers” causes much less controversy than “Christ is risen.” But instead we have to make sense of a man rising from the dead.

We have the Resurrection narratives, of course. But they come from a world very different from our own, and we are not sure quite what to make of them. Were the gospel writers witnesses of these events? How much was based on evidence, and how much on hearsay? How much had been added in the thirty or forty years before the gospels were written down?

The accounts of Jesus’ appearances, vivid and powerful though they are, don’t quite settle the issue for us. Whatever their authors were convinced of in their time, we still have to be convinced of the Resurrection in our time. We still have to ask what there is in our experience of Christ that demonstrates his risen life, that shows us a living man, one who has truly passed through death and is with us as more than a memory. Does this all have to come from the past, or is their something in our experience that we can recognise as the living Christ?

If recognition is the issue, let’s think about the Emmaus story, because it is a story about recognition: non-recognition at first, and then recognition afterwards. Notice how much non-recognition there is. Jesus joins Cleopas and his friend on the road, but they don’t recognise him. Then Jesus appears not to recognise the recent events in Jerusalem, and they scold him for his ignorance. Then Jesus tells them off for failing to recognise that all these happenings are the fulfilment of prophecy.

Up to that point no one is doing very well as far as recognition is concerned. And the story suggests that it might have stayed that way. As they get near to the village, Jesus leaves the two disciples and walks on ahead, “as if he were going on” to somewhere else. It is only at their insistence that he stays. Jesus seems quite prepared to let this episode end inconclusively, in continued non-recognition. One recalls some of his sayings about hearing and not understanding, and about leaving the dead to bury their own dead: you had your chance to recognise me, and you missed it.

However, the two do insist, and Jesus does stay, and recognition follows. But notice what it is that is recognised. It is not a face or a body. Had it been the physical Jesus that they recognised, they would have known him from the start, on the road from Jerusalem. Because these two were not fringe hangers-on who might not have known Jesus. Luke identifies Cleopas and his friend as “two of them,” of the inner circle of Jesus’ followers, a group small enough to be in one house at the same time. They knew him and should have recognised him. But they didn’t.

Nor do they recognise his teaching. When Jesus explains to them how his dying fulfils the scriptures, he is giving them a summary of his teaching about himself, a teaching that, as his followers, they must have heard before. But even then they don’t know who he is.

So what is it that gets through to them? What they recognise is an action: they enter the Emmaus house, and “when he was at table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.” And we, of course, also recognise this action: it is the action of the Eucharist. In fact Luke is using almost the same words that he used two chapters earlier when he described the Last Supper: “then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and gave it to them” (Luke 22: 19). The clear implication is that these two have seen Jesus do this before, if not on the eve of his death, then on some earlier occasion. They know this breaking of bread, and they know that Jesus is the only one who does it. Immediately their eyes are opened.

The risen Jesus is recognised by what he does; and what he does is unique, something that those around identify with him and with no one else. Most actions can be done by many different people. But Luke is directing us to a unique action that only Jesus can perform. He tries to make sure that we will not miss the point by repeating it, before and after Christ’s death. At the Last Supper, he tells us that Jesus “took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and gave it to them.” After the Resurrection, at Emmaus, he tells us that Jesus “took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them.” Between these two utterances lie the events of Good Friday and Easter Day, the dying and the rising, bracketed between these Eucharistic words.

Luke’s point is surely that only in the light of these words can we recognise what the Easter events were all about, and what Jesus was all about. If the followers of Jesus did not understand these words when he was alive, then however familiar they might have been with him, they did not really know him. In that sense, no one recognised Jesus until after the Resurrection. Because, for Luke, Jesus simply is the one who, through the breaking of the bread, declares the breaking of his body for the life of the world. He declares this twice; and between the two declarations, his body is broken on the cross, his Resurrection does give life to the world. The words make sense of the action, and the action makes sense of the words.

Jesus is only fully known to us by what happened at the first Easter. Cleopas and his friend do recognise a familiar presence, but in another, deeper, sense they are seeing Jesus for the first time. Whatever he was for them before—teacher, prophet, Messiah—they now see what his life was about, and how it centres on this single act, the breaking of a body to feed the world. Their non-recognition came from looking in the wrong place for the wrong thing.

And that, two thousand years later, is our difficulty too. What do we expect the risen Christ to be for us? A physical or spiritual presence? A moral teaching? An encouragement and inspiration? He was all those things to the first disciples, those who witnessed the Resurrection appearances. But what enabled them to recognise him was what he had done, the unique action of the first Easter.

Here was a man who, in his dying, drank the cup of death and despair. He trusted that in drinking that cup he would, in some unimaginable way, be sustained; the bread of new life would be given to him. But more than that: by his words and actions, by the breaking of the Eucharistic bread, he included those around him in that action, so that in some way it was as though he had done all that for them, as though they were caught up in this man’s action and changed by it. The new life that he had gained was theirs as well. And seeing that, they knew him for the first time.

The path of recognition is no different for us. When we see that Christ’s action is not just his alone; when we see that this action includes us all, that when Christ drinks his cup he drinks it with all who drink the cup of bitterness and gives to them, at the same time, the bread of life; then we know what it means for Christ to be raised from the dead, and through all our blindness and imperception we have recognised him for the first time. For that is the action of Christ alone; he is the only one who can, out of the brokenness of life and the despair of death, feed us with the bread of his risen being.