The Third Sunday of Easter (Year B)
April 14 2024
O God, whose blessed Son did manifest himself to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open, we pray thee, the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Micah 4:1-4
1 John 1:1–2:2
Luke 24:36b-48
This is Mark’s year, but here on the Third Sunday in Easter, we hear from Luke. In the “new” lectionary (that is the one from the 1979 Prayer Book), this is the Sunday where we learn about how the Risen Christ became known to the disciples in the breaking of bread. I usually associate that phrase (as you probably do as well) with the story of the disciples encounter with Jesus on the road to Emmaus. We heard that story, however, last year in Year A, so today we get the similar, but distinct, episode that follows.
The two who met Jesus on the road and who recognised him only after he took bread, broke it, and gave it to them (although they told each other that they knew who he was all the time), are now with the other disciples and “they told what had happened on the road, and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread.” And “as they were saying this, Jesus himself stood among them.” We are told that “they were startled and frightened, and supposed that they saw a spirit.” Jesus knew what they thought and felt, and asked them. “Why are you troubled, and why do questionings rise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have.” Here, as in the story of Jesus’ encounter with Thomas from John’s gospel, Jesus offers the disciples the chance to touch him, to verify with their very senses the reality of the resurrection. And, as I have said many times, this is not presented here (or in John’s version) as a bad thing.
Jesus knows they are uncertain, that they “disbelieved for joy, and wondered.” He knows this must be strange and unsettling; and so he seeks to reassure them. To prove even more definitively that this is really Jesus returned to them, “he said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ [and] they gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them.” Only someone of flesh and blood would need to eat, could eat. As on the road to Emmaus, Jesus shows them that it is he, in his own physical body, by sharing a meal with his friends, as he had done so many times before.
What is even more remarkable, however, is what follows. Yes, Jesus has proven he is risen from the dead, but what he also does – as he did on that road with the two – was teach them the true meaning of everything that had happened before. Jesus acknowledges that while everything he did in his ministry leading up to his passion pointed towards this moment, that it was opaque, and is now only truly comprehensible on the other side of the Cross. It is only the Risen Christ that explains everything, explains what God is doing in Jesus, what God has done for creation. Not until they see Jesus in his risen body can their minds be opened “to understand the scriptures.” Now they see with new eyes how the Kingdom of God is inaugurated, how death is defeated, and how we are reconciled to God.
The church understood this from early days, and we know for sure that in the fourth century, those who were drawn to Jesus, drawn to the waters of Baptism, who wished to be a part of what God was achieving in Christ, were welcomed at the Easter Vigil in rites veiled in mystery. Before their baptism, they were taught the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed, the basics, but they could not really grasp the full weight of that to which they were drawn. It was only after they experienced Christ death and resurrection through the waters of baptism and the drama of the ritual and ceremony, and received his Body and Blood in the Eucharistic elements for the first time that they were taught what it all meant. It was in the teaching that followed their new birth that their minds were opened “to understand the scriptures; [how] it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”
And perhaps, it is Jerusalem that is the key. Here in Luke’s gospel, where all the events of the resurrection take place not in Galilee, but at Jerusalem, we are meant to understand how this is to extend far and wide and is to be “preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” That phrase will immediately bring to mind the passage from Micah we heard earlier, flesh it out, give it even greater depths. The disciples will recognise in the Resurrection definitively how Jesus was not simply a prophet or teacher, as Israel had seen in the past, but the very son of God, how, indeed, “all the peoples walk each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever.” Micah tell us how:
He shall judge between many peoples, and shall decide for strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and none shall make them afraid.
This new resurrection life, coming out of Jerusalem and made incarnate in the risen Body of Christ, shall bring a new kind of peace, a world unrecognisable from our own. And on a morning like today, when half way round the world there is no peace in Jerusalem, this may be hard to for us to comprehend, but as we meet the risen Christ in the breaking of bread, we are to have hope that this promise will be fulfilled now that Jesus has inaugurated a new age in his resurrection.
Andrew Charles Blume ✠
New York City
The Third Sunday of Easter, 14 April 2024
© 2024 Andrew Charles Blume