The foundations, the disappointed in the Resurrection

(Lk 24:13-35)

The disciples question, they are in confusion; they are anxious and accusing, disillusioned and frustrated - but what they seem most concerned about is not so much the mocking death of the Master, but (paradoxically) his own divine condition.

What they fear is exactly the crumbling of their hopes of glory.

They are only afraid of not feeling supported by someone who has achieved notoriety in order to achieve the longed-for dominance.

What deludes them is precisely that Jesus could be the Risen One: that is, the one grasped and incorporated into himself, the one assumed by the Father into his own full Life because he is recognised in the resigned Son.

Enthroned at the right hand of the heavenly throne, because true, and a servant of others.

Such apostles have their eyes held back by dreams of principality, wealth, and supremacy.

On this basis it is impossible to recognise the Presence of Christ - who wants us to be in the present and see the future.

As before, they head for Emmaus, a place of ancient nationalist military victories.

Cleopas' very name was an abbreviation of Cleopatros meaning "of the illustrious, prestigious father".

The disciples are still filled with ambition for success: this is their god.

It is still triumph - not genuineness and self-giving to the grave - that would change the world.

For such followers, the son of the carpenter Galileo was still the Nazarene - which meant subversive, rebellious: one of the many messiahs who were to take revenge against Roman oppression and conquer power.

Quietly, sick with ambition, they return to consider as their 'authority' (v.20) the very bandits disguised as men of God who had done away with the Master.

So Jesus must once again pick up our pace and insist on interpreting the Scriptures correctly.

From them it emerges that the concrete good of the real, multifaceted, even seemingly contradictory woman and man is a non-negotiable principle.

The Greek text of Lk says that Jesus "does hermeneutics" (v.27).

In short: the passages of sacred Scripture, from Moses to the Prophets and beyond, are not to be told and perceived by ear, but interpreted.

These are teachings, not stories or storytelling.

We too, enamoured of our own ideas, struggle to enter into the work of excavating the events of failure in order to extract sapiential pearls from them.

But conflicts are valuable mirrors: of internal struggles.

The Word of God not domesticated by platitudes helps us to perceive events and the world even of the soul in the genuineness of providential signs.

They are there for a journey of evolution, where surprises of the most precious kind appear.

This is not in order to become astute, strong; not even good in the current sense.

Even negative events and emotions happen but to develop the ability to set our gaze and correspond to the inner jingle of the Calling.

Vocation-character, in bad moments: wonders for a great joy, like a Sun within, fiery and bright (without judgement).

Protagonist who extracts unexpected qualities; worker who tills the earth and waits.

Changing the way we perceive, the new energy of the Word brings considerations into a different dimension.

Conflicts are no longer looked at to resolve them, but to understand their meaning.

We learn to realise that our ailments, sufferings and problems are often like clothes - even willingly undone overcoats.

Having thrown away these external rags, here we sense in the same disappointments a Presence coming to visit us.

Alternative consciousness that wants to live and flow within us.

It will bring a Gift that brings another Relation, to chase away banality and its thousand bondages.

It will in time have the strength to settle within.

And when personal anxieties, conditioned intentions, conformist expectations, lead us into a territory where all things enter into another game, into a whole other reality - that Voice will increasingly become the fertiliser and substratum of our ability to correspond, to grow and depart; to detach ourselves from common ideas and find new positions.

A new realm, another founding memory; new reminders, different hopes, convictions, trusts.

Little by little we realise: it is in the same sense of the drama of the authentic Son that our lives as saved ones are spent.

Thus, instead of always standing with our heads backwards or only forwards, we begin to perceive the prophetic; and we bring it to awareness.

While the disciples of the glorious "messiah" continue to be directed to the old "village" - a place of narrowness, incomprehension, even hostility to the Call of God - the Risen One goes further afield.

Then it enters, but not into the village [the common village, of dogmas, of even glossy ways, or of traditions, of conformisms] because it is already Present. And in each case it is not Shepherd who loses the flock.In the watermark we catch the rhythm of our worship: entrance, homily, Eucharistic liturgy, final chorus, missionary proclamation... whose essential sense is the proposal: 'to break life'.

It is the sharing that makes the being of Jesus perceptible - in the Church that becomes sapiential and fraternal food for the wholeness of all.

"This my Body" means "This am I".

God is expressed in a gesture, the breaking of the Bread - not in a sacred object.

It alludes to the Community that overcomes differences and comes together to become shared food for the benefit of others.

Such is the essential, truly sacred call.

No pre-emptive sterilisation: only the all-round experience is the experience that makes the divine Presence perceptible.

"He made himself invisible" because the Risen One has a life that is not subject to the banal perception of the ordinary senses.

But it comes in the Church that freely offers itself for the life of the voiceless, the distant, the different; not in good manners, and bad habits.

"Take and eat": make my story your own, the choice of the conviviality of differences and contrasting sides. That they convey dignity to any Path.

The news is too good: one renounces the barley harvest [the end of the first ten days of April: in Palestine it was the right time to begin the harvest] and immediately sets out to proclaim.

The affairs of the earth are put in brackets, so that it is not only those that go by the wayside - making themselves explicit proclaimers, assertors and sustainers of those who seek life.

Broken: different Perfection

After the first persecutions (64), the bloody civil war in Rome (68-69) and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem (70), the rebels of the empire tended to decrease - along with the second generation Christians, direct witnesses of the Apostolic teaching.

In such a reality, entirely new and undermined by the danger of routine, perhaps more than a dozen years after the fall of Masada (73), Lk wrote a Gospel for converted Hellenists - but educated to the ideal of a Greek man.

Its purpose was to stem defections, encourage new believers, allow the culturally distant a living experience of the Lord.

The Risen One's life is no longer subject to the senses, for it is full. Now it is the community that manifests it present [or - unfortunately - useless and absent].

Conditioned by a false vision inoculated by bad teachers and pagan values, the disciples still felt dismay in the face of failure.

The expectations of religion, of philosophies, of life in the empire, made them gloomy and lost during the trials of Faith.

Everyone was waiting for the divine man: dominator, possessor, revered, avenger, titled and super-affirmed. Capable of drawing his own to the same fortune.

Lk reverses the banal perspective, because within each of us there is an innate wisdom, sometimes stifled by external ideas, but different.

Only a different understanding of the sacred Scriptures that still resound full of critical prophecy, warms the heart and makes each one recognisable in Christ.

Wisdom that is combined with the quality of life experienced in a multifaceted fraternity that may be destitute, but abandons no one.

In the authentic church, in fact, the synergy of differences and shadow sides configures a New Covenant; it opens the eyes of all, intensely manifesting the Son.

And the Risen One does not cling to the least of these in a paternalistic manner (vv.28.31) but confidently calls us to reinterpret him in love, without boundaries or identified roles.

His Presence in spirit and deed allows anyone a coined-spoken calibre of life without prior conditions of fulfilment.

Hence the return (v.33) and personal proclamation (v.35), instead of indifference or flight.

The passage from Lk is one of the most profound testimonies of Jesus' Easter.

The tragedy of the Cross still frightens, so does failure.

But we do not bluntly encounter the Lord as an executioner, or in the fervour of a 'victorious' holy war.

Christ is not a leader. Liberator yes, but not of an idea or of a single chosen people.

In short, the new order dreamt of will not be contrived, procedural, futile; nor will it be achieved with military triumph: it would disown Him.

We meet the Risen One outside the tomb.

We encounter Jesus on a journey, and in the authentic sense of the 'living scriptures'; in the breaking of the bread that illuminates coexistence and the richer meaning of church life.

We personally see the Son lifted up, building the new community of disciples who are not lost in history - indeed they flourish because of reversals.

By making it possible for the brothers too to meet with Easter.

In their ceaseless beginning, there is a discovery and something special, abnormal, disruptive; laying continuous foundations.

To internalise and live the message:

When have you experienced a Jesus who gently approaches and takes your step? Is the Cross a catastrophe for you?Which side of your personality captures that of the Eucharistic Christ and in between? Perhaps something one-sided, or overt?

What turns you away from the blindness of present Life?