Easter Sunday: the foundations, and the disappointed resurrection dudes

 

Lk 24:13-35 (13-48)

 

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 such a 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 to Emmaus, a place of ancient nationalist military victories.

Cleopas' very name was short for Cleopatros meaning 'of the illustrious, prestigious father'.

The disciples are still imbued with the ambition to succeed: this is their god.

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

For these 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 the very bandits disguised as men of God who had done away with the Master as their 'authority' (v.20).

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.

They are teachings, not stories or storytelling.

 

Even we, enamoured of our own ideas, find it hard to enter into the work of excavating the stories of failure, to extract sapiential pearls from them.

But conflicts are valuable mirrors: of internal struggles.

The Word of God, undomesticated by clichés, 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 cunning, strong; not even good in the current sense.

Events and emotions, even negative ones, happen but rather to develop the ability to set one's gaze and correspond to the inner tinkling of the Calling.

Vocation-character, in bad times: 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.

Discontents 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 outer rags, we sense in the same disappointments a Presence coming to visit us.

An alternative Consciousness that wants to live and flow in us.

It will bring a Gift that brings another Relationship, 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, will 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 capacity 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 dramatic story 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, misunderstanding, even hostility to the Call of God - the Risen One goes further afield.

Then he enters, but not into the village [the common village, of dogmas, of even glossy manners, or of traditions, of conformisms] because he is already Present. And in any case it is not Shepherd who loses the flock.

In the watermark we grasp the rhythm of our worship: entrance, homily, Eucharistic liturgy, final choir, missionary proclamation... whose essential meaning is the proposal: 'to break life'.

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

 

"This is my Body" means "This is Me".

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 make itself Food shared for the benefit of others.

Such is the essential, truly sacred call.

No pre-emptive sterilisation: only that in the round 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.

He comes in the Church that gratuitously offers itself for the life of the voiceless, the distant, the different; not of the good and the bad.

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

 

The news is too good: you give up the barley harvest [the end of the first ten days of April: in Palestine it was the right time to start harvesting] and set off immediately for Announcement.

The business of the land is put in brackets, so that it is not only the business of the land that goes by the wayside - becoming 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 him present [or - unfortunately - useless and absent].

Conditioned by a false vision inoculated by bad teachers and pagan values, the disciples still felt bewilderment 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.

All awaited the divine man: ruler, possessor, revered, avenger, titled and super-affirmed. Capable of leading his own to the same fortune.

Luke 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, which still resound with 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, albeit destitute, but which abandons no one.

In the authentic church, in fact, the synergy of differences or different and shadowed 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 for reinterpretation 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 the failure.

But we do not candidly 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, forlorn; nor achieved with military triumph: it would disown Him.

We meet the Risen One outside the tomb.

We catch 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 the reversals.

Making it possible for brothers and sisters to meet with Easter as well.

In their ceaseless beginning there is a discovery and something special, abnormal, disruptive; laying a continuous foundation.To internalise and live the message:

 

When have you experienced a Jesus who gently approaches and takes your step? For you, is the Cross a catastrophe?

Which side of your personality grasps that of the Eucharistic Christ and in between? Perhaps something one-sided, or overt?

What turns you away from the blindness of present Life?

 

 

 

 

It does not create a hierarchy: in the middle and wounded, or ghostly

 

(Lk 24:35-48)

 

We do not recognise a person by hands and feet (v.39).

The Risen One has a life that escapes the perception of the senses, yet the Resurrection does not annul the person, but rather expands it.

The identity and being that characterises him is of a different nature, but the heart is that, characterising. Love to the core: unsparing action [hands] and walk [feet], which non-faith marginalises, humiliates, kills.

Christ cannot be grasped outside the experience of sharing, witnessing, mission - the point of the text - which extends among all men.

Evangelisation from direct heralds and enthusiastic proclaimers. Centred in the core of the Announcement, which moves everything and gives access (vv.35-).

Finally, thanks to the intelligence of the Scriptures, which brings one out of commonplaces and vague interpretative automatisms.

In the specific listening and forgiveness that makes us participate; in the commitment that risks, walks, and speaks.

 

The human project of the Creator has taken on a pedagogical configuration in the Law. It was taken up, actualised and purified by the prophets, and sung in the psalms (v.44).

But the Conversion proposed by Christ is not a return to religiosity, but "change [of mind] into remission" (v.47).

The change of convictions and mindset is "for the forgiveness of sins": that is, in overcoming the sense of inadequacy preached by the manipulative religious centre.

Its formal and empty directions prevent women and men from corresponding to their roots, character, vocation - to joy, to the fullness of personal fulfilment, to the great Desire that pulses within each one.

 

In Jesus, salvation history takes on and redeems the totality of the human: it becomes the privileged place of the true seal of the eternal Covenant between the Father and his children. Only in Him does our life go right.

This awareness formed the core of all the early liturgical signs, which in words and gestures expressed the attitude of gratuitousness and acceptance that animated belief.

In this way, also the multifaceted encounter; and the risk of the mission of Peace-Shalôm (v.36): Presence of the Messiah himself, actualised in the Spirit.

 

The Passover of the Lord gave meaning to the past of the people and was the foundation of freedom in love, in coexistence - for personal and ecclesial work.

Principle of new configurations. "Made" par excellence [in this sense Lk in vv.41-43 insists on the reality of the resurrection].

Here is the beginning, source and culmination of authentic history - in the very figure of the Eucharist as the Table of the "Fish" [acrostic abbreviation, in Greek, of the divine condition of the Son of Man].

In short, we are eyewitnesses, not gullible or victims of collective hallucinations.

We do not see projections of anguish and frustration converging in the Risen One; we do not look to him for compensation.

 

In the early years after the Master's death, some disciples actually defended themselves against sceptics by telling of apparitions.

The most convincing and genuine Manifestation of the Living One was actually the wisdom and quality of life expressed by the first communities.

Those who "see and touch" are those disciples who involve themselves to the point of finally making their soul movements, their exoduses to the peripheries, and their passionate gestures, coincide with the Master's own wounds of love: "Touch me and see" (v.39).

This points to an event and story of admirable light for all, which becomes extended history, from brother to brother.

Witness of weight, of the divine (v.48) - in the Yes of being, even undermined or destroyed by the archaic sacral society of the outside.

 

In the earliest times believers - here and there - made it through the help of fraternities in which the Person of the authentic Messiah manifested himself persuasively, because "in the midst" (v.36).

Not 'above' or 'in front' - nor with ethics and dogmas.

Hence in the assemblies there should never have been any placemen (for life) who claimed to represent Him and had title and prominence, while others were destined for the rear or subordinates (equally fixed).

All should have been equidistant from God: no privileged, no installed.

No one leading the ranks - or closer to the Lord, while others distant.

 

The Lord was revealed Living in conviviality - the key word, the apex of the entire Bible.

Sharing also in the summary, which found the ways of sensitive, personal intimacy and trust: "They gave him a portion" (v.42).The concrete and global perspective of the Cross as source of Life was a transmutation of the haughty and distant sense of 'glory'.

Natural talent or not, those who represented the Risen One were always at hand: no chosen ones - zero those sent to the rear.

Even the first community tasks reflected the character of a Jesus who was shareable, spontaneous, accessible to everyone - at the centre and in a position of reciprocity.

 

No inbred, predestined, at the top.

This is why the Announcement had to begin from the Holy City (v.47), configured to the opposite vitality - compromised, inert, omertosa; pyramidal, co-opted, and murderous of the prophets.

That of the Eternal City ... remained the first of the 'pagan peoples' [v.47 Greek text] to be evangelised!

Only a strong identity of stringent Faith, of Hope from Elsewhere and real Communion could convert them from sin and be a code for understanding the Scriptures.

And not make Christ a ghost (v.37).

 

In the communities of the early days, listening to the personal and communal inner world was particularly pronounced, because the direction of travel proposed by the Master seemed to be all wrong.

Despite the chaos of external securities, the crossing from fear to Freedom came from a tolerant perception - from visceral cores of experience.

It was precisely the bottlenecks that accentuated change, internalisation, and tore disciples away from the habit of conformist harmonies.

One then relied more willingly on the tracks of the soul. Thus encountering one's own profound nature - a new axis of life, starting from the roots.

The search for a new compass for one's paths, the loss of predictable references, and social discomfort, put one in touch with oneself and others, in an authentic way.

Feeling the anxiety, the malaise, and the plagues, they let their own Calling be known - even though the external way in which they saw themselves and dealt with normal or spiritual existence, was for them.

Having to move from habits, one no longer shrank from the most precious revelation: of the primordial and humanising intimacy deposited in the fraternal communion of the new crucified Way.

Educated by the paradox of narrowness, the uncertain apostles became step by step the seekers of a trace, of a more pertinent route; the pilgrims of unexpected codes.

 

"Witnesses" (v.48): fathers and mothers of a new humanity.

 

 

To internalise and live the message:

 

How do you experience the identity of the Risen Crucified One? And his Glory? Of what does your heart burn, and Whom do you radiate?

Are you one who places himself at the head of the group? Or do you "with Jesus in the midst" contribute to the happiness of all?