From the Gospel according to St. John:
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.
It is the gospels of
St. Luke and St. John that give us the narratives of the most vivid
post-Resurrection appearances of Jesus.
These appearances are at once strange and ordinary, their strangeness
pointing to the dimension shattering act of the Resurrection, their
ordinariness underlying the absolute continuity of the risen Lord with the
Jesus who died on the Cross, as in today's Gospel: he showed them the wounds in his hands and in his side.
We have often heard Luke’s description of Jesus’ appearance
on the road to Emmaus. And like with so
many familiar gospel passages we tend to take it as just part of the story
without too much reflection. And yet
this passage is much more than one of the post-Resurrection appearances of
Christ. It is rather a profound and
fundamental passage for understanding the role of memory and of faith for the
Christian.
It is the three women, Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary
the mother of James, who first witness the empty tomb with the stone rolled
away. They listen in amazement and fear to
the angel’s pronouncement that Jesus had risen.
The angel begins his proclamation with: “Remember how he told you.” And the women then remember Jesus’ words and
they go to tell the apostles. The women
at the tomb rush back to tell the
disciples about the empty tomb and the words of the angel. And Luke says, concerning the reaction of the
apostles: “But these words seemed to
them an idle tale, and they did not believe them”. Not what we would expect from the men on whom
the Church is founded.
Then comes the Emmaus story. Two of Jesus’ disciples are walking to the
village of Emmaus and talking about what had happened the past few days and
what they had heard. The resurrected Christ joins them on the road
and asks them what they are speaking about.
They do not recognize him, the man they knew and loved. They give him a
synopsis of the events including their hopes that Jesus was the Messiah, that
he had been crucified, and what the women at the tomb had told them they had
seen. It is at this point that Jesus uses what we call the Old Testament and
what the apostles knew as Scripture to explain how what was foretold by the
prophets was fulfilled in himself, this man Jesus, whom the apostles do not
recognize. Evening is now approaching,
and they invite Jesus to stop with them to eat and to stay with them. Jesus accepts. And in that famous scene, when
he takes bread, blesses it, breaks it and gives it to them, the apostles
recognize the risen Lord. And he
vanishes from their sight.
We are so taken by the obvious Eucharistic imagery here that
we forget the importance of the teaching that has gone before this. The two apostles knew the writings of the
prophets. They were part of their memory, a memory without which they could
have no faith as Jews. And what Jesus
does during that conversation on the road to Emmaus is to make them understand
the meaning of what they remember: that he is the fulfillment of what they
remember as pious Jews and in so doing he prepares them for their recognition
of him in the breaking of bread.
But you see: without
that memory the apostles could not have understood. Without that memory the
apostles could not have recognized him as the risen Lord. Without the stories that are an integral part
of faith, there can be no recognition of the one who fulfills those
stories. And this points to one of the
causes of the deep problems of this particular time in the Church. It is as if most Catholics have been
lobotomized, their memories removed, their memories that are an integral part
of the Catholic faith without which there can be no recognition of the risen
Lord in the breaking of bread, in the Mass.
One could speak here as well of the deliberate loss of cultural memory
of a society that is hell bent on forgetting the bases of its culture in order
to do whatever it wants. But what must
concern us today is the lack for most Catholics of that memory that is
essential for faith, for without that memory faith becomes something of the
instant, with no foundation, something that is of the moment, relying merely on
feeling and emotion.
That this is true of our young people should be
obvious. The failure of religious
education in the past fifty years is acknowledged by all. And this is true especially in those places where the faith is taken
seriously and the obligation to pass on that faith is taken seriously. The sorry state of religious education in the
1970s and 1980s was answered by those who saw what was happening and saw that it was not
good by reverting to a catechesis that was centered around doctrine, that if we
pumped Church teaching into our kids that this would somehow solve the problem
of a basically secularized and sentimentalized version of religious
education. But teaching kids about the
Trinity and transubstantiation and the precepts of the Church, while important,
has little to do with that memory that
is crucial for faith. Because as St.
Augustine beautifully and powerfully teaches us in Book X of his Confessions, memory
is not just bits of information but is a mysterious and complex and integral part
of what it means to be human and plays a central role in faith in God.
Many of the Catholic young people I have taught in various
schools through the years have little or no knowledge of the scriptural stories
that are the foundation of faith in Jesus Christ. How could these kids have
listened to the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus and have had any
understanding of what he was saying? How could Jesus help them interpret their
memories as leading to faith if their religious memories are blanks? One cannot
recognize the moment of faith if one has nothing to lead up to that moment.
And yet the answer is not only having everyone memorize Bible
stories, as important as they are. The answer is not merely teaching children
the gestures and piety of faith, although teaching a child to genuflect tells
them more about the Real Presence than any teaching lesson or sermon. The
problem is deeper than that and in the end lies elsewhere. The climax of the Emmaus appearance is when
Jesus does at the table what he did at the Last Supper : he took the bread,
blessed it, broke it and gave it to them: all this in the context of the words: "Do
this in memory of me". Now that English
word “memory” does not convey what Jesus said very well at all. Without any pedantic linguistic pretensions
on my part, I can say that what the
Aramaic and the Greek and even the Latin are saying is more like this: “Do this in the making present of me”. This is the heart of the Catholic
understanding of memory in the Catholic faith.
It is precisely the Mass that is the memory of the Church, the memory of
Christ, the memory of God. What active participation
in the Mass really means is participation in the memory of the Church, that
memory that includes Scripture, that memory that includes that Tradition that
is the handing down of the faith, that memory that allows us to recognize the
risen Lord at the elevation of the Host, that memory that allows us to know
whom we are receiving in Holy Communion.
And the memory of the Church is something living, real, organic, that
grows in the power of the Holy Spirit.
And it is the Mass we celebrate here today that is this memory of the Church, and it is so not merely because this
rite is approved by the Church to be said at this particular time. It is so because it is the living organic
memory of the Church in every gesture, in every note of the chant, in the
cadence of the Latin language, in the special tones for the epistle and the
gospel, in the deliberately stylized archaisms that counter the rationalism of
modernity, in the oneness of the priest and people facing God together, and
above all in the silence that is demanded when we “do this” in the making
present of our Lord and our God. But
when the Sacred Liturgy of the Church becomes something for experts to tinker
with, something to be brought up to date, a date that is always already on the
trash-heap of the culture, when it is thought that one has the right to treat the
sacred rite as something to edit, copy, delete and paste, one destroys that
complex living organism that is the memory of the Church that is the liturgy,
and one destroys the very capacity for the Catholic to worship God.
Our prayer must be on this Low Sunday, this Dominica in
Albis, this Quasimodo Sunday, that the Church will do what she must do to
recover her memory and therefore the memory of her people. And we thank God that in this corner of the
world that is called Norwalk, there is this parish church dedicated to Mary,
the Mother of God, Mary the Mother of the Church, Mary who pondered all these
things in her heart: there is this parish church where the faithful come from
far and wide to remember, to remember in the beauty of holiness to remember
within what has been handed down to us, distilled by the faithful that have
gone before us, that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son
to die that we might live, and because He lives in glory, we have a sure hope
that by faith in him, we will share that eternal life.
