Father
Konrad zu Loewenstein
Easter 2020
Emmaus
Our Blessed Lord appears
to-day to two of His disciples: Cleophas and another, perhaps his wife Maria
who had stood at the foot of the Cross. When they looked back at the encounter
later, what motives would they not have found for amazement and the deepest
reverence? -their beloved Master Who had suffered and died in a manner so
atrocious and cruel, was in truth the Messiah of the Ancient Covenant, the
Glory of the Chosen People, indeed God Himself; He had risen from the dead and
appeared before them in person in the form of an unknown travelling companion;
He had come to their house, celebrated the Holy Eucharist for them, then
vanished from their sight.
‘Was not our heart burning
within us?’ they ask each other afterwards. It was right that these chaste and
pure disciples with their sincere and upright Faith in God should rejoice, says
St. Lorenzo Giustiniani, that the Only Begotten Son of God should treat with
them with such affection and familiarity. ‘It was right that in that ecstasy
they were inebriated by fervour, illuminated with wisdom, enflamed with love at
the contemplation of such tenderness and humanity... hearing the divine waves
of His Wisdom... They would have felt in their soul marvellous joys never
before experienced, in those supreme instants when the eternal Word of the
Father spoke to them with the ineffable sweetness of His superhuman love. His
words would have irradiated from Him like showers of spiritual light, His voice
come forth like rivers of celestial nectar, ineffably inebriating their hearts,
as though pervaded with uncontainable joy... while their mind was suspended in
contemplation both at the one who spoke and at the ineffable discourses which
He uttered. Certainly they would have realised that in the Lord Jesus there was
something divine, but their eyes were still too closed to be able to recognise
Him. They tasted the most sweet savour of His Wisdom and in this joy their
heart burned in the conflagration of divine love...’
The Lord explained to them,
as He will later explain to the Eleven in Jerusalem, how the Law, the Prophets,
and indeed the whole of the Old Testament spoke of Him; and how, more
precisely, He had had to suffer in order to enter into His glory. And then ‘it
came to pass, whilst he was at table with them, he took bread and blessed and
brake and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened: and they knew him. And
he vanished from their sight.’ Later they were to recount how they recognised
him in the breaking of the bread ‘Fractio panis’, a term used of the
Blessed Eucharist in the Early Church.
‘How
foolish and slow of heart...’
Various Fathers maintain
that the Disciples could not recognise Him because they doubted. Like the
Disciples on the road to Emmaus we too are on the way, that is on the way to
Heaven; like them we too are accompanied by the Lord, Who, if we are in the
state of grace, is also in our very souls in the mystery of the Most Holy
Trinity. But why then do we not recognise Him either, otherwise we would
certainly ask His help when we needed it, share our joys with Him, offer to Him
our sufferings, give ourselves completely to Him, as He has given Himself
completely to us? And when He enters into our house, as he entered into the
house of the disciples of Emmaus, into the house of our soul in Holy Communion,
under our roof, why do we not recognise Him there either, uniting ourselves to Him more
closely, thanking Him for coming, for giving Himself to us, for suffering,
dying, and rising from the dead for us? Are we too ‘so foolish and so slow of
heart to believe’?
‘Stay
with us...’
After talking to them on
the road He had ‘made as though to go further.’ He was a stranger to them, says
san Lorenzo, and this is why he appeared as a traveller, a pilgrim, and why it
was only fitting that he should leave them. But at the same time, as when he
had made as though to pass the disciple on the lake, He was inviting them
silently to call Him to themselves: into their boat, into their house, their
heart.
‘Stay with us, because it
is towards evening, and the day is already far spent.’ Stay with us on our way to Heaven: stay with us, do not leave us like
the sun sinking so fast over the Holy Land, like the species of Holy Communion
dissolving within us and leaving us without Thee; stay with us in the house of
our soul in Holy Communion: do not vanish from our house, do not vanish from
our sight, from our heart; stay with us when the light of all our worldly hopes
grows dim and extinguishes, when the shadows fall upon this world of ours and
deepen; stay with us when we grow old and it becomes evening, O Lord and God,
when the day declines and the sun of this world sinks and sets and disappears: usque
ad senectutem et senium, Deus, ne derelinquas me! Stay with us
all through our earthly journey and pilgrimage, Who art our only hope in time
and in Eternity, until a light transfigured and more glorious rises in a more
glorious world than this: the light that Thou Thyself art, O Light of Christ,
when at last we shall see Thee face to face, Whom we have recognised here below
in the breaking of the bread.
