April 15, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
Acts 5:29a, 30-32 God made him Leader and Liberator
or Daniel 12:1-3 Like the stars for ever and ever
Psalm 114 In exitu, Israel
or 136 Confitemini
or 118:14-17, 22-24 Confitemini Domino
1 Corinthians 5:6b-8 Let us celebrate with sincerity and truth
Luke 24:13-35 The supper at Emmaus
"Some women of our community amazed us" -- this is the substance of what the two disciples on the road to Emmaus had to say to the Stranger they met on their way home from the funeral of Jesus. It may be that John Paul II has similar words for the Lord, when he hears of the impertinent and reverend sisters who have surprises for him these days.
The disciples were defeated, their hopes for a new politics in Jerusalem had come to nothing: "Are you the only one (only visitor to Jerusalem, they said--for they assumed that since he was leaving town afer the Passover, he too had been there only for the Feast) --- are you the only one who doesn't know what happened in town?
And is there a sardonic smile on the Stranger when he tweaks, with his prompt, "No! What things?" "About Jesus of Nazareth" they exclaim. The two travellers didn't recognize the Stranger--why should they? They had never met him. Emmaus is not mentioned as one of he towns that the Leader had visited; it isn't the home of Mary and Martha--that was Bethany, another suburb, where he had stayed in the days of his flesh. They--Cleopas and the other disciple--were obviously known to the early church, however, to Luke's sources, for one of the names is remembered as he writes the account some fifty years later, around 85 or 90 A.D. So these two may not have ever met Jesus up close, though they may have been in the Palm Procession when the throng swept into Jerusalem proclaiming him Liberator, announcing his coup d'etat. But they didn't get to see him up close, 'though they knew what his politics were: "We had hoped that he was going to be the one to set Israel free, to get us out from under the Empire!" Our older Bible versions which say, "we had hoped he would redeem Israel" make it sound to our overly religious ears like they had been expecting a Billy Graham conversion of the city council to evangelical religion. But their hopes were much more worldly. "We had hoped he would save our necks!" That he would give us back our country, stolen by sellout pols, give us the franchise, make us proud to be a people again. And Jesus' response to them (a strange thing for an intruder to say to his hosts) is: "O foolish men!" "Babosos!" And the account Luke gives says that the Stranger then began to interpret the Bible to them. He didn't have his Thompson chain-saw Bible with him, or a Cruden's concordance, or one of those tape players the Witnesses carry nowadays to your doorbell, or newsprint posters and magic markers. He just began to talk plain Scripture to them in a new way, in a hermeneutic of liberation, for the first time in their hearing. Oh, they knew the Scriptures--and he wasn't teaching them the Bible as if they had not heard it read before in synagogue, talked about at home. He didn't have to begin with them as with Sunday School--he began with what they knew, with Torah and the Prophets--and opened it all up for them. His new hermeneutic, not of a triumphalist messiah, or a Latin caudillo, or a yankee imperial president, nor of any kind of crazymatic preacher, was an opening of the Scripture concerning the One chosen by God to be their Liberator. They would come to see that through his solidarity with them, and with the suffering masses, the oppressed would find the route to victory. "Hasta la victoria siempre," was singing in their hearts. What they learned that day as pilgrims together and at a shared supper enabled them, so that even when the Stranger vanished from their sight, they were left with Resurrection. They become liberators themselves. Their hearts burn within them in the recollection of the new way of doing Scripture, the opening and the breaking of the loaf of Scripture to be shared as food. These are the highly suggestive elements of the life of the radical resurrection community which Jesus leaves behind as he goes down the road after supper, as he in his flesh vanishes from our sight.
What he has left us, Luke tells us, is a liberationist way of looking at Scripture and sacred history and tradition. At religion itself. And a liberationist way of praxis--of acting on it. We now get to DO the word. They had invited in the Stranger, and let the One who was homeless for the night, and guest for the table, break their bread and bless it. "It is toward evening and the night is far spent," they had said. To break the bread is to decide how it is shared, for the one who breaks it divvies up the resources, cuts the cake, slices the pie, for the table guests. It is the sharing out of resources fairly that makes the Eucharist a fair one and a true, a valid Eucharist. Where the community shares no resources, its eucharist is a farce and a sacrilege.
Here I wish to cite a passage from a pastoral letter of Rubén Isaza, Archbishop of Cartagena, written decades ago, just after the great pentecost at Puebla, when bishops drank more deeply of the common cup of struggle: (Quoted from Rafael Avila's book, Worship and Politics, Orbis, 1981.)
"When in the church we celebrate the Eucharist we proclaim the justice of the bread distributed to all equally, liberty for all who come together to celebrate the paschal mystery. . . It is not in passivity or in conformity that the Christian realizes communion with God. Rather it is in the attempt without respite to achieve one's own liberation, and by the continual movement forward from a life less than human to conditions more human. . . Just as in the first passover of the Israelites, the Eucharist ought to be received by those who are ready to begin the march toward their liberation."
And it is a Sign and the means to the new arrangement of resources to which the whole community is called, politically. We need a laity and ministry demanding that the bread loaf of our common resources be broken and shared, and we need preachers and people willing to do the work of a liberation hermeneutic, in reflexion and in praxis. The Risen Christ comes into our midst not to replace our efforts with a religious substitute for struggle, but to give our struggle new power, and that power is given into our hands so that we may bid the pilgrim, "Stay with us!" and to the Stranger: "Be known to us in dividing up the bread.'
The little loaf-sharing church stole away from the neighborhood of Jerusalem Temple and the synagogues of the diaspora, hounded to martyrdom for hundreds of years, and then, one day, found its bishops enthroned and basilicas built for it by emperors. It issued rescripts and itemized its metaphysics. It created a dogmatic mind of Christ to supplant the tortured flesh of Nazareth. But there was always and remains still the opportunity to make Jesus your friend, and to invite him to share your supper. As I child, I learned John Oxenham's "Credo":
Felices Pascuas!Not what, but WHOM, I do believe,
That, in my darkest hour of need,
Hath comfort that no mortal creed
To mortal man may give; --
Not what, but WHOM!
For Christ is more than all the creeds,
And His full life of gentle deeds
Shall all the creeds outlive.
Not what I do believe, but WHOM!
WHO walks beside me in the gloom?
WHO shares the burden wearisome?
WHO all the dim way doth illume,
And bids me look beyond the tomb
The larger life to live?
Not what I do believe,
But WHOM!
Not what,
But WHOM!
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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