Luke 24: 13-35
Dear Friends.
We have seven weeks in the Easter Season. The Resurrection stories and the Gospel reflections all invite us to enter into the mystery of the risen Christ. It is a journey from the head to the heart.
The two disciples tell the story to Jesus. For them it is a profound tragedy. They are frustrated and at a loss. Their story is without faith and hope. In particular, they pass over the message of the women with the account of the empty grave and the angels.
Jesus tells the same story back to them. He presents it in the context of the Scriptures. For Him it is a story of faith and hope. “Then they said to each other, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while He spoke to us on the way and opened the Scriptures to us?’” (Lk 24:32)
In this experience we have a fundamental insight into the Christian life. We take the story, our life experience and sooner or later we run up against the common human fate of broken dreams, love rejected and our basic mortality. We try to cover all the contingencies but in the end we are not ready for what life has in store for us. We are like the disciples whose dreams of great things coming from Jesus, the one who would be their savior. Yet in their vision of life there was no room for the rejection and Passion and Crucifixion on that fateful weekend.
Like the disciples, we have to bring faith to the story. With faith we enter the story of the Scriptures and slowly we see God is with us all along. We begin to see the Resurrection for what it is. Love is the victor. All is not lost. Indeed, the victory is ours when we walk with Jesus.
Thomas Merton has a beautiful definition of prayer: Prayer is yearning to be in the presence of God, a personal understanding of His Word, knowledge of His will and the capacity to hear and obey. This is what happened to the disciples in their encounter with Jesus. They were walking away from life. They were fleeing the difficulty of their broken dreams. The Presence and the Word of God opened the eyes of their heart to the fire of love that was there all the time. Now they were ready to return to Jerusalem and do God’s work.
The power of deep personal prayer can do the same for us. We can begin to see reality as pregnant with hope and new possibilities once we encounter the Risen Christ in deep and trusting faith. We need the Word of God to enter into the gracious presence. We need the Word of God to give us direction on the road so we too can find our way back to the Jerusalem that is God’s loving plan for us.
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