Dying and rising

How do people experience the risen Jesus in their everyday lives?

The authors of the Christian Scriptures often deal with that question. But, because it isn't a pressing issue for us who have redirected our faith into areas different from those that interested our sacred writers, we rarely notice their responses. They differ author to author.

Luke seems to have partly created Peter's famous Pentecost speech with this question in mind (Acts 2: 14, 22-23). Hearing the first reading, we're not only to think about how great Jesus is, but also to imitate some of His attributes.

Notice how Luke describes Jesus' "mighty deed, wonders and signs." He tells us "God worked [them] through Him." Jesus didn't accomplish these solely by His own power. They were part of His life because He had opened Himself so deeply to God that one couldn't separate God's actions from Jesus' actions.

Raised

Such God-openness guarantees that, when Jesus is killed, "God [will] raise Him up, releasing Him from the throes of death because it is impossible for Him to be held by it."

When Jesus' first followers attempted to imitate His giving of Himself to God, they not only became "witnesses" of His Resurrection; they also discovered the same Spirit poured into their lives that God had poured into Jesus' life. How else could they explain the Pentecost morning phenomena?

It's important to note that the author of the second reading (I Peter 1: 17-21) uses the same words about Jesus's Resurrec-tion that Luke employs. Both say that "God raised Him from the dead," not that Jesus rose from the dead. There's a huge difference between doing something yourself and having someone do it for you.

The writer of the second reading believes God does the same thing for us that He did for Jesus, so that our "faith and hope [might be] in God." We discover the risen Jesus among us not so much by having faith in Jesus as by having the faith of Jesus. Instead of just worshiping Jesus, we're also expected to imitate Jesus. Only then do we notice that the risen Jesus has entered our lives.

The key to understanding the Gospel (Lk 24: 13-35) is to remember that the angel at the empty tomb tells Jesus' disciples to stay in Jerusalem until they receive the Holy Spirit. Jerusalem for Luke is more than just a geographic location. It's where someone experiences suffering, death and resurrection, imitating the pattern which the historical Jesus experienced there. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus are disrupting God's plan. They're walking away from a place where God had intended them to stay.

Vanished

Jesus doesn't meet the pair head on. Luke tells us that He overtakes them, demonstrating that He's coming from Jeru-salem. Eventually, He explains God's word, then breaks bread with them. It's at this point "that their eyes were opened and they recognized Him." Yet their recognition caused something else to happen: "He vanished from their sight."

Listening to the word and breaking bread is a classic way of describing the Eucharist. Through the Eucharist, Jesus takes Jerusalem to them. The first Christians most easily discovered the risen Jesus among them in the "breaking of bread."

It was each person's Jerusalem: the place where they died to themselves by becoming one with all those others who joined in that action. This act of suffering and death brought them the insight necessary to perceive the risen Jesus in their midst. That seems to be why the instant He's recognized, He disappears. We recognize Him over and over again only because we're willing to give ourselves over and over again.

No wonder, on returning to Jerusalem, the pair announce that Jesus was "made known to them in the breaking of the bread." It's the one place we'll always discover Him - as long as we make that action an experience of dying and rising.

(4/7/05)