HOMILY:  3rd SUNDAY OF EASTER ‘A’ 2017

‘I want to run away…’  ‘I need to get away…’   ‘I want to be away from here…’

Most off us have probably, at one time or another, found ourselves saying something like that – or at least murmuring something like it under our breath.  Maybe when something has gone badly wrong and we are angry or embarrassed at what we have done. Or maybe when we feel just fed up and depressed.  Or maybe when we have experienced a great sadness or disappointment and everything and everyone around us reminds us too painfully of what has happened.  We have to get away – we have to be anywhere other than where we are.

That was surely what it was like for those two disciples of Jesus who found themselves on the Emmaus Road, walking away from Jerusalem on the evening of the first Easter Day.   Cleopas and his companion had been disciples of Jesus – they had heard him preach and teach and heal and forgive – and then they had seen him condemned to death and suffer and die on Calvary.  The tales told by some women about seeing angels and finding Jesus’ tomb empty had not impressed them. As they said: ‘Our hope had been that he would be the one to set Israel free’ – and now they felt that they had been utterly disappointed of their hope.  So they had decided they must get away from the city of Jerusalem, the place that now they could only associate with death and failure.

On their flight from Jerusalem, a stranger had joined them.  As they talked through their troubles with him, he listened and helped them to understand the truth that what they had been through – all that they were trying to get away from – did make sense: that there was a meaning and purpose in it all;  and that that meaning and purpose would become clear to them if only they would remember all that the Lord God had done for his people in the past – all God’s care for his people in the past – above all, God’s promise, proclaimed by the Prophets, that the hoped for Messiah would have to go through suffering and death before his final victory.

For us, when we are tempted to take flight from our disappointments and embarrassments and despondency, there can be the same possibility of finding meaning and purpose and hope.  If, like the two on the way to Emmaus, we try to reflect carefully and thoughtfully and honestly about what has caused us distress – and, as it were, try to ‘stay with it’ – we are then very likely to find that our hearts begin to be touched by the same ‘stranger’. We shall certainly begin to hear his voice more clearly if we turn to the Scriptures and let him remind us through them of God’s faithfulness to his promises and his power to bring good out of the worst evil.

And above all, if we do what Cleopas and his fellow-disciple did, and ask the Lord to share his Supper with us, then we open ourselves to his promise to open our eyes and strengthen us to do precisely what they did:  that is, to return to Jerusalem – to give up our futile attempts to run away from our troubles – and instead to live in the place that once was the scene of our distress, but which is now the place where miraculously, we are able to find resurrection and life in abundance.