He was known to them in the breaking of the bread.
Our Gospel picks up the story just after the travelers to Emmaus return to tell their story to the apostles. Jesus appears to two people walking home from Jerusalem, but they do not recognize him, even though they were his followers. Their hearts are set afire as he speaks with them, opening up the scriptures. It is only when they get home, and they break bread together, that they recognize him, and then he vanishes.
. . . only to appear once again to his apostles as the two travelers tell their story. Here, like in some of the other resurrection accounts, there’s an emphasis on Jesus’ bodily reality: you can touch him; you can give him fish, and he’ll eat it; he’s definitely not a ghost, even if he’s somehow different from how he was before.
This opens up in a mysterious way the theme I want to address, which is the centrality of the body in recognizing Jesus.
So many of these post-Resurrection encounters, and the post-Resurrection speeches, like we hear from St. Peter in Acts, focus on the meaning of Scripture that has now been fully revealed. Indeed, that is what Jesus does here in Luke, opening up the scriptures, making them clear. And this is possible because they’re ultimately all about him. And he is their fulfilment, and he makes sense only in their light.
But we can add, as the Gospel writers do: the scriptures, and Jesus as the fulfilment of the scriptures, make sense only in his bodily presence. There’s a direct personal link that ties everything together. He was known to them not because he gave them the right password, but because he broke bread with them and ate.
St. Jerome famously says that ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ. We could also reverse this and say: ignorance of Christ is ignorance of Scripture. Yet in these stories from Luke, and the apostolic witness, it’s worth remembering the threefold nature of Christ’s body: (1) the historical body born of the Virgin Mary, dead, risen, and ascended into heaven; (2) the sacramental body truly present in the Eucharist; (3) the body of Christ, which is the Church. So if we tie all this together with Jerome’s principle, we might say: to know Christ, we must know the scriptures; to know the scriptures, we must know Christ in the sacraments; to know Christ in the sacraments, we must know Christ in his people. So in the end there’s no Jesus without the Church, no Church without Jesus, no Scripture without Jesus and the Church.
Even in the first century, it was tempting for Christians to separate these things, to go around claiming that they loved Jesus while hating his people or his word. As our epistle today says, “Those who say, ‘I know him,’ but do not keep his commandments are liars, and the truth is not in them.” It’s often thought that John, in his epistles, is dealing especially with an early form of Gnosticism, which is a religious movement founded on the absolute separation of body and soul. In a gnostic understanding, bodies are irrelevant to what is ultimately real; therefore, for some of them, all bodily disciplines and rules are irrelevant to what is ultimately real.
And here’s where the teaching of John, and of the New Testament as a whole, insists in a surprising way—surprising, at least, for those of us who had been tempted to think that Christianity was simply about spiritual things—they insist that the body of Christ, both in sacrament and assembly, is the privileged access point for interpreting the spiritual messages contained in the scriptures.
So we find, then, in Luke, that the single most important way of seeking out Christ isn’t just being clever, or learning a few extra languages, or memorizing the book of Deuteronomy—useful as all those things might be—it’s being in fellowship with the body, which is always a both/and—both the direct sacramental fellowship of the Eucharist, and the equally real fellowship of the Church. Catholics rightly emphasize the importance of the Blessed Sacrament, but we err if we think Christ’s presence in his body the Church is somehow less real. It is real in a different way. Yet they are related. For if we adore Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, should we not look for him and honor him among those who have been baptized into his life, and who have taken that sacrament into their own substance to be transformed by it?
Maybe you’ve noticed—I have—that in the last few years, with so many people spending more time isolated online, there have been so many new products being marketed to fix every possible ailment. We just want there to be a magic supplement for everything. So often, Catholics fall into this same trap spiritually. We think there’s some perfect spiritual or intellectual nugget that will finally cure our scrupulosity, or our covetousness, or our laziness. I don’t mean that there aren’t good things out there, whether consumer products or spiritual techniques. But there is no substitute for the basic discipline of sacramental life, which is life together. We have to show up, and listen to one another, and seek Christ with patience and perseverance. Then, in the course of the journey, like with those travelers to Emmaus, the Lord can open our eyes and reveal what he has been doing all along.