Dark Devotional: About All the Things

Last updated on: April 28, 2017 at 1:48 pm by Guest Contributor

Dark Devotional: About All the Things 2017-04-28T13:48:21-05:00 Guest Contributor

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Ostensibly, I created all my social media accounts to keep in touch with friends and family. Increasingly, however, platforms that were once about sharing pictures and keeping in touch are also the means by which I receive wave after wave of bad news. I’ve digitally surrounded myself with the socially concerned, and the world is a mess.

In our gospel reading this Sunday, we find two disciples whose situation seems similar.

“That very day, the first day of the week, two of Jesus’ disciples were going to a village seven miles from Jerusalem called Emmaus, and they were conversing about all the things that had occurred. And it happened that while they were conversing and debating, Jesus himself drew near and walked with them, but their eyes were prevented from recognizing him.”

My usual tendency would be to jump to the end of this passage, past this conversation and to the forthcoming revelation of who Jesus is, and I’ll get there, but that seems too easy. By chance, an old article I read this week by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion called me back to the importance of the men’s conversation: why would these two men talk with so much vigor about the “all the things?” Because they’ve just been through a major trauma. Their rabbi is dead. They grieve. They pine for a kingdom to come that now seems out of reach, wholly beyond possibility. And they do not recognize him when he walks beside them – “their eyes were prevented.” “By what, exactly?” Marion asks. They are next to him! They physically hear the sound of his voice, which taught them! They don’t recognize him because they won’t let themselves. The evidence in front of their eyes is such that the obvious truth of it is unimaginable. The notion that this might be their rabbi never crosses their minds. As Marion puts it, “the dead man is dead, period.”

And their minds begin to doubt… “Isn’t he?”

I still wonder… Isn’t he?

Because I see pictures of Syrian and Iraqi children, dead or in shock, and they remind me of my children, of holy innocents, and I don’t see the resurrection; I see the crucifixion, I see Christ being crucified. And if he isn’t dead yet, we’ll keep trying. But maybe that’s enough for hope. If we have to keep trying, that’s enough for that holy doubt, the moment when I think that there’s still a chance. Even when those disciples on the road to Emmaus were consoling one another and talking and arguing, Jesus drew near. In their sorrow and their confusion, even if they didn’t recognize him, he drew near. And even though they didn’t recognize him, he sat with them and helped them sort through the grief and the trauma of our shouts of “Hosanna!” turning into cries for blood.

“As they approached the village to which they were going, he gave the impression that he was going on farther. But they urged him, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening and the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them. And it happened that, while he was with them at table, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them. With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but he vanished from their sight.

…he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread.”

What strikes me as I think about this passage is the agency of Jesus and the cooperation of the disciples. It isn’t initially the disciples who come to Jesus – he comes alongside them. And yet, as a visitor, a stranger, he is the recipient of their hospitable welcome, “Stay with us.” And so the Christ abides with them, but in doing so makes them his companions, in the most literal manner, by taking up bread, blessing, breaking, and sharing it with them. Known to us in the breaking of the bread, so that our communion with those we come alongside makes new life possible. As Simone Weil once wrote, every morsel of bread we take, bless, break, and share with one another is an invitation for the presence of Christ to be received: “something like a real communion,” she says. Christ makes us his companions, we see him for who he is, and then he is gone from our sight. Alive to us, but invisible. Christ seems absent when he is present and is paradoxically even more present when absent. So why am I so lonely and blind?

“So it happened, one day, that while I was conversing and debating, Jesus drew near and walked with me, but I prevented my eyes from recognizing him.” My loneliness was the loneliness of one who refused to see the person right next to me. In a commentary on a different passage (Matthew 25), Weil writes that even if the gospel emphasizes the presence of Christ in the suffering, those who turn their attention to the suffering become Christ to them, by taking, blessing, breaking, and giving ourselves, by our real presence to their distress, by our coming alongside, by making one another companions. Being concerned and “[online] debating” is not enough for me to see the risen Christ – I only begin to despair. They knew him in the breaking, and then they were left alone to do the work, to come alongside and break for others.

Can I do the same?

Jacob W. Torbeck is an ENFP, a Slytherin, a husband, father, and doctoral candidate at Loyola University Chicago, where he studies the concept and use of vision in Christian spirituality and theology.

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