Acts 2:14, 22-33 | 1 Peter 1:17-21 | Luke 24:13-35

May your people exalt forever, oh God, a renewed youthfulness of spirit so that rejoicing now in the restored glory of our adoption we may look forward in confident hope to the rejoicing of the day of resurrection through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

There’s something consistent about the message that God has placed before the human race, and nothing seems more important than for those of us who call ourselves Christians to follow the story as it is written. And for me as a Catholic priest, the story was in the New Testament, and until recently, I looked to that place for my fullness of understanding of who God is.  I learned more about who Christ is than I did learn about who God is in the New Testament, and so it was my beginning, after my retirement, of really studying the Old Testament — not that it wasn’t there in the readings ever since I was ordained.  After the council, we added an Old Testament reading, but to really get into it took time and reflection.  And what I see now is a much richer, much more beautiful picture of this journey that we’re on with God in Christ and in one another.  And so if I look back to the Old Testament, I realize, when Abraham was called, he was told he was going to take on a role with God, and he was going to do something for God.  He was going to form a people, and so the first thing he was asked to do was to take a journey.  He was going to start this journey with his people, and so he had to leave what he knew.  And he had to go on this path, and he would get finally to Jerusalem.  And then finally what happened there is — well, before they got to Jerusalem, I should say, they got as far as, let’s say, to the Egyptians, where they got into slavery.  So think of it.  On the journey people get sidetracked and get caught in things that rob them of continuing on the path, and so then Abraham led them.  And then it was time for Moses to lead them, and they also went on a journey, on a long, 40-day journey toward the Promised Land, Jerusalem.  

And then we have this beautiful, beautiful story of Christ coming into the world, and then he uses the same kind of metaphor.  He uses the same kind of thing.  He said, “I want you to come with me on the path, the path of life.”  That’s the main theme of this third Sunday of Easter.  What is this path of life that we’re on that our ancestors have been on?  If we look at a path, what is it?  It’s different than a road.  A road is constructed.  It’s perhaps done by engineers and people who have all kinds of technology and ability to know where the destination is and the easiest and most efficient way to build a highway there, and then you just get on it, and you don’t have to think.  You just follow the road, but the journey that God is calling on us to engage in is not that kind of a highway.  It’s a path, and a path is made by human beings walking.  It meanders, and it flows, and it follows the terrain.  And the beautiful thing about it is there’s a kind of sense that, when you’re on it, someone has gone on this journey before, and the first ones that went, it must have been very difficult to figure out which way was the right way until more and more people understood it.  And the more people walked it, the more it became a distinct path, in a sense, in the forest or wherever they were walking.  Beautiful image about the reverence we need to have that’s mentioned in the second reading of today’s liturgy of the word, the reverence we have for those who have gone on this path, our ancestors.  They have grown slowly in their understanding of this great, great mystery that God longs to reveal to each and every person, the path in which God invites them to follow him, to find him, and the beautiful thing about this gospel passage, the beautiful thing about this story, the road to Emmaus, is it’s one of the many stories that revealed to the early church the process that they are invited to engage in.  It’s new.  It’s different.  And the difference between the Old Testament journeys is, number one, they weren’t as successful as these people hoped they would be, but now something had shifted, something we call redemption.  It’s something that we — think about it this way: the whole story of a God entering into the world to teach you and me how to live in this life with hope and with direction and with success and finding what we ultimately, deeply need — that’s the best description I can give you of what it means that we are a redeemed people. 

What does redemption mean?  What did it earn for us?  I should say what did it gift us with.  Two things: the promise of enlightenment, of understanding, of knowing, of discovering a truth that we call wisdom, and forgiveness.  We are promised, as a redeemed people, that God has done something through Christ that broke a barrier that kept us from the fullness of understanding of who we are and who he is and where we’re supposed to go.  And for every misstep, for every time we get off the path, there is nothing, nothing but forgiveness, understanding, compassion.  Can you imagine making a journey where, the minute you get off the path, you’re told that you don’t deserve to find what’s at the end of this path.  One of the shadows of religion or any religious person is, when somebody deviates, they say, “Well, they’re lost.  They’re gone.  They’re cut out.”  That’s not true religion, but it’s the way religion can sometimes develop, we, the saved, on the path and the others lost and forgotten.  No, this path is something much, much more certain.  We’re promised that we will find this path, and one of the primary promises is that we’re not making it alone.  

That’s what I love about these men who represent all of us.  The road to Emmaus is the path of life they’re on, and we’re going to be on that — we are on that same path.  And they’re like so many of us.  They’re sitting there discussing things, things that make sense in one way, that there is this promise of a figure that’s in the world that’s going to change things and that is going to be a vehicle through which we have this new insight and new freedom and promised that we will reach this goal, whatever the path represents for us.  It’s a way to find the thing that we’re made for, our destiny, the things that satisfy us.  So the promise of redemption is we don’t go on this journey alone, and we don’t go on it with just rules and regulations given by an authority outside of us that, if we don’t do this, we’re going to be left behind.  No, that motivation is over, but we are given, in place of that kind of pressure to perform or be excluded, we’re given this mysterious presence of a God who is with us, whose very presence is a manifestation of hope.  Believe, trust that this is working, that this is going to produce what I know it has been promised to produce, and so the biggest change in the Old Testament and New Testament is there’s another path, but this path we walk with God.  

His presence is interesting, because if you think of Jesus as the presence of God, particularly after his resurrection, we see that this image for these men is that there’s this figure, this God in their midst who is there to explain things, to do what Peter said in that first reading, to make it clear to them that — there are over 300 references to the Messiah in the Old Testament, and every one of them is spot-on.  They all talk about exactly who he is, where he’s going to be born, what’s going to happen to him, how he’s going to save the world.  It’s all there written ahead of time, which is enough to convince a lot of skeptics, but we don’t pay that close attention to what’s in the Old Testament.  But what God is saying through the prophets and what he’s saying now in the person of Jesus on this road with these men as they’re putting all the pieces together — they have the story, and you don’t get any sense about their understanding and debating about it that they’ve received it, that they’ve received what it offers.  They’re just saying, “Isn’t this interesting?  This guy was there, and he died.  Then he’s not there anymore.”  They say this, and they say that.  I love Jesus’ response to it.  “Are you just that dense and that slow to understand?  Look at this.  It’s so clear that everything that was foretold took place, and you see that.”  And if you understand with even just your mind, you’re going to say, “Wow, this is really important to pay attention to.”  But then if you go one step further and embrace it with your heart, then something really radically changes, and that’s the burning heart of this story as these men begin to believe, not in just a story but the story — the story that is written in us, the same story.  And when we see it unfolding in the way that it was unfolded is not just that it happened and gave us this gift, but it’s an invitation with this gift of redemption that we can do this thing.  We can walk this path.  We can find this gift, but then he disappears.  As soon as they find it, he’s gone.  Then they go back and meet the others, and they’re all enthusiastic, and they all support one another.  

And this is the key thing I want to try to get across in this homily, and that is, when we walk the path, we never walk it without our ancestors.  We never walk it without God, but the most interesting people we walk it with are the people in our life, the people that enter our life, the people we fall in love with, family members, the family that we choose on our own, the influential people, the teachers, the artists that create something that move us.  All these people we walk with, and when we’re walking with them, we’re walking with the God that’s in them.  That’s one of my strongest things I long to teach you is that we have a God who is present to us, not directly as he was, say, to Jesus but as he is through Jesus to the world.  Jesus manifests God’s power, God’s strength, God’s wisdom, God’s forgiveness, and we have that same gift to manifest that same presence to each other.  So what I’m thinking of, what I want you to think about is this path you’re on, your life, my life, our path, how interconnected it is and how important it is to know there’s a power overseeing it so we’re not going to get very far off before he draws us back.  And then when we’re walking with people, we’re going to lean on them when we’re weak, and they’ll lean on us.  It’s a beautiful way of describing this world, and never before with this sort of craziness in our world of separation do we need that presence of one another on this path as we’re so separated because of this pandemic.  But believe with me in the path and the goal and the beauty of the way in which God is manifesting to us the hope that we should have that this journey is going to produce everything it promises.    

Father, always you’re drawing your people from what they know to something more, something deeper, something more life-giving.  Bless all of us as we struggle to make the transition move through change after change, path twist after path twist and move closer and closer into the light of everything you’ve prepared for us, particularly the peace and the hope that is such an integral part of how we’re called to live in this world for ourselves and for each other.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.