NOTES for Luk 24:13-43

If in the previous story the women never met the risen Jesus, becoming participants in the Gospel of the Resurrection only by faith in His word, now a real meeting is described for us. For Christ, unrecognized by the travelers, remains Himself, and they really did share conversation and a meal with Him, even though they recognized Him at the very last moment. Earlier, Jesus taught crowds of people and openly argued with the scribes and Pharisees, but after the Resurrection only those who themselves want it with all their heart can see and recognize Him. And this recognition takes place precisely in the heart: "Were not our hearts burning within us?"

The experience of these two disciples is open to everyone who cannot reconcile themselves to the death of hope. In fact, it is the experience of the Church, when "two or three are gathered" in order to meet Christ in the Scriptures, for everything there is written about Him, and to recognize His presence at the meal of the Kingdom.

A strange situation at first glance: the disciples are walking along the road beside the Teacher without recognizing Him. How could this have happened? Of course, Jesus changed greatly after the resurrection, but at other times and in other situations His disciples still recognized Him, even if sometimes not immediately. But here, throughout a journey that was by no means short, they never recognized Him!

The evangelist says that their eyes were "held" - that is how the corresponding Greek word sounds literally. It was as if something kept them from seeing. Some barrier, something through which the gaze cannot penetrate, which does not let it pass through. So what was this invisible barrier? Invisible because they were walking along the road right next to each other, talking, and it would seem nothing could have prevented the apostles from recognizing Jesus.

But they saw Him while at the same time, in a sense, not seeing. Did they see indistinctly? Hardly; then they would have raised the question much earlier. More likely, they saw clearly, but... as if not the One who was actually walking beside them. It happens when the person you are speaking with puts on a mask very much like a human face: it is easy then to mistake him for someone else, but no one who sees him will doubt that a human being stands before him, even if an unfamiliar one. So what barrier changed the appearance of the risen Jesus so much?

Obviously, the very one that separates the Kingdom from our world, which is still not transfigured. He was already dwelling in the Kingdom, for after the resurrection His life belonged entirely to the Kingdom, and in the untransfigured world He was visible only to those, and only to the extent, who could perceive the reality of the Kingdom entering the world. The apostles, however, were not truly ready for such perception. Of course, they had spent a great deal of time beside Jesus during His earthly ministry; they had seen manifestations of the power of the Kingdom and felt its breath.

But they had not yet truly shared in its life. Their sharing in the Kingdom and its life would happen later, on the day of Pentecost, when the breath of the Kingdom would burst into the world like wind. Then, after Pentecost, they would learn to see Him clearly and distinctly. The barrier would disappear for them. For now it still exists, and, seeing the Teacher, they do not recognize Him unless He Himself makes Himself recognizable to them. After all, only a resident of the Kingdom clearly sees its realities. And its King as well.

Paradoxical things happen to the apostles during their fellowship with the risen Jesus. At first, for quite a long time, they walk along the road beside the Teacher without recognizing Him. Then, at the moment of the breaking of bread, they recognize Him and immediately lose sight of Him. What is happening? Did Jesus really change so much after the resurrection that He could not be recognized at all? Hardly, since at other times the apostles recognized Him.

Perhaps His nature after the resurrection ceased to be visible to the eyes of an ordinary person. Clearly not, because both before and after the events described, His disciples saw Him, and more than once. So what is the matter? Apparently, it is a question of who sees what is happening in the Kingdom, and to what extent. In truth, the Kingdom "has drawn near," as the Savior Himself says. It is now close. And the Risen One abides in it fully, to the end; He no longer belongs to the former, untransfigured world.

And He can be seen only to the extent that one can penetrate the Kingdom with one's gaze. But from our world, not yet transfigured, the Kingdom can be seen only a very little. One can see, so to speak, only its outer edge. On the other hand, it is now everywhere, it is always near, and if someone is walking beside you on the road, you can never be sure that this someone is in the same world as you. He may very well turn out to be an inhabitant of the Kingdom, whom one can dimly see, without recognizing his face, even from outside, through that boundary that separates the Kingdom from this world. That is how the apostles saw the risen Jesus walking beside them on the road to Emmaus.

They were on one side of the boundary, and He was on the other; but as long as He was near the boundary, His disciples noticed nothing, thinking that He belonged to the same world as they did. But then came the moment of the breaking of bread, when in order for that breaking of bread to be accomplished in fullness, He needed to move away from the boundary into the depth of the Kingdom, toward the Throne that is its center.

And it is there that the disciples recognize Him, because the breaking of bread brings them into participation in His life, and immediately they lose sight of Him: they cannot look into the depth of the Kingdom, into its center, where their Teacher has gone. This is not surprising, since the apostles, despite their constant fellowship with the Teacher both before and after His resurrection, still lived wholly in this world. The Kingdom remained something external for them. After Pentecost, when they themselves become its inhabitants, they will learn to see the Teacher everywhere, wherever He may be and wherever they may find themselves. But that still lay ahead; for now, the Teacher appeared to them and disappeared. As did His Kingdom.

One wants to look at the appearance of Jesus described by Luke through the eyes of a person present nearby. We see a company of people gathered in the evening for fellowship, united by the name of their Teacher. Two of them, who had just come from Emmaus, are eagerly and fervently telling their friends about the Lord whom they met on the road. What a miracle it is to see Him and receive confirmation of the importance and necessity of celebrating the Eucharist, in which the Lord Himself is recognized as present.

And then, absorbed in the story and in attention to it, the people see Christ appear. Everything falls silent, and the words sound: "Peace to you." Their hearts are filled with confusion and fear, with disbelief at what is happening: after all, He did not come in through the door! But Jesus, setting aside everything external, immediately invites them to look deeper, into the depth of their own heart. And to find there a place for His peace.

The apostles' reaction to the risen Jesus appearing among them is entirely understandable if one allows that at that time they still knew about the Kingdom and its life more by hearsay than from their own experience. It could not have been otherwise: the experience of the life of the Kingdom began to open to them on the day of Pentecost, which still lay ahead of them. For now, they remained completely inhabitants of this world, knowing about death and the afterlife no more than any of their contemporaries knew about them.

People in those days connected the afterlife with the world of shadows, with the realm of the dead, where everyone goes and where there is no question of any recompense. There were, of course, other versions, among the Egyptians, for example, or among the Greeks, who taught both about different states of postmortem existence and about postmortem recompense, but they were not very widespread and usually did not go beyond the cultural and religious tradition within which they had been formed.

Among the Jews there was no developed teaching about the afterlife, and Yahwist ideas about it did not differ from the ideas of most other peoples. So what could the disciples have thought when they saw their living Teacher before them? Their first thought was: this is a ghost, a shadow that has come out of the tomb. The corresponding Greek word here can mean both "breath" and "spirit" in the sense of the Spirit of God, but also "spirit" in the sense of a shadow, ghost, or apparition.

In Sheol, as the realm of the dead is called in Hebrew, there could be nothing but shadows, ghosts, and spirits. Sheol is not simply a place of death; it is a place of unceasing dying that can never come to an end. The biblical understanding of the soul sees in it a stream of life that can be more or less full depending on how much of God, His presence, and His breath there is in a person's life. This stream can be utterly full, as is the life of the Kingdom, or it can barely trickle, almost dried up, as is the existence of shadows in Sheol.

In the Kingdom, life overflows like wine from a cup during Shabbat; in Sheol, a person feverishly tries to hold on to the pitiful remnants of it that he managed to carry with him from the world of the living. In the fallen world before the coming of Christ, Sheol was the only real afterlife. People spoke of the resurrection, waited for it, and believed in it, but no one truly knew what it would be like. And so they take the risen Savior for a shadow that has come out of the tomb, only to be convinced very soon that in reality He is far more alive than anyone who considers himself alive.

Describing the appearances of the risen Jesus to His disciples, Luke wants to show his listeners that the Lord who stood before the apostles on Easter morning is real. He immediately cuts off their thought that what is happening is merely "spiritual." If He is real, if He truly returned from the realm of death alive, with flesh and bones, then everything He had told them through all those years is true; then the Kingdom of God has truly come; then death no longer has power, and hell no longer has victory. That is why the disciples part from Him with joy, knowing that a new life is beginning, life in the reality of the Kingdom, full of His invisible presence. We too become participants in this life, believing in His bodily Resurrection in spirit, knowing that death has been conquered by Jesus and that soon we will see Him as He is.

The image of the risen Jesus, who eats fish and honey before His disciples' eyes, is one of the most remarkable Gospel images. One of the most encouraging. Jesus remains Man even after the resurrection. Precisely Man with a capital letter: not less, but more Man than He was during His earthly ministry. Because after the resurrection it is precisely His human nature that is revealed in all its fullness.

God's fullness is present in Him from the very conception, and it always remains equal to itself: God is God, He does not change. But human nature can change, and in Jesus it changes as in every human being. Yet in a fallen person the boundaries of such changes are limited by the damaged state of his nature, while in Jesus there are no limitations. And He shows us our own human nature in all its fullness.

Such as it will become in us as well when our Christian path is completed and we come into that fullness of life to which God calls us. And Jesus' human nature remains itself. It remains nature, and precisely human nature. After the resurrection Jesus does not turn into a bodiless angel, into a ray of God's light. He remains a human being who can communicate with His disciples fully in human fashion, not imitating something human, but precisely being Man.

His nature remains nature, and therefore nothing natural is alien to it, including fish and honey. Of course, passing through closed doors, for example, is not characteristic of the nature of fallen humanity. But, as is evident, the matter here is not human nature as such, but the fact that in each of us fallen people it is spoiled. When human nature is in good order, closed doors are no obstacle to it.

Not because it ceases to be nature, but because it functions somewhat differently, according to other laws. Yet since nature is one, Jesus' body is not cut off by some difference of nature even from such things as fish and honey: they too are part of the same nature to which the body of the risen Jesus continues to belong. This means that at the end of time, after resurrection and transformation, we too will not cease to be ourselves. Not only in soul, but also in body. And the world will not disappear for us, but will change, becoming the Kingdom where life is full in every respect: both spiritual and natural.

For many people today, the question of resurrection recedes into the background, giving way to thoughts about postmortem existence, the immortality of the soul, rewards and punishments after death, heaven and hell. Meanwhile, the Bible says very little about all this, if it says anything at all. Evidently the biblical authors were concerned not with what often concerns us today, but with something completely different: what they called resurrection from the dead.

At first glance it can appear that the difference is not essential: in the end, the subject is still life after death, and the details are not so important. In reality, the difference between the immortality of the soul and resurrection is very great. What is the immortality of the soul in general? What kind of life, what kind of postmortem existence, could be meant in that case?

From the biblical point of view, the postmortem existence awaiting a person is rather bleak: it is not full life, but its pitiful likeness, which can hardly satisfy anyone. There is no question of a person's complete disappearance after death, but what awaits him after death can be called life only with great reservation. All that remains of a person is a shadow; he loses feelings and thoughts, almost loses the memory of his own life and of the world of the living: a shadow in which only a remnant of consciousness barely flickers. It is no accident that when the apostles saw the risen Jesus, they thought they had before them the shadow of their Teacher coming out of the tomb: none of them expected any other postmortem existence, and a meeting with a shadow, even the shadow of a loved one, could bring the living nothing good. The Bible tells us nothing about a blessed postmortem existence or about postmortem recompense like that mentioned in Egyptian or Greek myths.

But it does speak about resurrection, and the image of the risen Jesus shows us quite clearly the difference between postmortem existence and resurrection. Resurrection is not the preservation of pitiful remnants of life after the death of the body, but a return to life in all its fullness, requiring the transformation of human nature itself. Such is the transfigured humanity of the risen Jesus: on the one hand, He can pass through a locked door, which is no longer an obstacle for Him; on the other, He is able to eat the same ordinary earthly food that any of us eats. He is not a shadow; He deliberately lets the disciples touch Him so that they can be convinced of this. He is a man of flesh and blood, although this flesh and this blood live according to different laws from those by which we live.

And He gives the apostles the chance to understand that He has not simply returned to life, but has conquered, has overcome death, which no longer has power over Him. In the same way, it has no power over the life of the Kingdom that He brought into the world and offers to each of us.

The Gospel of Luke ends with a brief description, or rather a brief mention, of the Ascension. The evangelist's logic is understandable: he wanted to describe in full the entire forty-day period of the risen Jesus' stay with His disciples, right up to the completion of that period.

But this is, so to speak, a purely factual, event-based logic. There is another logic in the Gospel as well, one connected with the spiritual meaning of the events taking place. It is no accident that, speaking about meetings with the Risen One, the evangelist describes in such detail what happened on the road to Emmaus, when the apostles, walking along the road and talking with the Teacher, did not recognize Him, and later, during the breaking of bread, having recognized Jesus, immediately lost sight of Him. On the day of the Ascension He also disappears from the sight of His disciples. Clearly, with the Ascension a new stage begins in the establishment on earth of the Kingdom that the Savior brought into the world.

That this Kingdom includes the whole world, together with its physical nature, had become clear even earlier, when Jesus allowed His disciples to make sure that He was not a ghost, not a shadow that had come out of the tomb, but a real living Man. Of course, His human nature changed after the Resurrection; otherwise appearances like the ones the apostles had to observe on the road to Emmaus would scarcely have been possible. But in a certain sense it still remained nature, though transformed: if it were otherwise, He could hardly have tasted earthly food after the Resurrection. After the Resurrection Jesus does not turn into an angel, into a bodiless spirit that has lost every connection with the natural world. He remains a Man, but His human nature changes in quality.

The same thing must finally happen to the world and to each of us, if we follow the path into the Kingdom to the end. Being transformed, the world loses nothing except the evil whose captive it has become. And we, being transformed, lose nothing except the sin that keeps us from living the fullness of the life of the Kingdom.

But in order for the Kingdom to enter the world, its King must be in His own place. Not at the boundary that separates the Kingdom from the fallen world, where even a person who has not yet come into contact with the Kingdom can see Him, but in the very depth of the Kingdom, at its center, on the throne where Christians with good spiritual sight saw Him. To those who are unable to look into the depth of the Kingdom, it may appear that the King has gone away, disappeared, dissolved into that radiant cloud of God's presence that usually accompanies a theophany. In fact, He has simply gone to the place where the King must be when events decisive for His Kingdom are beginning. And that means the events will begin. Very soon.

Today's reading once again makes us think about how fallen man perceives the reality of the Kingdom. The apostles' first thought when they saw their risen Teacher standing among them was that before them was a ghost, a shadow that had come out of the tomb (v. 37). It would seem that for the disciples, who did not expect to see Jesus risen, such a reaction was quite natural. But on the other hand, it is still rather difficult to confuse the ghostly, barely visible shadow of a dead man with a risen man full of life. Such a thing would be possible only if the disciples simply had not managed to see Jesus properly.

Judging by the fact that He had to let them touch Him specifically (vv. 39-40), that is what happened. Apparently touch became the decisive argument for the disciples, while sight, it seems, failed them. Meanwhile it is obvious that if the body of the risen Jesus was dense enough to be touched, then it could be taken for a ghost only if the apostles simply could not distinguish it properly. The situation somewhat recalls the meeting of the disciples with the Risen One on the road to Emmaus: there too the apostles did not recognize Jesus, even while speaking with Him. Apparently it is very difficult for a person who remains in a world not yet transformed and who does not yet possess developed spiritual sight to discern people or objects whose nature has already been fully transformed. If a person sees them with ordinary physical sight, then probably he sees them vaguely and indistinctly enough that they really do resemble transparent or translucent shadows.

In reality, however, transformed nature is least of all like a bodiless shadow. Moreover, it interacts perfectly with the nature of our world. An example of this is the fully earthly food, not yet spiritualized in any way, eaten by the risen Jesus (vv. 41-43). Apparently in this case we are dealing with a concrete manifestation of the universal laws of the Kingdom: it does not destroy or exclude our nature, not yet transformed, but includes it within itself after first transforming it. And here, as one can see, on the scale of one small room, there took place what at the Savior's return will take place on the scale of the universe: the world will be transformed and become part of the Kingdom. And then the age in which we have had to live will come to an end.

Luke's third and final account of the disciples' encounter with the risen Jesus opens before us a reality that is scarcely attainable in our earthly life. Like the women who came with spices to His tomb, we can touch the mystery of the Resurrection through faith; we can meet Him when our heart “burns” as we read Scripture and recognize His living presence in the breaking of bread. But to see Him face to face, feel His touch, and see the marks of His teeth in a honeycomb—all this lies beyond human experience after the Ascension. And yet this is the foundational experience of all Jesus' disciples, of His Church: to know that He has truly risen. This knowledge, this experience, is preserved in Scripture and in the Church's memory, and it fulfills its mission in the world: to bear witness to the Resurrection, not logically or rationally, but on some other level. He is alive, and therefore all subsequent history—described in the Book of Acts and continuing to our own day—has meaning.

Several points closely connected with our lives stand out in today’s account by the evangelist Luke of the risen Christ’s appearance to Luke and Cleopas on the road to Emmaus. First, there is the central meaning of the Lord’s words that it was thus “necessary for the Christ to suffer and enter into His glory.” He tells Luke and Cleopas that the Crucifixion and Resurrection were not merely a tragic accident in which Christ died as a result of human malice. As the authors of liturgical texts insistently emphasize, they were a voluntary manifestation of God’s love, a sacrifice offered by Him for our salvation.

Second, there are the disciples’ remarkable words: “Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked with us on the road...?” We often wonder why we hear God so poorly and why we fail to recognize His presence. This burning of the human heart when it comes into contact with truth is the Creator’s greatest gift to us, the gift of recognizing the time of visitation. Luke and Cleopas were the first and gave us a most important example. Now, after their testimony, we know that this is what happens when we experience an encounter with the Risen One.

And finally, third, there is the fact that definitive, clear, and complete recognition occurs in the breaking of bread. Interpreters differ in their explanations of these Gospel words. Some say that perhaps the Lord broke the bread with a characteristic gesture that Luke and Cleopas might have seen before. Others suppose that at the moment of breaking the bread the disciples saw the nail wounds on the risen Christ’s hands. Still others think that, as the Lord gave them the bread, He said, “This is My Body.” A fourth group regards it as a mystery that cannot be explained rationally. One thing cannot be reinterpreted: the sure and complete encounter with the risen Christ takes place in the Breaking of Bread—that is, in the Eucharist. This is true not only for Luke and Cleopas, but for everyone who loves Jesus from that day until the end of the age.

An interesting question: why do the apostles walking on the road to Emmaus not recognize their Teacher? Of course, they were not expecting the Resurrection; it seemed to them that everything was over, and to the One they took for a stranger they bitterly told everything "that had happened in these days in Jerusalem." But how can one fail to recognize the One with whom one has spent several years, speaking with Him every day? A changed humanity, not easily perceived by the eyes and senses of fallen man? Perhaps yes, for the Kingdom reveals itself with difficulty, and only in part, to untransfigured sight. But at the moment of the breaking of the bread they see Him with complete clarity. What happened?

A theologian could perhaps build an entire sacramentology on this one fact. But the matter here may be both simpler and more complex: the disciples simply partook of the Kingdom, entered it, and found themselves right at its center, where He, their Teacher, is. And from within the Kingdom the Kingdom can be seen well, so the apostles, of course, immediately made out Jesus without difficulty. But how and why it turns out that the Kingdom now opens to the disciples, then closes again to them, remains something one can only wonder about.

One thing is clear: now it is truly near, so near that one can cross its boundary without even noticing it. Yet, on the other hand, it turns out that one can cross the boundary of the Kingdom without noticing not only the boundary, but even the Kingdom itself. One can pass through it without seeing or sensing anything, without noticing even the One whom, while He still belonged in His human nature to the untransfigured part of creation, it had been impossible not to notice. Apparently what is needed is a relationship actualized here and now, a bond like the one uniting those gathered around the broken bread, in order to experience the reality of the Kingdom. And it turns out to be infinitely great: as soon as the apostles recognized Jesus and found themselves in the same spiritual dimension with Him, He immediately disappeared from sight, dissolving into the infinite distance, for He is at the center of His Kingdom, and the apostles, it appears, are still very far from the center...

And yet the meeting took place. That is the main thing. The rest will follow, for ahead lies an entire life, a life to be lived in the Kingdom.

The message of Jesus' Resurrection forms the heart of apostolic preaching, the center of Christianity. Today the evangelist shows how uncontainable and overwhelming it was for the first disciples. Luke describes their doubts and hesitations in order to reflect the experience of his community (the local church), but his story can fully apply to us as well. We too have heard more than once about the Resurrection, read about it more than once in the Gospel, heard it in church preaching, and told others ourselves. But, like the two travelers to Emmaus, it is very hard for us to believe in the Resurrection until the Lord Himself, unnoticed by us, widens our hearts and opens to us by His Spirit the Scripture that bears witness to His Resurrection.

The Resurrection is not an abstract theological concept. Faith in it is based on a personal meeting with the Risen One, as the myrrh-bearing women met Him, as the two disciples recognized Him in the breaking of the bread, as He appeared before all the apostles. But it is also based on our meeting: even if we have not yet recognized who was speaking with us on the road of our life, the burning of the heart and joy over the Risen Lord already testify that we are becoming participants in His glory.

Reading the Gospel accounts of the disciples' meetings and fellowship with the risen Teacher, many people wonder why, having recognized Him at the moment of the breaking of bread, the apostles immediately lose sight of the Savior. It would seem that just a moment ago, as they were walking along the road, they saw Him perfectly clearly; He was beside them, and now He is no longer there, and no one knows how or where He disappeared.

Meanwhile, the nearness of the Kingdom entering the world can explain much here. Even before His death and resurrection, Jesus spoke of the Kingdom having drawn near, of its now being close, of its already entering the world. And after His resurrection He again confirms this thought. But now the situation has changed: after the resurrection Jesus already belongs fully to the Kingdom, and He is present in this world insofar as the Kingdom has entered it. He no longer crosses the boundaries of the Kingdom; He does not touch the fallen world, not physical nature as such, but that part of it which has not yet come into contact with the Kingdom. Meanwhile the apostles still belong precisely to the fallen world, and belong to it entirely. For them the situation will change only after Pentecost, when they come into contact with the Kingdom, feel its breath, and enter it; then they will learn to see the Kingdom as it is, to perceive its infinite depth, where there are no distances and where it is therefore easy and simple to meet Christ: one need only call Him.

For now, before Pentecost, the disciples see only, so to speak, the outskirts of the Kingdom, that boundary by which it touches the still untransfigured world. The boundary itself is transparent; it is easy not to notice it. And the risen Savior, who is on the other side of it, appears to be walking the same road as the apostles. He really is walking the same road, but His part of the road runs on the other side of the boundary that separates the Kingdom from the fallen world.

The disciples, of course, notice no boundary: they are sure that the mysterious Stranger is an inhabitant of their world, not a resident of the Kingdom. And as long as He remains as close to the boundary on His side as His disciples are on theirs, the apostles notice nothing. But then the moment of the breaking of bread comes, and Jesus is where He can only be at that moment: at the center of His Kingdom, as befits the King. From the boundary of the Kingdom He goes into its depths.

And, naturally, He becomes invisible to the apostles, because they cannot yet look that far into the depths of the Kingdom. It appears to them that the Teacher disappeared precisely at the moment when they finally guessed Who was before them. In reality, of course, Jesus had not disappeared anywhere: if the apostles had been able to see the Kingdom as it is, they would have seen their Teacher there in glory. But their time had not yet come. Pentecost was still ahead. For now, the apostles could only wonder and guess why their Teacher appeared so unexpectedly and disappeared from sight just as unexpectedly.