A couple of months after
my priestly ordination, I ended up checking in to Holy Cross House. For about a
week, I’d been really tired and had an annoying cough that wouldn’t go away,
and then one Sunday evening, I passed out while saying Mass. It turned out that
I had walking pneumonia, which isn’t a lot a fun at the best of times I’ve
heard, but that also interacted another condition that I thought I had been
managing adequately, and resulted in gastric fluid collecting in my lungs.
After a few really difficult days of isolation on the medical floor, which were
certainly difficult because of the pain and the fever, but even more because of
the complete lack of knowing what was going on, I was finally allowed out of my
room, and allowed to come down to concelebrate Mass. Still smarting from the
realization of how out of breath I was from walking from the elevator to the
chapel, I remember well the first time I concelebrated Mass at Holy Cross
House. I remember saying, “This is my Body,” and it meaning something new and
different than the last sixty or so times I’d said that. I remember seeing the Body
broken at the fraction rite and knowing that I now knew Christ in a new way. I
knew him in the breaking of the bread.
Thanks to excellent
care from our human health care workers and the heavenly physician, I was able
to go home, back to Holy Cross Parish just over a week a later. It was a slow
recovery, and this is a homily, not grand rounds, so I won’t give you all the
details, but about six months later, we got the news that my lungs were finally
clear, and there had been no significant permanent damage. But that didn’t mean
there had been no permanent change. I knew him in the breaking of the bread.
Fast forward another six months or so, and I was back at Notre Dame, taking
classes while preparing applications for doctoral programs, and I was able to
take a seminar with Candida Moss, who shared with us her reading of Mark’s
account of Jesus’ healing the woman with the flow of blood. If you remember
that, the woman reaches out and touches Jesus’ clothes, and power just kind of ‘leaks’
out of him, and she’s healed. The woman was leaky in disabling way. Jesus was
leaky too. But his leakiness heals. Knowing now in a new way my internal leakiness,
I felt this new closeness with Jesus, our leaky Lord. The brokenness of Jesus’
body was not limited to the crucifixion. The Incarnation as a whole reveals
Christ’s total embrace of human frailty, of leakiness, of breaking. And he
heals not despite that but in that. We know him in the breaking, in the
breaking of the bread.
So, it’s no
surprise to me that these disciples on the road to Emmaus only knew Jesus in
the breaking of the bread. Jesus breaks for us. And everything else we hear
that he did on that day is not comprehensible, cannot lead to recognition, to
Easter faith, without that. They knew him in the breaking of the bread.
That’s not
to cast off everything else he did as unimportant. Some of it, I think, was
vital preparation. At the start of the passage, I’m not sure if they’re ready for
the breaking of the bread. They’re walking along bickering about something, and
then he comes. This moment always reminds me a little bit, if this isn’t too
irreverent, of Bugs Bunny. Do you know the cartoons where Elmer Fudd is out
hunting, and Bugs creeps up behind him, taps him on the shoulder, and asks “What’s
up, Doc?” To which, Fudd turns and replies, “Shhh! I’m hunting wabbits” Fudd is
so focused on his approach to rabbit hunting, so turned in on himself we might
say in Augustinian language, that he doesn’t notice that rabbit tapping him on
the shoulder. I think there’s something a little playful in Jesus here. But
there’s more than just playfulness. Because they don’t shush him, even if they
don’t recognize him. They start to name what’s broken in their lives. Their
teacher, their band of followers, their hopes. “We were hoping.” Such sad
words. But there’s power in saying that out loud, naming what needs to be made
whole, what Christ has brought into union with his breaking, before we can really
let ourselves know him in that breaking.
Then he
walks with them. It’s a slow journey, as it normally is when God works with us.
God could change us quickly of course. God is God after all. But would we then
be us? For rather unfathomable reasons, God loves us. As much as He’s
grieved by us, he loves us. And as He wants us to be holy, to be loving
as He is loving, and to still be the us He loves, he works with us
slowly. He walks with us.
He breaks
open the scriptures for them. And note that it’s only later that they can name
how they’re hearts were warmed by this. Not just warmed, burning. Jesus, the
fiery furnace of charity, set their hearts aflame. But they don’t cut him off in
the middle of Bible study and recognize him there and then. Because, yes, the
Law and the Prophets testify to a God who loves us so utterly that He’d break
for us, but until you know Christ, and you go and “read backwards,” you can’t see
him there.
And, of
course, he had to take the bread. And he blessed it, and he would give it, but the
center point around which all else rotates is that he broke it. The center of
the Christian mystery is not gift, but that Christ breaks for us. Now, the
first orbit around that center is that he gives us the fruits of that breaking.
That he sets our hearts afire, that he breaks open scripture, that he walks
with us, that he has us name what needs healed. But the center is that he
breaks for us. And we are made whole.
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