“Let us proclaim the mystery of faith,” the priest urges you. Notice that he does not say, “Let us proclaim a
mystery of faith,” but the mystery of faith. And what is that mystery? It is the mystery of the Lord’s passion, death and
resurrection sacramentally re-enacted upon the altar, bringing the central event of human history into the present. It
is the mystery of the Incarnation extended in space and time through the Church. It is the mystery of God’s love for
mankind, the sign of his desire to be close to those He loves. It is the mystery which looks to the day of Christ’s
return as Judge of the world, ushering in those days when sacraments shall cease because God “will be all in all,”
because then we “shall know even as we are known.” And all this explains why we fast, why we genuflect, why we
receive Holy Communion only in the state of grace, why we have a special love for the priests who bring us this
mystery, why we are concerned with fostering vocations in young men to take their places.
Tonight as we go in spirit to the Upper Room to witness, as it were, the first ordination and first Mass, we do so
on a very special Holy Thursday for it occurs during the Year of the Eucharist, for which Pope John Paul II provided
us with an apostolic letter, Mane nobiscum, Domine (“Stay with us, Lord”), a line taken from the twenty-fourth
chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel, the Emmaus story, my favorite passage in the New Testament. Let us take our cue
from the Pope and reflect on this pericope. Allow me to refresh your memory regarding its details, as I also suggest
that you make this text a point of meditation tonight during Solemn Eucharistic Adoration.
On Easter night two lonely, frustrated disciples of Jesus are on the road; they meet a Stranger Who engages
them in conversation about the meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures which have to do with the suffering and death of
the Messiah. They are so intrigued by Him that they invite Him to share a meal with them and then, in a glorious
reversal of roles, the Guest becomes the Host as He breaks bread for them, opening their eyes to recognize Him
as none other than the Risen Lord, in which moment He vanishes from their sight.
Luke passed on this story of rare charm and beauty because he was writing for people so much like us, people
who were living some thirty years after Christ’s Death and Resurrection, people who had never known Jesus during
His earthly life, people who felt cheated for having missed out on that experience. They were also people who well
may have fallen into the habit of celebrating the Eucharist without enthusiasm or an awareness of the greatness of
the mystery. The point driving home by the Emmaus story is a very profound one, namely, that we who live two
millennia after the Lord’s Death and Resurrection are no worse off than those who walked and talked with Him -- a
statement very subtly made as we learn that the very minute those two disciples recognized Christ in the breaking of
the bread, He vanished from their sight. Therefore, our forebears in the faith had no advantage over us, for we have
access to the Risen Lord in a way every bit as real as they.
Well, then, is this a story about the Resurrection or about the Eucharist? Both -- at one and the same time, for
we behold the Risen Christ precisely in the Eucharist, the mystery of faith, as the Sacred Liturgy speaks of it. And
that fundamental mystery contains within it every other mystery of faith. St. Luke’s story is like a comprehensive
catechism, presenting the basics of Christian doctrine -- all of which lead us not to mere intellectual knowledge for
its own sake but to an experience of the Risen Lord. The best way to prove what I’m saying is to follow the Lord’s
example, as Luke communicated it to us. When Jesus wanted to enlighten the two confused disciples, He joined
them on a walk. May I invite you to join me on the walk to Emmaus, a walk which once led two men to know the
Lord in a new, unique, exciting and vibrant way?
The Evangelist introduces us to two disciples leaving Jerusalem, en route to the backwater town of Emmaus.
Jerusalem is the reference point because it was there that Jesus underwent His redemptive sacrifice, and notice --
the disciples are getting away from Jerusalem as fast as they can; they don’t want to be the next to suffer, which is
to say that they reject the notion of a suffering Messiah. However, the Stranger goes to great lengths to show how
necessary Christ’s Passion was. The obvious conclusion to draw is that the Lord came into His glory only because
He accepted the ignominious death of the Cross. The application to a would-be believer in any age should also be
obvious: We have no right to expect a share in Christ’s Resurrection if we refuse to be identified with Him by
accepting a share in His sufferings.
It is also important to realize that this saving encounter occurs because Jesus takes the initiative, not because
the disciples were clever enough to contract the services of a good guest speaker or because they saw the
intriguing possibilities of getting onboard a winning team. Rather, Jesus approached them and offered them the
occasion to embark on a life of faith. Humility calls us to recognize the fact that God chose us in Christ; we did not
choose Him. He invites us to believe, but He will never force Himself upon us. Only a whole-hearted personal
response can guarantee that great things will happen.
What had kept those two disciples in Jesus’ company during His earthly life and ministry? They tell us
themselves: “We were hoping that he was the one. . . .” Hope is the critical virtue. If any element is lacking in
contemporary life, it is hope, and that is why we witness so many succumb to the ultimate act of despair through
suicide. But our hope must never be misplaced; we trust in Christ and in the power flowing from His Resurrection;
a hope grounded in any lesser reality is less than true hope, providing us with faulty assurances and depressing
results.
As the journey progresses, they reach an inn, and they ask the Stranger to stay with them. Why? Only
conjecture is possible: Was it their desire to continue a conversation on a topic dear to them? Was it to distract
them from their sadness and loss, or to keep their hopes kindled? Was it an exercise in Christian charity, in fidelity
to Christ’s commands? Whatever the explanation, the request, “Stay with us,” needs to be the plea to the Lord from
every believer. He then proceeds to show them how He could remain with them.
Jesus performs an action which Luke’s audience around 70 A.D. would clearly have perceived as a Eucharistic
service, using ritual, familiar language and gestures: “He took bread, pronounced the blessing, then broke the
bread and began to distribute it to them.” With what result? “Their eyes were opened and they recognized him.”
Then what? “He vanished from their sight.” How odd, until one sees what Luke was trying to do. Poetically and
beautifully, he is saying that the presence of the earthly Jesus is not needed when one has the Eucharistic Jesus.
Having prepared the disciples by breaking the break of God’s Word with them on the road, the Risen Lord then
breaks the bread of His Body. Isn’t that exactly what we do in every Mass as the Sacred Scriptures are proclaimed
and explained, making our hearts burn within us for yet more? And the ever-generous God does give us more in
the gift of His Son’s Body and Blood.
I should note that this entire passage is focused on one word. A biblical commentator, with perhaps little else
to do with his time, informs us that a counting up of the words demonstrates that the exact mid-point of the story is
the word “alive,” as the women convey their “tale” to the apostles, to quote their skeptical hearers. Christian faith
must, of course, hold that Jesus is risen or alive, but not just in Heaven, removed from us until Judgment Day. We
experience Jesus as “alive” most especially through the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, which comes to us
through the Church, His mystical Body.
This is the case because Christ has willed to be inseparable from His Church: He is the Head; we are the
members. That Church has a divinely established order to it -- a priestly order which makes the Eucharist present
on our altars and a priestly order which preaches the Word of God, as the Emmaus story likewise makes clear.
Hence, the women’s testimony is not accepted. Neither is the story of the two male disciples, it would seem, for
they are greeted with the line: “The Lord has been raised! It is true! He has appeared to Simon.” Those private
revelations or experiences of the Risen Christ, as inspiring as they might have been, had to be validated or
confirmed by the witness of the divinely appointed teachers, the apostles, and most particularly by Peter, the prince
of the apostles. Only then does the proclamation of the disciples – male and female alike -- have meaning. To this
day, any who would want to have the Eucharistic Christ must receive Him from His Church, which automatically
means accepting the teaching authority of that Church and putting its teachings into practice in one’s daily life.
Having been nourished by the Eucharist, believers must also imitate those early disciples by going forth to
share the good news of the Risen Christ with all they meet. Mission-mindedness must be the hallmark of every
Christian, as Vatican II reminded us. That requires personal efforts at evangelization and support for the work of
those committed to full-time missionary labors. After all, wasn’t it Christian hospitality to the itinerant preacher
which enabled those two disciples only later to discover that it was Christ all along -- the Christ Who so often
comes in the guise of the poor and the needy, or the Christ Who is revealed in a special way by missionaries?
The Stranger of Emmaus leads the disciples from blindness, to sight, to insight. The pattern of faith described
is most interesting: incipient faith . . . shaken faith . . . disillusionment . . . understanding . . . true faith. This was the
pattern for the apostles, and for the disciples; it is so for us as well. True faith is only a faith which has been tested
but, in the testing, we need to remember and to believe that Jesus is there with us on the road -- sustaining us with
His Word and His Body, moving us forward to the Kingdom where the wedding feast of the Lamb has already
begun.
Meanwhile, the Church as a whole and her members individually must contend with the enveloping darkness
of life here below. Hence, the prayer, “Mane nobiscum, Domine, quoniam advesperascit” (Stay with us, Lord,
because it is getting dark).
As we re-trace the paths of history, we find darkness encroaching on the Church from the outset: From Judas’
betrayal and Peter’s denial, to the earliest heresies, to the schism between the East and West, to medieval and
Renaissance ecclesiastical corruption, to the Protestant Reformation, to the Enlightenment’s deleterious effects on
much of western Europe, to the revolutions which enslaved the Church in France, Germany, Spain, Mexico, eastern
Europe, China and Vietnam. How encompassing was the darkness in all those instances.
As we look at the contemporary life of the Church, we behold at times an unbelievably sad and depressing
scenario in so many places of bad liturgy, unfaithful clergy and Religious, defective presentations of the Catholic
Faith, weak bishops, and insipid Christian commitment, demonstrated by insufficient vocations, poor Sunday Mass
attendance, and an impotent public witness. How deep the darkness can seem to be all too often.
As we consider our own personal lives, fickle friends, broken marriages, unsure finances, personal insecurity,
feeble health, all conspire to enervate us. Will the darkness overwhelm us?
One need not be a Cassandra to give in to depression and negativity on occasion. The Pope himself
acknowledges this in his apostolic letter. He says that those two disciples were “weighed down with sadness” (n.
1), to be sure, but he proceeds to offer us hope. He observes, “amid our questions and difficulties, and even our
bitter disappointments, the divine Wayfarer continues to walk at our side,” leading us from the despair of darkness
to the light He brings in His Word and in the Sacrament of His Body and Blood (n. 2). Our personal and ecclesial
problems can be clarified, he maintains, when “seen in the light of Christ” (n. 6). He goes on to explain that this
was one of the reasons he introduced the “mysteries of light” into the Holy Rosary. Not by accident, he notes, “the
mysteries of light . . . culminate in the Holy Eucharist” (n. 9). Or, as the Scriptures teach us, “in your light, we see
light” (Ps 36:10). The Holy Father concludes his message with this desire: “May all of you, the Christian faithful,
rediscover the gift of the Eucharist as light and strength for your daily lives in the world” (n. 30). Simply put, the
Eucharist doesn’t make our problems disappear, but it does give us a divine perspective from which to view them
and a well-founded hope for dealing with them.
Interestingly, our own dear Cardinal Newman in one of his Eucharistic meditations, entitled precisely, “Mane
nobiscum, Domine,” offers this moving, insightful and heartfelt prayer to our Eucharistic Lord as we seek to make
sense of the darkness that surrounds us, but a darkness that will not overcome us any more than it did the
Incarnate Word Himself during His earthly sojourn.
The Venerable Cardinal prays:
How can I keep from Thee? For Thou, who art the Light of Angels, art the only Light of my soul. Thou
enlightenest every man that cometh into this world. I am utterly dark, as dark as Hell, without Thee. I droop and
shrink when Thou art away. I revive only in proportion as Thou dawnest upon me. Thou comest and goest at Thy
will. O my God, I cannot keep Thee! I can only beg of Thee to stay. “Mane nobiscum, Domine, quoniam
advesperascit.” Remain till morning, and then go not without giving me a blessing. Remain with me till death in this
dark valley, when the darkness will end. Remain, O Light of my soul, jam advesperascit! The gloom, which is not
Thine, falls over me. I am nothing. I have little command of myself. I cannot do what I would. I am disconsolate
and sad. I want something, I know not what. It is Thou that I want, though I so little understand this. I say it and take
it on faith; I partially understand it, but very poorly. Shine on me, O Ignis semper ardens et nunquam deficiens! – “O
fire ever burning and never failing” – and I shall begin, through and in Thy Light, so to see Light, and to
recognize Thee truly, as the Source of Light. Mane nobiscum; stay, sweet Jesus, stay for ever. In this decay of
nature, give more grace.
Stay with me, and then I shall begin to shine as Thou shinest; so to shine as to be a light to others. The light, O
Jesus, will be all from Thee. None of it will be mine. No merit to me. It will be Thou who shinest through me upon
others. O let me thus praise Thee, in the way which Thou doest love best, by shining on all those around me. Give
light to them as well as to me; light them with me, through me. Teach me to show forth Thy praise, Thy truth, Thy
will. Make me preach Thee without preaching – not by words, but by my example and by the catching force, the
sympathetic influence, of what I do – by my visible resemblance to Thy saints, and the evident fullness of the love
which my heart bears to Thee.
St. Paul reminded the Romans, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are as nothing compared
with the glory to be revealed” (8:18). We gain a fleeting but assuring glimpse of that “glory to be revealed” in every
celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, and that in turn gives us the ability to regard “the sufferings of this present
time as nothing.”
And so, Pope John Paul sums up for us our own hopes and aspirations, locating them in a lively Eucharistic
faith when he writes:
Amid the shadows of the passing day and the darkness that clouded their spirit, the Wayfarer brought a ray of
light which rekindled their hope and led their hearts to yearn for the fullness of light. “Stay with us,” they pleaded.
And He agreed. Soon afterwards, Jesus’ face would disappear, yet the Master would “stay” with them, hidden in the
“breaking of the bread” which had opened their eyes to recognize Him (n. 1).
May it be so for each of us.
