~
"[T]he resurrection deepens our understanding of the cross while also drawing us into further reflection upon Jesus' life-ministry. The resurrection is precisely an act of 'memoria', God's transformative memory. Resurrection purifies and redeems memory. As with the story of the travellers to Emmaus, the presence of the risen stranger facilitates an act of recollection in which the disciples are capable of remembering Jesus' life from a fundamentally new perspective. They remember what he said and what he did, but they now do so in the light of a transformative experience, brought to consciousness in the breaking of the bread, that purges and deepens memory."
- Brian Robinette, Grammars of Resurrection, pg. 12
~
"Well, I'd like to draw attention to one element of this story, a story which offers not so much a key to reading scripture as an ongoing hermeneutical principle which we do not control, and which is alive independently of us and transforms us. [...] It is the fact, little commented, that what is odd about the Emmaus story is that it is a dead man who is talking.
"I think it very important that we don't make the separation which we are accustomed to when talking about the risen Jesus, imagining that he is alive, and for that reason, not dead. No, what is fascinating about the doctrine of the resurrection is that it is the whole human life of Jesus, including his death, which is risen. The life of God, since it is totally outside the order of human life and human death, doesn't cancel death, as if it were a sickness which is to be cured, but takes it up, assumes it. Luke offers us a vision of a risen Jesus who has not ceased to be a dead man, and who, starting from his living-out-being-a-crucified-man, teaches and empowers his disciples by his presence."
- James Alison, Faith Beyond Resentment, pg. 42
~
"Not only, then, is it a dead man talking. It's a dead man talking without any rancor. It is someone who has been seriously victimized, as Cleopas and N know very well - someone put to death cruelly by a violent conspiracy between religious and political forces. [...] So this is a victim telling the story, but it's not a victimary story at all. When the unrecognized third party says, “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” there is no hint of a victimary bleat. [...] And as Cleopas and N discover later, the one who is telling them this story is in fact its protagonist. He's not complaining, he's not hard done by. Yes, it is a victim speaking, but without rancour. Yes it is a dead man talking, but without desire for revenge.
"And these two elements are the final elements I want to bring out today of the tone of voice of the one speaking. Because they are further elements of what it is like to have our texts interpreted to us through the eyes of our dead-and-risen Rabbi. They enable us to share the disciples' sense, quoted elsewhere in the Gospels, that “It is the Lord!” - meaning not only that it is Jesus who is speaking, but that Jesus is in fact YHWH. For there is only one source of protagonism that is not on the same level as death, whose life and aliveness is nothing to do with death, and that is God."
- James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim, pp. 75-77
~
"So here we have this wonderfully familiar Gospel - the road to Emmaus. And I'd like to follow on from our two previous Sundays, showing how Jesus's drawing close to people doesn't follow things they understand, is not obvious. They don't know what's going on. Аnd yet he wants to make himself present. There is a giving of himself to them that is to take them beyond themselves. We saw that with Mary Magdalene, we saw that with Thomas, and now we're going to see it with Cleopas and friend as they head to Emmaus.
"So there they are, walking out of town, [...] and there they've heard about the visit of Mary Magdalene and other women to the tomb. They know that something is very strange and they can't make sense of it. So while they were talking and discussing together, Jesus himself drew near and went with them. So a third person appears, but he's not a third person whom they recognized. Again, the risen Jesus is never obvious. “But their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” [...] I think that's hugely important. The voice of the Risen One is going to come to us from a strange place, it's always going to be experienced by us as a strange turnaround.
[...]
"So there he was, doing this, giving them a completely new take on the story which they already knew, the take that was not obvious and that would not have come from somebody who they would have taken seriously. So this is the strangeness of this thing, that they have someone outside themselves, from a not a very respectable position, giving them the whole thing. [...] The voice has come from outside. We have to learn to hear the unexpected, the strange, not very reputable voice, challenging us to turn our sense of what's really happening upside down.
"And then with them in the home, he is their guest and yet he performs a gesture which is the gesture of a host, breaking the bread, blessing it and giving it to them. In other words, suddenly they find that the one who they thought they were hosting is the one who has been hosting them. And immediately they perceive that all that he had been telling them as if about a third person was in fact, I Am. He had been telling them in the first person about what he had been doing and what he was including them in.
"And of course, immediately they grasped that he was actually not a third person speaking to them, but the first person narrative. They realized that this is a theophany, this is the presence of the Most High. And immediately he's gone. And all theophanies, all glimpses of the Most High, he's gone in the glimpse, and that is the case here. So now they've heard the story from the one who was telling it, so their version is no longer muddled. They're now able to speak with confidence about what had really been going on.
[...]
"So as we celebrate our Eucharists [...] let's remember the Word coming from outside, [...] our world being turned upside down and us being given a new perspective - “Oh my God, I am actually being invited here rather than running the show. And the One who is giving himself to me is giving himself to me as my host even as I thought I had hosted him.”
"What I hope and pray for you all with this Eucharist is that we are able to follow the paradigm that was opened up for us on the road to Emmaus and share in the presence of the Most High who gives himself to us and reveals himself in the breaking of the bread."
- James Alison, from video "Homily for the Third Sunday of Easter 2020 A" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTFKY_Lf4gE)
[Source of quotes from James Alison's book Faith Beyond Resentment and Jesus the Forgiving Victim, and for analysis and discussion on all the lectionary texts for this Sunday, see: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/easter3a/]
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