Emmaus

“13 And now two of them / on this very day,
were going to a village called Emmaus, / sixty furlongs from Jerusalem,
14 and they spoke, / with each other,
of all these things / that had happened.
15 And while they talked / and questioned each other
He, Jesus, came and joined them, / and he walked with them;
16 And their eyes were blinded / so that they did not recognise him.
17 And he said to them:
What are these words / that you say to each other
walking / and being dark?
18 One of them, named Cleopa, answered / and said to him:
You are indeed / the only foreigner in Jerusalem
not to know what happened there / in those days!
19 He said to them: / What?
They said to him:
About Jesus / the one from Nazareth!
A man who was a prophet!
He was powerful in word / and deed,
before God / and before all the people!
20 And they handed him over, / the chief priests and the elders,
to a death sentence / and raised him [crucified]!
21 But we were hoping / that he would deliver Israel!
and besides all this, it is now the third day / since, besides all this, this happened!
22 But also some of the women among us / created amazement.
They went early in the morning / to the burial chamber,
23 and when they didn't find his body, / they came back and said:
We saw angels there, / saying about him:
He is alive!
24 And also some of the men among us / went to the burial chamber
and they found things [so] / as the women had said;
but he / they did not see him!

25 Then / Jesus said to them:
O deficient in intelligence, / and heavy of heart
to believe all the things / of which the Prophets spoke!
26 Did not the Messiah have to endure these [things] / in order to enter his glory?"
27 And it had started from Moses / and from all the Prophets,
he interpreted to them what concerned him / from all the Scriptures.
28 And they had approached this village / where they were going,
and he made them suppose / that he was going to a more distant place.

29 But they urged him, saying: / Stay with us!
Because the day now has declined / to darken!
And he went in to stay with them. / 30And this was while he was at table with them,
that he took the bread, blessed, broke it / and gave it to them.
31 And immediately their eyes were opened / and they recognised him!
And he was carried away from them!
32 And they said to each other: / Were not our hearts heavy [1] within us,
when he spoke to us on the road, / and explained the Scriptures to us?

33 And they stood up that very hour, / and returned to Jerusalem.
And they found the Eleven gathered together / and those who were with them,
34 while they said:
Truly, Our Lord stood up / and appeared to Simon!
35 And so are they,
they told what had happened on the way, / and how he had made himself known to them as he broke bread” (Luke 24:13-35 _{from Aramaic}).

“We were hoping that he would deliver Israel!” (Lk 24:21). The disciples' words are all the more resonant in that it was from Emmaus that Judas Maccabaeus' victorious reconquest against the Greeks began (1 M 4:3), with a holy war in the form of Dt 20.

On the road to Emmaus, Jesus opened up a wider perspective for them. First with Moses, the Torah, where we read how Satan tempts Adam to take of the fruit of the tree. Adam's (and Eve's) fall delivers all his descendants, and even the whole cosmos, to Satan's grip. This is what Jesus will repair, especially on the 'tree' of the cross. Jesus was first tempted in the desert, for example, when the accuser, Satan, wanted Jesus to use the divine power of miracles for himself (Lk 4:9-12). During the Passion, through the words of the magistrates, the soldiers and the first malefactor, Satan repeated his temptations: “Let him save [vivify] himself, if he is the Messiah of God, his Chosen One!” (Lk 23:35). But only a false prophet uses signs for his own benefit, and only hypocrites are tempted to claim such a miracle: Jesus does not save himself, and in so doing he has triumphed over Satan!

Jesus continues with the prophets, where we can read, for example, in the scroll of Isaiah, this song of the Servant: “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. 5 But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed” (Is 53:4-5), and again: “He shall see the fruit of the travail of his soul and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous; and he shall bear their iniquities” (Is 53:11)

Apse of St. Clement's in Rome

However, the two disciples’ hearts are too heavy, their pain is still too strong, and they do not understand, they do not recognise Jesus until he makes an important move.

Jesus “took the bread and blessed and broke and gave it to them” (Lk 24:30). These gestures allow the two disciples to recognise Jesus because they had probably been present among the 5000 men for whom Jesus had multiplied the loaves, by four similar gestures: he took, blessed and broke and gave to his disciples... (Lk 9:16).

At Emmaus, Jesus does not say a word about the bread, nor does he take a cup of wine. It is not, therefore, strictly speaking a Eucharist ("qurbana"). Besides, how could these disciples, who did not participate in the Last Supper, have recognised the Eucharistic words?

This being said, the experience of the disciples of Emmaus is unclassifiable: how can one compare a sacrament with such an encounter with the risen Jesus? Certainly, they experienced what Eucharistic communion provides: a death to self and a vivification of divine life. The two disciples, in fact, stood up (qām - Lk 24:33) as Jesus had risen (qām - Lk 24:34).

Let us turn to the “Holy Mountain”.

The hill of Qiryat-Yearim rises 60 stadia from Jerusalem (about 15 km). Its first claim to fame is that it has long housed the Ark of the Covenant. But its second claim to fame is that it corresponds to the breaking of bread by the risen Christ with two disciples in a place in the countryside (Mk 16:12) that was 60 stadia from Jerusalem (Lk 24:13).

On Easter Day 1927, the year of her death, Sister Josephine heard the Lord say to her inwardly: "You have the true Emmaus; I will make it known to the learned", and this was also the thought of Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth, who was asked about this by her parish priest in 1930.

In December 2018, Israel Finkelstein, director of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, which is leading the excavations, with which the Collège de France is associated, pointed out in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, that it was probably in this place that the Emmaus episode, reported by the Christian Scriptures, took place [2].

At the edge of the choir of the present church, a venerable stone has been preserved, roughly cut, carefully and mysteriously wrapped in all its contours by a fine mosaic, with graceful ribbons of colour, it is reasonable to see in it a relic of the place where the Risen Christ appeared to the pilgrims of Emmaus.