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Reverend Timothy B. Cargal, Ph.D. 20/20 Hindsight If you had been walking that dusty road with Cleopas and his companion, would you have recognized Jesus when he joined you on the road? Having spent weeks, maybe even months or years, listening to Jesus teach, seeing him perform marvelous healings and acts of deliverance, surely his appearance and the sound of his voice must have been forever impressed on their memory. It had only been a few days, barely a week, since they had probably seen Jesus make his way into Jerusalem, perhaps themselves joining in the shouts of "Hosanna." Surely if it had been you or I, we would have recognized him; but somehow, they didn’t. Maybe you are thinking to yourself that the appearance of the resurrected Jesus would have been so glorious that it would have borne little resemblance to the former carpenter turned itinerant preacher from the backwater village of Nazareth. But recall that Cleopas and his companion were hardly overwhelmed by this stranger who had walked up to them. Indeed, they were incredulous that this one could have been so oblivious to what was happening that he alone was unaware of what had transpired over the last roughly forty-eight hours in Jerusalem. Their’s was no vision of angels in shining white apparel. They had seen only a stranger, and an apparently quite ill-informed one at that. But then, it was the information that Cleopas and his companion had, the knowledge concerning which they were so confident and so amazed that this stranger lacked, that in fact had made them ignorant about just who it was that had joined them. They knew Jesus to be dead. They knew from the reports that just that day were spreading that Jesus’ body was missing from the tomb. They knew that whoever this stranger was, it certainly wasn’t their beloved teacher whose enemies refused to allow even his body to rest in peace. They knew they would never see Jesus again—certainly not alive and, now they knew, not even dead. If it was knowledge that had blinded them, maybe it was knowledge that could open their eyes to see what was right in front of them. So Jesus began to teach them, to once more take them through the scriptures as he had so many times before. No doubt as Jesus, beginning with Moses and the prophets, showed them how the scriptures had provided the key to interpreting all the events that had now so befuddled them, Cleopas and his companion began to change their estimation of this one who walked with them along the road. He was not nearly so ill-informed as they had thought. Yet even that was not enough to enable them to see who was literally standing right there in front of them. They wanted him to stay with them, to continue to teach them how to make sense of what was happening to them in light of the scriptures, but they still had no idea who it actually was standing right there in their presence. So long as Cleopas and his companion were focused on just the physical world around them, they could not recognize Jesus’ presence with them. Nor was it enough for them to think things through in terms of the scriptures. Only when Jesus took the bread and blessed it—only when their attentions were drawn simultaneously to the physical and spiritual aspects of life—only then were they able to recognize that it was Jesus who was there with them. In many ways this story is the quintessential Easter story, at least for me. Easter is about opening our eyes to see more than just the limited world of our usual experience. We, like Cleopas and his companion, become so focused on all the things happening around us—the tragedies and suffering, the loss of meaning and hope—that we are no longer able to recognize God’s constant, abiding presence. Jesus did not first become present with Cleopas when the bread was blessed and broken. Jesus had been with Cleopas as he traveled along the road, helping him to make sense of what had happened, wanting to show him the spiritual significance of physical, historical events. Yet somehow it was only when Jesus blessed and broke the bread, just as he had with his disciples on the night before his death, that their eyes were opened and they recognized Christ’s presence among them. The priest was walking through the streets of the Roman forum, and there seemed to be even more excitement and "buzz" in the air that day than usual. As he worked his way through the crowds, he finally came to the place that was the center of all the interest. Some recent war captives were being auctioned into slavery. Their appearance and language were quite different from that to which the Mediterranean inhabitants of Rome were accustomed. The priest finally asked someone who these strangers were, and where had they come from. He was told they were "Angli" from the island of Britannia. "Angli ...," he thought to himself, "angli ... angeloi!" That is, in our modern English, "Angels!" Well, he wanted to know more. "Have these Angli ever heard the gospel?" No, he was assured; they were pagan and not Christian. So the priest set off for England to convert these lost "angels" on the island of Britannia. As he was traveling along, making his way across France, a locust happened to land on his hand. He looked at it, and thought to himself—in his native Latin, of course—"Locusta ... locus sta!" Or again, in our modern English, "Stand here!" Well, it was perfectly obvious to this priest that God was trying to tell him something; so he stopped his journey and began to wait for another sign to give him direction. Before too long a rider quickly approached and told the priest he must immediately return to Rome. The pope had died since his departure, and the priest had been elected to succeed to the papacy as Pope Gregory I. To me, Gregory’s call is also one of the truly fascinating stories of the Christian faith, not least because it provides clear insight into how people’s minds worked in the European cultures of some 1500 years ago. For them, there was no such thing as a spiritual world or reality as separate from the physical world or reality. The spiritual and the physical did not exist somehow alongside one another, but rather interpenetrated one another to form a single reality. That is why such seeming coincidences, at least to our modern minds, as a bug landing on you can be a command from God, or the chance commonality of a people’s name in one language to a word in another language can launch a missionary enterprise. The trouble is, as much as I am sure that Gregory and his contemporaries were right about reality being intrinsically both physical and spiritual, I am just as sure that I cannot live my life wondering about the cosmic significance of each insect that crosses my path. As sure as I am that it was preoccupation with events understood only in terms of human causes and effects that prevented Cleopas and his companion from recognizing Jesus’ presence with them, I know that even at my spiritual best I can never move myself beyond considering how the events of my life might be set within a proper context by considering the insights of God’s people preserved in scripture and the theological tradition. But I, like Cleopas and his companion, have experienced those moments when my eyes were opened and God’s presence was as real to me as anything in my physical surroundings. Those moments have given me faith to believe in God’s presence even when I struggle to sense it with my spirit. Those moments have given me hindsight to recognize signs of the spiritual within reality that I looked right past in the moment. Through experience, through scripture, through careful attention to my world—through all these things taken together I have found Easter faith: "Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!" Copyright © 2008 by Timothy B. Cargal. All rights reserved.
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