Some of us know well the story of today's Gospel (Luke 24.13-35, please read it along with the other texts for today), some of us don't. Two disciples who are not among the Twelve Apostles are leaving Jerusalem. They have succumbed to despair, hope dashed, and Jerusalem no longer the centre of their expectations of the new age when God restores the Kingdom to Israel. Jerusalem is the well of shattered dreams, the wreckage of the Chosen People of God.
They meet a lone traveller and decide to allow him to walk with them. It's a risky thing, no one really could trust chance meetings on the road then as we really should not today, for many of the same reasons, but they no longer care. As people do, more out of boredom than anything else, they engage in conversation with the traveller and spill out their souls about the events in Jerusalem that Passover. Once someone would listen, there was no stopping them getting it all out of their systems and before them in stark words making it all the more real, finishing up with the story of the empty tomb and their obvious disbelief of the women's report that Jesus had risen from the grave.
To their surprise, the fellow traveller sides with the women immediately and guides them through the writings of the Prophets telling of this very event. Somehow, in their despair they begin to hope again, and unwilling to quite let go of that hope by parting ways they convince their companion to have dinner.
Then, not having recognized this person for hours, when he gives the blessing over the bread and broke it for sharing, in that action, those words, the voice, the sharing, they had been speaking to Jesus himself. He then disappears, having done what He needed to do, which is visit more of His disciples to strengthen their testimony that He indeed has risen from the dead. Unable to contain themselves, they run back to Jerusalem with new hope, to tell the Twelve, who themselves confirm that some of them, too, have seen the Lord Jesus.
So begins a pattern. Disciples of the Risen Lord have now for twenty centuries use His blessing in breaking bread, read the words of the Prophets, and in so doing recognizing Jesus among themselves and that He indeed has risen, strengthening their testimony to the rest of the world that Jesus indeed is risen from the dead, destroying death's hold on us, and validating hundreds and even thousands of prior years' testimony that God indeed has not forsaken us and would reunite with us, that hope is not gone, that we are not alone, and that death is not the final word.
Today at Mass we will break the bread and open our hearts and eyes and see that Jesus is indeed risen from the dead, just as the prophets foretold. Let's run back to our own Jerusalems and spread the word.