Today’s readings: Acts 2, 14.22-28; 1 Peter 1, 17-21; Luke 24, 13-35.

In his An Agnostic’s Apology, (1893) Sir Leslie Stephen describes human­kind as “dimly discerning light enough for our daily needs, but hopelessly differing whenever we attempt to describe the ultimate origin or end of our paths”. It is here that he uses the phrase ‘devout sceptics’, which can easily apply to the two travellers on their way to Emmaus in St Luke’s gospel. They sound so devout about what they believed in, yet so disheartened about the facts.

In the wake of the Easter celebration, the Scriptures continue to speak of those who were part of the Jesus revolution and yet so hesitant to come to grips with what that foundational experience was all about. Jesus had always made clear and hard demands regarding discipleship. Today’s Emmaus narrative depicts how people can be transformed from admirers of Jesus to disciples.

Discipleship is not simply about belonging to a group or to a mindset. It is about embracing the freedom of having nothing to lose. Blaise Pascal’s dictum is very true when he says that faith is not lazy acceptance of dogma but rather something more akin to a gamble. Paul Tillich writes that: “He who risks and fails can be forgiven. He who never risks and never fails is a failure in his whole being.”

The Emmaus disciples had believed in Jesus: “Our own hope had been that he would be the one to set Israel free”. Yet that hope was overshadowed by doubt and fear, both endemic to the human condition and which even in present-day culture condition us so much in the way we stand up, or fail to do it, to what we believe in.

Burning hearts is the antidote to the fatigue syndrome that marks Christianity in our times, which we label as post-Christian.

Faith is more an act of courage than an act of knowledge. In the past weeks, reacting to a statement by Prime Minister David Cameron that “Britain should be confident of its status as a Christian country”, Rowan Williams noted that Britain was more of a post-Christian nation. Of course, that does not necessarily mean non-Christian.

Like the Emmaus disciples, we tend in this day and age to be middle-of-the-road Christians, confused, disoriented, with divided loyalties towards a Christian memory which still marks our mindset, and our longing to be free spirits, autonomous, knowledgable enough to decide for ourselves personally on practically everything.

So our conversations proceed endlessly and freely but seem to lack sure points of reference. Our problems are fuelled, rather than resolved, by conflicting visions, models, and views of the Church, of society, of freedom, and of life itself. Even the Church seems to be on its way to Emmaus, torn between its past and its present, its consolidated hope and fresh and ever bigger challenges.

In the gospel narrative, the ‘breaking of bread‘ was the magic moment, a common gesture that be­comes sacramental, mystical, eye-opening. It put the travellers in perspective, helping them reach out to depths they were missing along the way. Williams, in his poem Emmaus, speaks of this “solid stranger” in this journey who gives things shape, fills up the gaps, and disrupts the silence. “So it is necessary,” writes Williams, “to carry him with us”.

To walk with Jesus means to walk on the wilder side of life, as Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch write in The Faith of Leap. For them, this is “allowing the fears themselves to be overwhelmed by bigger and better things – by a sense of adventure and the fullness of life that comes from relocating our fears and vulnerabilities within the larger story that is ultimately hopeful and not tragic”.

If we lose sight of the vision that is bigger than our fears, then we end up being neither devout nor sceptics. St Peter in Acts is addressing the crowds “on the day of Pentecost”. Pentecost is the standpoint, the larger story that puts together the pieces of the puzzle, that nourishes the dim light which helps our daily discernment and that many a time serves more to kindle the heart than to clear the mind.

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