Anticlimax was in the air. The Passover holiday was over, and pilgrims were departing from Jerusalem. In that world, Sunday was an ordinary workday, and the city — swollen to double its normal size for the festival — was now emptying out. The pilgrims were going back to their own towns and their own homes, back to the grind of their labors.
Wasn’t it time the disciples also moved on? Their master had died days before, and they were adjusting to the facts.
“Now on that same day two of them” left on foot, heading “to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem” (Lk 24:13). One of them was named Cleopas; we don’t know the name of the other.
While they were walking and talking, they were joined by another traveler, who came from behind and walked beside them. St. Luke tells us that it was Jesus, but “their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” Perhaps he had his face covered to protect himself from the dust of the road.
Still, shouldn’t they have recognized his voice?
They did not. The Gospel tells us that “their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” In translation (and in the original Greek), the sentence has an odd passive construction. It declares an action, but it names no agent.
Who kept their eyes from recognition? Did Jesus disguise himself? Or were they hindered by their own unbelief?
There’s a dynamic here that Jesus himself had discussed (again using the passive voice) in an earlier chapter of the same Gospel: “For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light. Then pay attention to how you listen; for to those who have, more will be given; and from those who do not have, even what they seem to have will be taken away” (Lk 8:17-18).
Things are hidden. Eyes are kept from seeing straight. But who is doing the hiding and hindering? And who makes things manifest? St. Luke doesn’t say. Apparently, true understanding — of God’s ways or even their own — is not something these disciples can achieve by their natural powers. Sensory data is not enough; they have that. The “road” passage suggests the need for some other action, coming from an unnamed elsewhere.
The stranger (Jesus) asked them: “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?”
They were shocked by the man’s apparent ignorance of the biggest news story of the season. Cleopas, incredulous, asked him: “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” (Lk 24:18).
The evangelist certainly set that line down for its ironic effect. Jesus, of course, was the only person in Jerusalem who did understand what had happened!
But Jesus answered the question with a question: “What things?”
Into the open he drew their accounting of the events — a hash of reports and rumors, memories and mourning.
Then Jesus, without revealing his identity, asserted himself in a shocking way: “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!” (Lk 24:25).
The stranger immediately took the two men out of their immediate context, the events that had caused their grief. They saw Jesus’ suffering as a senseless act of violence visited upon an innocent man. The stranger, however, insisted that the events were not only sensible, but essential in a cosmic way. “Was it not necessary,” he said, “that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?”
Then, “he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the Scriptures” (Lk 24:27).
At long last, the trio approached the village of Emmaus, the stated destination of the two disciples. Jesus did not take the exit and seemed to be continuing forward on the path. So they said: “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over” (Lk 24:29).
Clearly, they did not want the conversation to end. Clearly, they hoped it could continue long into the night.
But what happened in that house in Emmaus was not conversation or biblical interpretation. What happened was sacramental. “When he was at the table with them,” the stranger “took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them” (Lk 24:30).
He took, blessed, broke and gave the bread. That was the pattern the disciples’ master had followed in all the bread miracles of his public life. It was also the sequence he had followed in the Last Supper he had shared with the Twelve.
In that moment, they saw everything clearly. They knew the identity of their companion. They saw the sense of the last days’ ordeal. They saw, in fact, the shape of all history. What they heard first as a shocking assertion now seemed obvious to them — and thrilling. “Was it not necessary?” Of course it was.
“Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight … he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread” (Lk 25:31,35). There is that passive voice again: “he had been made known to them.”
Note that he was not “known to them” in the accumulation of evidence. Surely, as they themselves point out, the evidence made their “hearts burn.” But they did not come to faith until the sacramental grace was given. He was made known to them in the Eucharistic action. He “vanished from their sight” because they did not require the vision of their eyes to know that he was really present.
Revealed in the sacraments
We find in the disciples’ journey from Jerusalem to Emmaus a movement toward illumination. It is an illumination we might categorize as “mystagogy.”
Literally, mystagogy (from the Greek mystagogia) means a “doctrine of the mysteries” or “doctrine of the sacraments.” More precisely, it is biblical typology applied to the sacraments.
In the words of the French scholar Jean Danielou: “the sacraments carry on in our midst the mirabilia” — the wonders, the miracles — “the great works of God in the Old Testament and the New.” Mystagogy is, according to the Italian liturgist Enrico Mazza, “the oral or written explanation of the mystery hidden in the Scriptures and celebrated in the liturgy.”
As evening fell that Sunday, the disciples’ unknown companion led them to an understanding of the divine economy and its typological pattern, now newly fulfilled.
Part of the process was didactic. Christ guided the disciples by interpreting “all the Scriptures” for them. But the definitive part was pure grace. At the decisive moment, when the disciples owned the knowledge of Christ as the summit of the divine economy and the fulfillment of the types, the Evangelist describes the process with a passive verb form: “he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.” It is Jesus’ Eucharistic action that brought about the disciples’ recognition.
What Paul calls “the plan of the mystery hidden for ages” (Eph 3:9) was now revealed to the disciples, though not in a way they could see with their eyes. For, immediately, Jesus “vanished out of their sight.” The mysteries of Christ’s life — culminating in his passion, death and resurrection — had fulfilled the foreshadowing signs of the Old Testament. This fulfillment, however, did not immediately lead the disciples into the beatific vision. It led them, rather, to a reprise of Jesus’ “new covenant” meal. On the night he was betrayed, Jesus “took a loaf of bread, … broke it and gave it” to his Apostles, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me” (Lk 22:19).
His physical body they did not recognize; but, after he had prepared them by his typological interpretation of the Scriptures, he was “made known to them” — by faith, not by sight — in the breaking of the bread.
This is mystagogy. Having been instructed in the pattern of the divine economy, the disciples could see God’s sacramental plan. St. Augustine once said: “Before the coming of Christ, the flesh and blood of this sacrifice were foreshadowed in the animals slain; in the passion of Christ the types were fulfilled by the true sacrifice; after the ascension of Christ, this sacrifice is commemorated in the sacrament.”
Christ’s life has fulfilled the types in a sacrifice that was “once for all” (Heb 9:26). But all that was hidden in his life — the mysteries of his life — are now extended in time through the Church’s sacraments. After his resurrection, the ordinary way the disciples come to know the mysteries of his life is through the breaking of the bread. This is evident immediately at Emmaus, but borne out also through the Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline corpus. Chapters 5, 10 and 11 of the First Letter to the Corinthians are explicitly mystagogical, describing the Eucharistic rite, but also tracing their antecedents in the events and rites of the Old Testament. Paul presents a similar mystagogy of baptism in his letters to the Romans (6), Galatians (3) and, again, 1 Corinthians (6:11 and 10). For Paul, the process of covenant fulfillment by Christ is not terminated but continued in the sacraments.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it well: “The mysteries of Christ’s life are the foundations of what he would henceforth dispense in the sacraments, through the ministers of his Church” (No. 1115). The catechism concludes with a quotation from Pope St. Leo the Great: “What was visible in our Savior has passed over into his mysteries.”
The sacraments and the mysteries — the Church Fathers used the terms interchangeably, for they describe the same phenomena. But it is good for us to make a distinction. The term “sacrament” emphasizes the visible signs in the Church’s rites, while “mystery” emphasizes the hidden reality. “Sacrament” has always been the preferred term of the Christian West (with Leo, perhaps, being the great exception), while “mysteries” has dominated in the East.
Mystagogy, according to the catechism, is a process that moves us “from the visible to the invisible, from the sign to the thing signified, from the ‘sacraments’ to the ‘mysteries'” (No. 1075). It is a process that involves both human and divine initiatives, both human dispositions and divine grace. Following Jesus’ model in Luke 24, it involves both didactic instruction and the experience of liturgy.
Living in (and living out) the mysteries
What was visible in Christ “has passed over into his mysteries.” In the sacraments, he is made known to his disciples, but it is more than a knowledge of doctrine, more than a wisdom about the world. When Christ is “made known … in the breaking of the bread,” what is happening is something far more profound than mere learning. It surpasses the mere conversation of wayfarers, no matter how exalted that may be — and it is difficult to imagine conversation more exalted than what must have passed among the travelers on the road to Emmaus.
The New Testament refers to the encounter, in the breaking of the bread, as a koinonia, a communion. That is the term used in Acts (2:42) to describe the church’s Eucharistic fellowship. Paul uses the same word, twice, to describe the Christian’s reception of the Eucharistic body and blood of Christ (1 Cor 10:16).
The events of Christ’s life pass over into the mysteries, where they are continued in the lives of believers. The Christian at liturgy receives a “participation in the blood of Christ,” “a participation in the body of Christ,” a share in his suffering, death and resurrection. “Do you not know,” Paul writes, “that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” (Rom 6:3).
This is why every Eucharistic liturgy conforms to the pattern established at Emmaus: the opening of the Scriptures followed by the breaking of the bread, the Liturgy of the Word followed by the Liturgy of the Eucharist. The Mass, then, is the place par excellence of the Scriptures’ faithful reception. It is the place where, by grace and by habit, the Scriptures are rendered most intelligible to the disciples and most potent to transform human lives. The breaking of the bread, of itself, is mystagogical, now as it was at Emmaus. Christ is present, and he is made known, even though the disciples cannot see him.
The primary illumination in the liturgy, then, is an action of Christ, who is substantially present in the breaking of the bread. Nevertheless, his real presence does not present a free pass to preachers. Liturgical sermons should also be mystagogical — unveiling the hidden mysteries of the divine economy, its typology and the sacramental economy. Those who preach must follow the example of Christ on the road, as his interpretation set fire to the disciples’ hearts.
Most people who know the word “mystagogy” have encountered it through their study of the early Church. There is, among the writings of the Church Fathers, a certain genre called the “mystagogical homilies” or “mystagogical catecheses.” The best-known surviving examples are those of Cyril of Jerusalem, Ambrose of Milan, Theodore of Mopsuestia, John Chrysostom, Augustine, (Pseudo-)Dionysius and Maximus the Confessor. The ancient Church — even as late as the sixth century — generally observed a certain reticence regarding the sacraments. The fathers preached and wrote little about specific details of the rites. When they mentioned the liturgy, they often did so in veiled, highly allusive and symbolic language. Later generations referred to this tendency as the discipline of the secret. The silence was broken, customarily, only with the Easter homilies that explained the “mysteries” the new Christians had experienced for the first time. The homilies were didactic, richly scriptural, but they presupposed the experience of the paschal sacraments of baptism, penance, Eucharist and chrismation.
From the first generation, the Church referred to baptism as “illumination” or “enlightenment” — in Greek phótismos (see Heb 4:6 and 10:32).
It was the grace of this sacrament that made mystagogy effective. That’s why Easter season, which began with the celebration of baptism, was typically the season of mystagogy. It was baptism that empowered the neophyte Christians to see beyond the sacramental rites and signs, to perceive what would be disclosed through their bishop’s mystagogical preaching.
Following the New Testament model, the mystagogical preacher demonstrated the significance of the biblical types and the sacramental antitypes. These “eye-opening” homilies prepared the new Christians for a gradual deepening in their knowledge of the mysteries of Jesus Christ and his Church.
The process was designed to last a lifetime. What began with the “breaking of the bread” need never end.
