From Our Archives

For earlier essays on this week's RCL texts, see Dan Clendenin, Dinner at Emmaus (2023); Debie Thomas, But We Had Hoped (2020); Dan Clendenin, The Kitchen Maid of Emmaus: Three Paintings and a Poem (2014) and The Road to Emmaus: What Happened on the Way (2011).

This Week's Essay

By Amy Frykholm, who writes the lectionary essay every week for JWJ.  

Luke 24:13: “Now on that same day, two of them were going to a village called Emmaus.”

Science writer Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears, is about the realm of consciousness, how we know what we know. One of the most mysterious things about consciousness is that the closer we come to an understanding of it, the less we truly know it. In a recent interview with Ezra Klein, Pollan notes something that I found extraordinary to think about: scientists are finding that consciousness probably starts in the body and moves to the brain.

Without the body, it isn’t clear that we would have consciousness at all. In order for consciousness to emerge, we don’t need language, but we do need vulnerability, suffering, maybe even mortality. “The body is thinking on its own, feeling on its own, reacting to its environment in a million different ways,” Pollan notes. Once you understand that — that 90 percent of what the brain-body connection is doing never enters the conscious mind — it “totally changes what you think about consciousness.” At the end of the day, whatever else it might be, consciousness is an embodied phenomenon.

It just so happened that I was thinking about this little snippet of the interview while I was reading this week’s lectionary text about the road to Emmaus. An understanding of embodied consciousness is everywhere in this story. The story begins on the road to a village that is about seven miles from Jerusalem. Two disciples are absorbed in talking about the events that have taken place — so absorbed we can imagine that they don’t even notice where they are, the dusty road, the twilight. They are so absorbed that they don’t notice that Jesus has come to walk beside them. They tell this strange man all that has happened, and Jesus gives his lengthy response, going through “Moses and all the prophets, interpreting to them the things about himself in all the scriptures” (Luke 24:27). But despite all of these words, there is no breakthrough, no transformation, just words. 

The Road to Emmaus by Giselle Bauche.

The transformation begins with the disciples’ invitation to the stranger, “Stay with us” (24:29), but then continues as Jesus takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to them. With these gestures, “their eyes were opened, and they recognized him” (24:31). Immediately, he vanishes from their physical sight. Then they remember what their hearts had known before their minds could become aware. They remember the sensation of burning they had experienced on the road: the sensation of the truth as it began to work its way from their bodies to their minds.

In This Here Flesh, theologian Cole Arthur Riley asks, “What does it mean that our knowledge of the spiritual is deeply entwined with the sensory? That it is bodily?” We must attune ourselves to the bodily, she says, in order to have the spiritual knowledge we desire. 

Two things happen to these disciples through their encounter with Jesus in the breaking of the bread. The first is that the sensation of truth, begun in the body, enters their minds and breaks them open with astonishment. The second is that they come to see themselves in the story. This is no longer a telling of abstract events that took place among some people of their acquaintance. It is living, breathing presence, and it fills them with awe. 

The Road to Emmaus by He Qi.

“Wonder requires a person not to forget themselves but to feel themselves so acutely that their connectedness to every created thing comes into focus. In sacred awe, we are a part of the story,” Riley writes. 

Yet because we are human, because our brains work the way they do, we need to practice this. The world relentlessly crushes our capacity for wonder. Because consciousness is embodied, and because truth, wonder, and deep knowing are all also embodied, we must practice our ability to perceive.

This story gives us one way of practicing: to know through the breaking of the bread. It’s so simple. It’s so ordinary. We skim past it every day. We’re on our phones; the news consumes us with despair and fear. We hardly notice our rituals of bread breaking. We forget that awe and wonder are right in front of us. 

Last month, I went to Monte Vista, Colorado to experience the sandhill crane migration. I was in a bit of a funk, feeling the too-dry spring, the lack of snow here in the mountains of Colorado. I was having trouble finishing my novel, and I’d been looking out over the bare, brown ground for months waiting for inspiration. Spontaneously, my husband and I decided to go see this yearly ritual a few hours south of us. 

The Road to Emmaus.

Every spring — dating back at least 10 million years — sandhill cranes land in the San Luis Valley in Colorado to spend a few weeks on the path of their migration. About 25,000 birds gather here, and every afternoon they fly in from various locations where they’ve been napping, swimming, and grazing to a particular field. For a few hours before sunset, these thousands of birds spend time in the field, eating and playing, getting into little skirmishes, and doing elegant mating dances. 

We joined a few dozen other humans to watch, and after the sun had departed behind the western mountains, we were about to go home and make dinner. “Oh,” said the woman sitting next to me on a boulder. “You don’t want to go yet. You don’t want to miss lift off.” 

At a moment known somehow in the minds and bodies of all the birds, they all, as if they were one bird, turned to face the west. In one ecstatic motion, like ripples on a sea building into a wave, they lifted off and then turned into ribbons and arcs of birds flying off in all directions. We felt the incredible movement with our bodies. Our hearts lifted with the birds. For a moment, every human being watching was filled with awe. 

And yet, this was nothing particularly extraordinary. It happens every evening of the spring and has happened every evening during migration for millions upon millions of years. For probably less than .2 percent of that time, humans have been observing the ritual. Yet somehow, in this ordinary thing, we were changed. Like the disciples whose eyes were opened in the breaking of the bread, we stood for a moment in the doorway between two worlds. We saw what was in front of us, and we knew it as holy, as sacred. “Wonder is a force of liberation,” Riley writes. “It makes sense of what our souls inherently know we were meant for.”

Weekly Prayer

Dante Alighieri (1265–1321)

The Love of God

The love of God, unutterable and perfect,
     flows into a pure soul the way that light
     rushes into a transparent object.
The more love that it finds, the more it gives
     itself; so that, as we grow clear and open,
     the more complete the joy of heaven is.
And the more souls who resonate together,
     the greater the intensity of their love,
     and, mirror-like, each soul reflects the other.

Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was an Italian poet whose Divine Comedy is one of the most significant pieces of world literature. Even though much of his work commented on Italian and especially Florentine politics of his day, his poetry contains universal themes of the human condition. From Stephen Mitchell, The Enlightened Heart (Harper Collins, 2011), 68. 

Amy Frykholm: amy@journeywithjesus.net

Image credits: (1) Giselle Bauche: Iconography and Beyond University; (2) HeQiGallery.com; and (3) Wellsprings.org.uk.