Jesus is alive

By Mia Pohlman

The Road to Emmaus is one of my favorite Gospel stories because it's so human.

Two disciples think it's over. It's the third day and it seems unlikely Jesus has risen like he said he would. They hardly dare to hope what they've heard is true, that Jesus' body is gone from the tomb.

They're walking along together and trying to make sense of life when Jesus comes and walks with them. They don't recognize him.

How many times do we yearn for God, then fail to recognize God right in our midst? I am one of those disciples walking on the road to Emmaus.

Pope Benedict XVI compared the silence of Holy Saturday with our own times:

"Does our century not begin to become one large Holy Saturday, a day of God's absence. ... God is dead, and we killed him. Did we actually notice that this statement was taken almost word for word from the language of Christian tradition? ... We have killed him by enclosing him in the shell of antiquated modes of thinking, by banishing him to a piety void of reality, which becomes more and more a devotional slogan or archaeological curiosity. We have killed him through the ambiguity of our lives that obscured him."

But the story doesn't end with Good Friday or Holy Saturday -- it continues. Jesus does not remain dead. He rises. God is alive.

Pope Benedict XVI continued, "Only through the failure of Good Friday, only through the deathly stillness of Holy Saturday could the disciples be led to grasp who Jesus really was and what his proclamation truly meant. God had to die for them, so he could truly live in them. Their image that they had formed of God, into which they tried to force him, had to be destroyed so that they could see ... him who always remains the infinitely greater."

We killed God, but our own abilities do not limit God, and our own beliefs or disbeliefs do not change truth. It's something, I think, those disciples walking to Emmaus had the timid audacity to hope in. Even a tenuous faith allows us to walk with the living Christ.

Pope Francis said, "May the Lord free us ... from being Christians without hope, who live as if the Lord were not risen, as if our problems were the center of our lives."

We no longer have to live as if our problems are the center of our lives. They are not. We serve a living God who lives in, with and through us. This God transforms our confusion as he walks alongside us to our homes, speaks to us in our conversations, and gives us his presence at our tables. Our God is alive and can now become the center of everything.

Sister Aemiliana Löhr, O.S.B., wrote, "There is only one thing left for us to do: obey the angel. We are to tell the seekers, the doubters, those who have no belief: 'He is not here. He is risen, as he said. ... Have a mind for the things that are above, not for those on earth.'"

Let us not live as if God is dead. Let us invite God into the grit, the doubt, the questions of our lives and of our day.

Jesus is alive. That changes everything.