Years ago when I was a college student, I remember that it was the fashion for the evangelical students on campus to come up to people and ask them if they had a personal relationship with Jesus. For all I know, this is still a thing, but it certainly was back then. And of course my reaction was, besides please go away and leave me alone, my reaction was it seemed like if they did have a personal relationship with Jesus that they were being really braggy and smug about it, you know, of course I have a relationship and it’s a great one, it’s easy, and that seemed wrong. If that was what a personal relationship with Jesus was like, then I didn’t want one. And also, my reaction was, our faith isn’t that simple, it seemed like it was reducing faith to just God-and-me in a conversation, and you could end up using your imagination to think that God was telling you almost anything.
But these gospels that we hear after Easter are in some ways all about what it’s like to be in a relationship with the risen Christ. And they tell us that yes, it is possible for us to have a relationship with him. One of the most confusing things Jesus occasionally tried to get across to the disciples was that after his death, he would actually be more available, his presence would be even more powerful, than they experienced when they were with him before his death. Their relationship with him would not be over. They didn’t see how that could possibly work, and probably it would have been hard for us to see it too.
And here today in the gospel, even after the resurrection, his new way of being present is hard for these disciples to grasp. The risen Christ in the gospels isn’t someone it’s always easy to recognize. He can seem ordinary, he can look like a stranger, the two disciples on the road to Emmaus only realize they have seen Jesus hours later when they make the connection — their eyes were opened, the gospel says. One disciple who knew him as well as anyone mistakes him for a gardener; some people don’t see him at all.
And yet, as Jesus says today, he is not a ghost, something that isn’t really present, kind of ephemeral, here today and then gone. He isn’t a dead man just come back to life for a while, either. He is something new that we don’t understand — although here’s one thing we do understand, he apparently hasn’t stopped being human, he has wounds, he is hungry. He has been through everything we go through and more, and understands it all. And he wants to be in relationship with us, a relationship maybe even deeper and more powerful than the disciples had with him when they walked the earth with him.
So how do we begin to allow ourselves to see and feel this presence? How is it possible? Some of the paths to it are in today’s gospel, and they are what the church has always told us to try: We read the scriptures over and over and we come to a day when we recognize the presence of the living Christ in them, then we break the bread of the eucharist together and we see Christ really present not only there but in everyone around the table. Or maybe we do what one of the great saints of prayer said, and just learn how to speak with Christ as one friend to another, someone who already knows everything about us, the same way Jesus knows everything about all these disciples, and yet still loves them enough to want to see them again and again.
Speaking to Christ that way takes a lot of practice and a lot of willingness to listen and watch for him. It never seems as easy to build that personal relationship as that evangelical young man all those years ago made it sound. Any relationship takes work and time and commitment and maybe this one more than most. But the point is that this relationship with Jesus is something that we want. Because the point of every interaction with Christ is deeper transformation for us. Just like Jesus transformed those confused, discouraged disciples, who thought they had lost him and were wandering home in discouragement or locked in a room out of fear or completely forgetful of what they were supposed to be doing. The encounter with the risen Jesus lets them go from all this, and it does this for us too, frees us from our too-small selves, security-seeking, fearful, cramped, angry. We want freedom from that somehow. and that is what the transformation Christ offers us can do.
What we see in this gospel is the disciples coming back to life themselves. In way, when Jesus died they all went through a death, too, they fell into disillusionment and fear and guilt about their own failures. And now they have not the old relationship with Jesus but a completely new one, maybe an even closer one. It brought them freedom and gave them a new life. That’s what we want, too.