One of the optional Easter Sunday Gospel readings is St Luke’s account of the risen Christ’s appearance on the road to Emmaus to those two disconsolate disciples, Cleophas and his unnamed companion. But before Christ reveals the resurrection to them he clearly feels that they are in need of a salutary rebuke:
Then he said to them, “You foolish men! So slow to believe the full message of the prophets! Was it not ordained that the Christ should suffer and so enter into his glory?” Then, starting with Moses and going through all the prophets, he explained to them the passages throughout the scriptures that were about himself. (Lk.24: 25-27)
The two gloomy disciples merit chiding for their failure to grasp that the path to Christ’s glorification is through suffering. They failed to understand the Old Testament prophets (and in fact a message that permeates the psalms also) who clearly show that evil – no matter how powerful it appears at one point in time or another – will never vanquish good. Good is always victorious; in a beautiful passage in Evangelii Gaudium Pope Francis describes the good as an “irresistible force”:
It is an irresistible force. Often it seems that God does not exist: all around us we see persistent injustice, evil, indifference and cruelty. But it is also true that in the midst of darkness something new always springs to life and sooner or later produces fruit. On razed land life breaks through, stubbornly yet invincibly. However dark things are, goodness always re-emerges and spreads.
Each day in our world beauty is born anew, it rises transformed through the storms of history. Values always tend to reappear under new guises, and human beings have arisen time after time from situations that seemed doomed. Such is the power of the resurrection, and all who evangelize are instruments of that power (EG, 276).
Something we might term a “law of rebirth”, the apparent victories of evil over the Church preceding sudden re-flowerings of her life, has repeatedly been manifested throughout the history of the Church. In 197AD Tertullian gave this rule an early formulation when he wrote: “the blood of the martyrs is the seedbed of the Church” (Apologeticus, ch. 50). And how historically accurate he was: the brutal persecutions of the early Church in imperial Rome came to their climax and conclusion in the great persecution of Diocletian (303AD) before the sudden, almost over-night, cessation of persecutions and the tremendous period of freedom and expansion for the Church inaugurated by the Edict of Milan (313). Similarly the turmoils following the barbarian destruction of the Roman Empire gave way to the 9th century Carolingian renaissance; the investitures crisis preceded the 12th century Gothic renaissance; and the 16th century Protestant Reformation of the 16th century lead to all the creativity and energy of the Counter-Reform inaugurated by Trent.
Such historical precedents should be before our minds when we survey the contemporary situation of the Church; they amount to the prophets that Christ refers to on the road to Emmaus. Such precedents strengthen our conviction that the Church is an Easter people, and that “The Church is alive!” as the then Cardinal Ratzinger proclaimed in his homily for the funeral Mass of Pope Saint John Paul II.
And life means struggle. The Church does not enjoy the peace of something inert and lifeless, of something that has no struggles to survive and grow. The Church is alive and “militant”; indeed it is the unique locus of the cosmic struggle between good and evil, and as such there can be no surprise that the Church is buffeted from all sides. That these buffetings appear to be increasing in their hostility should be taken as a roundabout compliment as Mgr Charles Pope recently suggested:
So, while it is irksome, take the special hatred of the world toward Christ and His Church as a compliment. Somehow, we are viewed as a unique threat. Despite all the scandals, despite the timidity of our clergy and laity, we apparently still pose a threat. It must be Christ shining through in spite of us.
Furthermore, the buffetings are alway purificatory for the Church. Christ’s mystical body on earth will always suffer defections which, while they sadden us, and while we struggle against them, in the final analysis are necessary, as St Josemaría Escrivá described in the 1930s:
The storm of persecution is good. What is the loss? What is already lost cannot be lost. When the tree is not torn up by the roots – and there is no wind or hurricane that can uproot the tree of the Church – only the dry branches fall. And they … are well fallen (The Way, 685).
If the persecutions that the Church experiences daily around the world (we only have to think of manifestly unjust imprisonments, attacks on priests, and burnings of churches) makes us fall into the pessimism of Cleophas and his unnamed companion, then those words Jesus might well be directed at us: “You foolish men! So slow to believe the full message of the prophets!”
Furthermore, in words of the Pope we have already seen: “Such is the power of the resurrection, and all who evangelize are instruments of that power” (EG, 276). Far from succumbing to pessimism, the Christian has the mission to evangelise – to transmit and embody – the Good News of our faith. The gloomy Christian undermines the message of the Gospel, as even Nietzsche, a great hater of Christianity, famously observed: “They would have to sing better songs for me to believe in their Saviour: his disciples would have to look more redeemed!” (Thus spoke Zarathrustra, XXVI).
“The Resurrection of Jesus is the crowning truth of our faith in Christ” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 638). The optimism of Christians, especially in times of trial, is a most eloquent testimony of their faith in the “law of rebirth”. A striking example of this is the effect on the young, still unbelieving, Edith Stein, of the Christian faith of a recently bereaved colleague, Anna Reinach. In 1917 Edith attended the funeral of Anna’s husband Adolf who had died at the front. She expected to find Anna disconsolate but was deeply impressed by her peace, such that, as she told a German Jesuit shortly before her own death, it was witnessing Anna’s faith after Adolf’s death that ultimately led to her decision to convert to Christianity.
The Christian must not carry about the heavy sorrow of the Emmaus disciples at the outset of that journey, but the joy of its close: the joy that sped them back to the nascent Church in Jerusalem where “they told their story of what had happened on the road and how they had recognised him at the breaking of bread” (Luke 24:35).