EDITORIAL : THE NATIONAL POST, CANADA

 

The road to Emmaus

 

Easter Week is the most holy week of the Christian calendar. The traditional exposition of the passion of Christ has two foci: one, on the hill called Golgotha where Jesus was crucified under a hand-lettered sign whose superscription ("This is the king of the Jews") was intended by Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor who wrote it, to be ironic; second, on the tomb discovered empty by the disciples on Easter morning, the stone rolled away, the inhabitant gone, the empty tomb a symbol of Christ's victory over death and the climax of God's redemptive drama.

But I like to think that the biblical penchant for threes (think of the Trinity, the three Magi, etc) is also in the Easter narrative if you look closely. In Luke's Gospel, we find the third focus of Easter, and an unlikely one it is: a parched and dusty stretch of road running from the city of Jerusalem to the insignificant village of Emmaus.

Cleopas, a relative of Christ's family, and another disciple were walking along this road and, inevitably, talking about the shattering events that had just happened: the crucifixion, their likely peril as followers of Jesus, and now the reports of an empty tomb. The women of their company were talking about visions of angels and a gardener who resembled Jesus. What can it all mean?

As the two men walked along, they were joined by a stranger. He seemed to be from a far country for he appeared to know nothing of what had happened. So Cleopas and his friend filled the stranger in, telling him about Jesus, the carpenter's son from Nazareth, "a prophet mighty in deed and word . whom we had trusted should have been he to have redeemed Israel." Now comes the twist in the story: Instead of expressing surprise or commiserating with them in their loss, the stranger instead began to expound the messianic scriptures from Moses through the prophets.

The travellers reached the end of their day's journey and the stranger made as if to travel on. Cleopas and his companion pressed the stranger to stay: "Abide with us, for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent."

These last words were to be echoed by an asthmatic English parish priest, Henry L. Lyte (17931889), who shortly before he died wrote a poem called Eventide and gave it to a friend. The friend tossed it in a trunk where it languished unseen for 14 years; eventually, the poem was retrieved and set to music by William Monk (1823-1889) at a time of deep sorrow in his own life; it became one of the best beloved hymns -Abide with Me:

"When other helpers fail and comforts flee,

Help of the helpless, O abide with me."

When Cleopas, his friend and the stranger sat down to supper, the stranger "took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them." What a moment of illumination that must have been, recalling so vividly the first Eucharist earlier that week. In that moment, Cleopas and his friend recognized the stranger as the risen Lord, and then he was gone.

Cleopas and his friend jumped up and set out on the approximately eight-mile trek back to Jerusalem to tell what had happened. As they ran back, perhaps stumbling as much from sheer excitement as from the dark, they said one to another: "Did not our hearts burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the Scriptures?"

And so the Easter Trinity is complete: the hill called Golgotha; the empty tomb; and the road to Emmaus. Miraculous it is that these three locations and events were to shape the succeeding 2,000 years of human history -even today in our "post-Christian" era not quite forgotten.

In the 1960s, the great British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge made a BBC television series on the life of Christ; in the last scene, Muggeridge and a friend walked the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus. Muggeridge wrote:

"As my friend and I walked along like Cleopas and his friend, we recalled as they did the events of the Crucifixion and its aftermath in the light of our utterly different and yet similar world. Nor was it a fancy that we too were joined by a third presence. And I tell you that whatever the walk, and whoever the wayfarers, there is always this third presence ready to emerge from the shadows and to fall in step along the dusty, stony way."

Truth and power

 

In many places across the land, Canadians make their way to church in order to vote. Church halls are often booked by Elections Canada as polling stations, and so as advance polls opened yesterday, voters likely mixed with Good Friday pilgrims, each going about their business, citizens to their civic duties, religious folk to their worship.
The contemporary sensibility is to keep all that separate now. But, as Father Raymond J. de Souza noted on this page Thursday, this Easter weekend puts them together. Religion and politics, faith and public life. They cannot really be kept apart, for citizens cannot set aside their faith, even as one does not expect the parishioner to cease being a citizen when about the things of God.
"My kingdom is not of this world," Jesus said to Pontius Pilate. Kings and governors, especially those in service of absolute power such as Pilate, do not much care for rival kings and governors. They do not much care for rival allegiances of any kind, which is why having any other kingdom -even one not of this world -was offensive to Pilate, who judged that it would be offensive to Caesar.
We all belong to various kingdoms. Blessed thing that it is, Canadian citizenship does not exhaust our identity or provide an answer to the ultimate questions. So Canadians have other allegiances, including higher allegiances, which bring other truths, including higher truths, into our common life together. It is the ordering of those allegiances and truths that animated the biblical confrontation between Pilate and Jesus on that first Good Friday -a conversation profoundly relevant to every time and place.
"What is truth?" is the question Pilate puts to Jesus. Pilate knows about power; he governs in the name of a formidable empire. He has the power of life and death over Jesus. Before Pilate, Jesus speaks not of his own power, but of coming into the world "to bear witness to the truth." It is an extraordinary claim that Jesus makes, that "everyone who is of the truth hears my voice." This is a new category for Pilate to think about, a kind of power that comes not from force, but from the authority of truth itself.
Perhaps Pilate was being dismissive then about the question of truth, thinking it irrelevant to the brute force of power, as Stalin did when he mockingly asked how many divisions the pope had. Or perhaps there was a faint glimmer of awakening in Pilate, opening himself to a new -and to him, dangerous -possibility that political power is not the final word about the human condition.
"It is the key question that is also asked by modern political theory: Can politics accept truth as a structural category?" wrote Pope Benedict XVI about the trial before Pilate in his recent book about Holy Week. "Or must truth, as something unattainable, be relegated to the subjective sphere, its place taken by an attempt to build peace and justice using whatever instruments are available to power?"
Truth or power? Benedict's question is not for Catholics alone, but one that should occupy thoughtful people of all traditions, and especially Canadians in the midst of an election.
There is much back-and-forth between candidates, accusing each other of not telling the truth. More fundamental than who may be telling lies is the task of articulating those truths which ought to undergird our common life together. Some of those truths about the human person and society are encoded in our laws, constitutional tradition and democratic elections. But there are other truths too, belonging to science and commerce and music and literature, that shape our common life together. Above them all are the truths of philosophy and theology that seek answers to the most fundamental questions of how, and for what purpose, we are to live.
The drama between Jesus and Pilate is neither a mere legal matter, nor a political dispute. Likewise, an election is not an occasion only to choose between partisan options. It is a time to think about where politics fits in an account of the good life, and to think about the other truths that politics must leave room for, and to which politics must defer. As Canadians, we frequently take for granted those freedoms which give us space to seek those truths, primary among them religious liberty. At the National Post, we attempt to use our freedom of the press to tell those stories that go beyond the narrow sphere of politics, and thereby participate in the broader human conversation about how we are to live.
Politics is an important part of that. Indeed, politics was an important part of that first Good Friday. But it was not the most important part, nor did it have the final word. Christians believe that the final word belongs to the eternal Word, the Risen Jesus, who is the way, the truth and the life.
To all our readers then on the occasion of Easter, we offer our good wishes, as we seek together for that truth that opens the way to life.