Re Emmaus Road
Easter has now passed but if there was any part of that message that was bequeathed to us from almost 2,000 years ago that could make sense, it has to be the Road to Emmaus. It captures my attention and really makes me think. On the surface it begins with two of Christ’s disciples travelling home to Emmaus after his crucifixion and discussing all that happened. It is a hauntingly mysterious and wonderfully crafted story and I am left with a sense of a fundamental truth that lies hidden as the drama unfolds. It cannot be simply written off as an imaginative tale, there is more here than meets the eye as it were, and this is exactly the point that I wish to make, for I see it as a psychological gem of our thinking processes.
In the first instance and at a fundamental level we have two people whose hopes have been dashed and they are trying to put together all that happened which brought them from such high expectations to the depths of despair. Jesus is their unconscious self which gradually reveals itself to them as they proceed with their enquiry. For this story Jesus is the unknown part of you that you can come to know and in the knowing truth can be revealed to you. The structure is similar to struggling with an intellectual problem and then the light dawns on you and you see the answer. It is the ‘Eureka moment’, the ‘Wow moment’ the ‘Why, that’s it’ moment. Everything has come together, all the information you need is there and the problem is resolved. You are overjoyed with the result.
The revelation from the accumulation of data or information is seen in the Emmaus story as a result of Christ’s promptings and actions until he breaks bread with them and they finally understand who he is by the association of ideas with the bread that they had previously shared with him. When we have solved an intellectual problem in this way, at that moment, we lose sight of the actual way it was solved and we are just satisfied that we have found the answer. Likewise in the Emmaus story, as soon as the disciples recognize that which is presented to them he vanishes, but they are overjoyed at what they had witnessed.
The New Testament story climaxes in Christ Risen and the journey on The Emmaus Road is an excellent example of the workings of our unconscious mind. Now bear in mind that Christ Risen is the axis upon which Christianity is based; it rests on the belief that Christ triumphed over death and I believe that the wisdom teacher who wrote this story was trying to convey in the only way that he could that death is not the finality and that in some form we are all renewed.
Life and death, contrary to all that appears as self-evident are one, the two in one, the unity of opposites. The unity that defies understanding yet manifests itself to us by its continual renewal on our planet earth.
The problem that religion and philosophy have been trying to solve from the beginning had found a new level of understanding in Christ Risen.
Are we now ready to see that Christ should be clothed today with the language and increasing knowledge of science as an aid to go further and deeper into the mystery of all mysteries?
The problem with language is that the surface representation of thought (in this case words) is open to misinterpretation and it is only by properly understanding the symbols and the association of ideas that these words represent can we form a true picture of what is really being conveyed to consciousness.
