God seems to have an instinct for revealing himself in what is most common.
We read in Chapter 23 of St. Luke’s Gospel about the two disciples on their way to Emmaus. They were walking away from Jerusalem, speaking and searching together; disappointed, chagrined, and confused.
A stranger joined them and asked why they looked so sad. In a reply that showed that he had little respect for the perceptivity of his interlocutor, Cleopas responded, You must be the only person staying in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have been happening there these last few days.
The stranger pressed the question, What things? They replied by giving brief information about Jesus in whom they had placed so much hope and who had been killed by the government forces at the instigation of their religious leaders.
To top it all off, some women had gone to the tomb and found it empty and brought back a story about some angel who told them that Jesus was alive. Some of the men had then gone out and had indeed found the tomb empty, but of Jesus they had found no trace.
Then Jesus burst out in exclamation, amazed and saddened by their inertia of heart.
The evidence had been there, their intuitions could have carried them out beyond their own comfortable rational assessment of things, and they could have been the first to have let their hearts move with the power of the Spirit and to have believed what seemed beyond belief — that Jesus was alive. It would have been a daring intuition, but the possibility of it was there.
So Jesus patiently began to expound the law and the prophets and to show from the inspired word that the Christ ought to have suffered and thus have entered his glory.
Finally, at the invitation of his two fellow travellers, Jesus shared a meal with them, and when he was with them at table, He took the bread and said the blessing; then he broke it and handed it to them. In this gesture, which somehow must have been so characteristic, and at the same time sacramentally communicative of him, the disciples recognized Jesus.
They hurried back to tell the others, and as they went, they reflected on their experience as they walked with him and heard him expound the Scriptures. Now they saw the full depth of that journey together, as well as the true meaning of the reports they had heard from those who had visited the tomb.
The reality which had been just below the surface all the time became evident. Their ordinary experiences of a journey with a stranger, a discussion of a great disappointment, a shared meal all of a sudden coalesced into a living experience of the living Jesus.
This Gospel account, which basically shows us the structure of the liturgy with its gathering together, its mysterious presence of Christ, its hearing and pondering on the word of God, and finally its breaking of the bread, is also a meditation on the mystery of ordinariness.
We see Jesus, unrecognized, enter into a perfectly ordinary situation and gently reveal to the disciples the deepest dimension of their experience. What he shows them is the treasure they already possess if they only knew how to understand its true potential.
The resurrection had been revealed because it had taken place: there were even tentative and incoherent witnesses to it.
Had their hearts been able to move, the disciples would have been able to make sense not only of the previous few years’ experience with Jesus, but of the whole history of their people. They finally received insight through a very ordinary but mysteriously full gesture, when Jesus broke the bread.
God seems to have an instinct for revealing himself in what is most common. In the ordinary and undramatic dimensions of reality, God lies hidden, but in a way which allows his presence to burst through.
Perhaps the very humility and simplicity of what is ordinary calms our complex fears and need for assurance. Perhaps the very prosaic nature of what is common serves to still our soul, make us feel that we are on familiar ground, and thus allows God to be manifest.
God never uses silver and gold, lightning or rare perfumes as the essential stuff of his sacraments, but only common things like water and oil and wine and bread, and in this way, he comes to us where we are at home. This law of the incarnation finds its most perfect realization in the man Jesus, the Word who became the most common of all human realities — flesh.
The Father entrusts some people in a special way with the great vocation of being ordinary. In fact, it seems that those who are most deeply involved in the mystery of the Word made flesh are touched by this strange paradox: that the deepest revelations of God demand that he be hidden.
The Mother of God, she who was most deeply endowed with all the gifts of the Spirit, was a simple small-town girl and housewife. Joseph, her husband, was a working man. Indeed, it seems as though many of the saints have been more impressive than Jesus and his family.
The paradox seems to be that at the very core of God’s revelation, there must be nothing that can distract us, nothing that we might take for God because it is out of the ordinary.
The mystery of God is too great to be contained in anything less than himself. The revelation of God must always point beyond itself. The experience of the unmistakable power and beauty of God’s presence transpires within a context stripped of the drama with which man would like to distract himself from the awesome mystery of the Holy One.
From the still, small voice at whose sound Elijah covered his face, to the meal shared with a stranger after the resurrection, God’s deepest revelations of himself have taken place where man is at home and himself.
This means, of course, that God is revealed not only in the comfortable experiences of life but also in the pain and loneliness and tears which are common to all of us.
For Jesus himself with loud cries and tears offered prayer and entreaty to him who could save him from death and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Son though he was, he learned obedience through the things that he suffered and having been made perfect has become for all who obey him the source of eternal salvation (Heb 5: 7-9).
To be ordinary, then, is to be deeply human. To be so deeply human that one often passes unnoticed.
Often Jesus’ presence is as beautiful and as taken for granted as the appearance of a blossom on a branch, yet it is in such a mystery that our spirit is moved constantly beyond itself until the deepest and most common of life’s experiences become diaphanous, shot through with the light of God.
For a Christian, the touchstone to all mystical experience is to be found in compassion, for he who knows God imitates God and, in his tears and smile and handshake, once again allows the Word to become flesh.
Fr. Francis, now deceased, was an associate member of Madonna House.
Restoration April 2025
image: Christ on the Road to Emmaus, by American 18th Century artist
