A man, walking to the next town, caught up with two men ahead of him. He “desired to hear some news, and said: ‘I pray you, make me partaker of your talk.” Obviously, those weren’t the days of cars and cell phones, our times when we’re usually self-absorbed and don’t easily enter into a conversation with a stranger. It’s a tale, fiction, told by Apuleius, a second century Roman orator and author.
Catching up on the way, “He said to them, ‘What is this conversation that you are holding with each other as you walk?” That’s from the first century, the risen but unrecognized Jesus joining two disciples walking to Emmaus. They told him news they couldn’t believe. “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things happened. Moreover, some women of our company amazed us. They came back saying that they had even seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. But these words seemed…an idle tale” (Luke 24).
Tell me something that doesn’t fit into my experience and I’ll be skeptical too. We know what we know; don’t challenge us with something not in our experience. God in my daily life? God in the sacraments? Do you go about today so bound by the laws of nature that you won’t believe the supernatural presence of God?
In Apuleius’ tale, the man who joined the two said, “You that are of gross ears and an obstinate mind, mock and contemn those things which are perchance really the truth…, those things accounted untrue by the false opinion of men.” Jesus said to the men He joined, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.”
Apuleius, no Christian, knew that we dismiss what we do not know. Jesus joins today’s conversations with resurrection news. Is the supernatural an “idle tale” as you go about your ordinary tasks? Are you looking outside yourself to hear from the “Stranger”? “For many things chance unto me, and unto you, and to divers others, wonderful and almost unheard of, which being declared unto the ignorant be accounted as lies.” (Apuleius translated by Adlington, “The Golden Ass,” 20f, 35f)
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