Ep 85 - When the Pieces Don’t Fit

In this episode, Fr. Isaac reflects on the journey to Emmaus — a story of confusion, disappointment, and ultimately, recognition.

When life feels like a collection of scattered and broken pieces, it can be difficult to see how everything fits together. The disciples themselves struggle to make sense of what has happened to Jesus, holding fragments of a story that no longer seem to align.

Drawing on the insights of Louis-Marie Chauvet, this homily explores how the Eucharist acts as a “symbol” in the deepest sense — something that brings together what is divided and reveals meaning.

It is in the breaking of the bread that everything changes. The pieces come together. The confusion gives way to clarity. And the presence of Christ is revealed.

This episode is a reminder that even when life doesn’t make sense, placing Jesus at the centre can transform broken fragments into a story of hope.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to episode 85 of Brother from Another Father as we celebrate the third Sunday in Easter. There was a man sitting at his desk at home trying to get some work done, and his little five-year-old daughter kept interrupting him and pestering him with questions. In exasperation, he caught sight of a sheet of paper with the map of the world that was sitting on his desk. So he tore it up into little play pieces and told his daughter that once she had put it all back together, he would then play with her and answer all her questions. He of course thought to himself that it would take her at least the rest of the day to complete this task, knowing that she had little knowledge of world geography. Imagine his shock when less than ten minutes later his little girl was back with the map of the world all nicely reassembled. Surprised, he asked her, Sweetie, how did you manage to put that back together so fast? His little girl smiled demurely and said, Well, Daddy, there was a picture of Jesus on the other side. So I knew that if I put Jesus in the right place, everything else would be in its right place. In his book The Sacraments, Louis Marie Chauvet, one of the greatest liturgical theologians of our time, explores the notion of symbol as it applies to our sacraments, and in particular as it applies to the Eucharist. Now, unfortunately, the word symbol has got a bit of a bad rap in Catholic circles because of its historical use by Protestants as a counterweight to the Catholic belief in the real presence. From as young as I can remember, my Sunday school teachers always drilled it into me that the Eucharist is not just a symbol, but it is rather the real body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. I think that this historical debate between Catholics and Protestants has unfortunately set up a false dichotomy between real presence on the one hand and symbol on the other. Because they actually do not have to be two mutually exclusive categories and can both be applied to the sacrament of the Eucharist as a whole to mutually enrich one another and our understanding of the sacrament. To be clear, I want to firmly underline here that I believe in the doctrine of the real presence. This short excursus on the theology of symbol that we're about to engage in is in no way intended to undermine or relativise the centrality of the doctrine of the real presence in the sacrament of the Eucharist. So to continue now with Louis Marie Chauvet, he explores the function of a symbol in the ancient world. A symbol was a fragment of an object that was given to members of different parties to a contract so that these parties, or more likely their descendants, could recognize each other as related parties by putting together the various fragments to form a united object. And so this is the meaning of the word symbalain. In Greek, cymbalane means to put together, and this is where we get our word symbol from. It is this coming together of united fragments that enables supposed strangers to realize that they are not strangers to each other after all. They are bound together by a common contract, probably concluded by their ancestors. Before applying this directly to the Eucharist, let's first apply it to our gospel today, which is in fact a parable of the Eucharist. The disciples on the road to Emmaus are joined by Jesus, who they take to be a stranger, and moreover, one who does not know what has been happening in Jerusalem. So, dejectedly, they present Jesus with the fragments of their own broken story and their shattered hopes. They had hoped that Jesus had been the one to save Israel, that Jesus had been the Messiah, but then their leaders handed him over to death. Now, some women of their company are telling them that they have seen angels who have told them that Jesus is risen, but him, Jesus, they have not seen. And so the fragments just don't seem to fit together, and so they have lost hope. So Jesus comes along and adds in a few more fragments that they were missing in order to help them piece together the whole jigsaw, put the whole jigsaw together, symbalayame, to gather together all the different missing pieces so that they form a coherent whole. What these disciples on the way to Emmaus, and indeed the early Christian community, were missing was the understanding that suffering and death is an intrinsic part of life, and indeed the only way in which the redemption and new life that God has promised us can come about is through suffering. The final missing piece of the puzzle, which brings it all together for them and makes them realize that they are not strangers after all, but are related parties bound together by a covenant, is the breaking of the bread. In this gesture, they recognize Jesus and a new way come to appreciate the meaning of his sacrifice and the meaning of the horrific trauma that they have just gone through these past few days in watching him die on a cross. And so the Eucharist becomes the symbol by which they are able to gather together all these missing pieces and recognize Jesus as their Savior. The experience of these two disciples only makes sense when it is read in the light of the scriptures and illuminated by the symbol of the breaking of the bread, a symbol that they were party to only a few days prior at the Last Supper. It is this symbol of self-sacrificial love that renders Christ fully present to them in a way that was only inchoate prior to this moment. This is the power of a symbol to take the whole of Christ's life, everything about his teaching, his actions, his healing miracles, that may the disciples feel so right about themselves and understand the world and understand God's plan for the world, it condenses all of Jesus' teaching, everything that Jesus had managed to transmit to them over the course of his public ministry, this symbol of the breaking of the bread, condenses all of this and renders it wholly present through one simple sign of sacrificial love, the breaking of the bread. It is in this warm embrace of the risen Christ who has conquered the horrific trauma of the cross that all the pieces of their lives come together, and once again they are able to have hope. In a similar way, at each Eucharist, we are called to cymbalane, to put together the pieces of our lives, with our shattered hopes, with our unfulfilled desires and expectations, with our own traumas, with our doubts and sufferings, and we put all this together with the pieces of Jesus' life and death and resurrection. And it's only when we put these fragments together that we can start making sense of our lives. What is essential to go back to the story that I began with is that we put Jesus in the right place. Like that little girl, we have to have the faith that if we put Jesus at the center, if we put Jesus at the right place, then everything else falls into place. When we come to understand that the fragments of our lives, when they are joined to the cross, come to make sense to us, and we can recognize ourselves and our stories in the breaking of the bread. Jesus' victory over death gives us the hope to believe that there is no trauma or loss too big or too dark, that it cannot be overcome by the Father's enduring love, who raised his son from the dead. But this can only happen if, like Jesus, we are prepared to let our stories be broken and be robbed of their superficially and artlessly constructed coherence. Our hope had been that he would be the one to save Israel, the disciples tell Jesus on the road to Emmaus. The disciples, like most other Jews, had been expecting a military messiah, not one who would let his life be broken on a cross. The disciples had to let go of this false hope in order to be given the true hope of the resurrection and of God's new life and presence in their lives. We might want to ask ourselves, what are the false hopes that we are holding on to that are getting in the way of God giving us true joy and true hope? Let us pray that, like the little girl, we might put Jesus in his right place at the center of our lives as the crucified and risen one, so that all of the other pieces of our lives might fall into place. God bless and have a good Sunday.