Recognition 

Sermon preached by Revd Maggie Guillebaud
Sunday 19th April 2026

Acts 2: 14a, 36-41, Luke 24:13-35 

‘When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed it, broke it, and they recognized him.’ 

I suspect many of us here have played the game of peek-a-boo with babies. I confess to sometimes playing it in the Cathedral when I’m not directly involved with one of our services and a fractious baby needs distracting. You know how it goes: you cover your face for a moment so that to the baby you appear to have completely disappeared. But then you suddenly you uncover your face, and there you are again! Smiles, or gurgles of delight as that momentary puzzle is solved. This ability to work out that someone is there, even though you can’t see them, happens within the first year of a baby’s life and is recognised as a vital marker in their development. It’s also hugely enjoyable, for both parties. 

The encounter between the unrecognised Jesus and his two sad disciples, as they walk away from Jerusalem towards Emmaus after the crucifixion, would wring anyone’s heart. They are full of information as to what has happened, and eager to share it. Jesus is gone. Their friend and teacher is gone. Now they are just trudging home the seven miles to Emmaus. 

Not just trudging, but profoundly puzzled. It is the third day since the crucifixion, but they simply don’t know what to make of it, or of the angels the women claim to have seen at the empty tomb. They have plenty of  information, but no understanding.  

Information but no understanding. For me that is the very essence of that period between the Resurrection and the Ascension, those 40 days we celebrate after  Easter. In this very short period of time Jesus has a huge job on his hands: he has to prepare his disciples for what they must do next – proclaim him to all nations and build up the body of Christian believers – before he finally disappears from their sight at the Ascension.  It is a period of teaching, of learning, and of coming to understanding, for these first disciples. So much to learn, such a short time.  

And during that time Jesus appears to the disciples frequently.  

In John we are told he appears to Mary Magadalene at the tomb on the morning of the Resurrection, and she mistakes him for the gardener.  

He appears to his inner group of disciples, the Apostles, but without Thomas. One week later he appears again to the Apostles, this time with Thomas , who had said he would not believe what his friends were saying about Christ having risen unless he himself had visual proof. He was given this. 

A week later, so John’s Gospel tells us, the disciples are fishing when they see Jesus on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias, and later  breakfast with him on fried fish. It is as if Jesus has to convince them that yes, he is really, really alive. Seeing becomes believing. Just like small children, the disciples have to be convinced that even when they can’t see him, Jesus is still present. 

But also importantly  each of these appearances also becomes a point of teaching: Mary must learn not to touch the risen Lord as he is on his way to the Father, he is not yet ascended. She will have to continue in her faith even when she can no longer see him, let alone touch him. 

In his first appearance to the Apostles, Jesus, as we heard last week, breathes on them and gives them the power to forgive sins, or indeed retain them if they see fit. The disciples are beginning to learn what it is not only to know that Christ is with them even when they cannot see him, but that part of their future ministry will be in forgiving the sins of those who come to believe.   

The second appearance with Thomas amplifies the point: Jesus praises those who in the future will not see him, but still believe in him. ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’ I guess that’s you and me. 

And at the Sea of Tiberias Jesus and Peter are reconciled. In an encounter when three times Jesus asks Peter if he loves him, Peter’s ‘you know that I love you’ erases the three times he had denied him on that fateful evening of his trial.  This rock on which Jesus would build his church is now given the job of leading his flock. Seeing, believing, reconciling, commissioning – these are the themes which run through these appearances.   

But the story of the meeting between the two disciples and the resurrected Christ on the road to Emmaus is, to my mind, in a rather different category. This is not primarily about seeing or believing or commissioning or reconciling, though that is surely part of it.  If we unpick the story, we find distinct echoes of what had happened in that upper room at the Last Supper, and what subsequently becomes for us the  Eucharist, that central act of worship which still today holds together the Christian community. 

Jesus did not meet the disciples on the road, or indeed in any of his resurrection appearances, as a mighty king but, as at his birth, in all humility: in a garden after the Resurrection, quietly in a room where the Apostles were together, eating simple fried fish on the shore, walking all day with two sad and bewildered men. In other words, Christ meets us where we are – today in the Cathedral, but also every time we pass a beggar in the street, when we smile at a stranger and they smile back, when we talk to the sometimes noisy youngsters who meet up in the Close, or ring up a friend we know is lonely. 

If we pick up the story after the two disciples’ description of the events of the past three days, we find Jesus’ gentle remonstrance and an appeal to Scripture: ‘Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all the prophets have declared!’ His subsequent explanation of Jewish history, leading up to the coming of the Messiah, opens their hearts, which burn within them, as they begin to understand. This sets a pattern for us. A prerequisite of our encounter with God in the Eucharist must surely be an understanding, based in scripture, of who the Messiah is and why he has come into this world.  

These two men, Cleophas and an unnamed disciple, are not from the inner circle of the Apostles. They were not present at the Last Supper. But through the taking, the blessing, and the breaking of bread, when they finally recognise Jesus, they are inexorably drawn into that wider circle of recognition, love, and grace which spins out, and continues to spin out, to include us, two thousand years later.   

This bewildered collection of men and women disciples were for forty days before the Ascension being welded into a community of faith in order to proclaim the gospel, a community based on the sacramental and covenantal signs of water in baptism, to which Peter in our first reading points us, and of bread and wine in a Eucharistic meal. They were being prepared for the final gift  Jesus had promised them: the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, which we celebrate 10 days after the Ascension.  

Today as we gather to share Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist we, like those two men on the road to Emmaus, recognise Christ in the breaking of bread. As we are offered the  bread and wine we first say ‘Amen’, or ‘may it be so’ in English, to each offering. This is both our assent and our recognition of what is about to happen. By our response we become fully invested in this act of reception. 

As ever, St Augustine nailed it when in his Confessions he has Christ say: ‘I am the food of the fully grown, grow and you will feed on me. And you will not change me into you, but you will be changed into me.’ 

Christ comes to us in  bread and wine in order to unite us to himself and therefore to God and to one another. We become, through the Eucharist, changed into the body of Christ, that body of believers in him whom we call the Church. We are indeed changed, forever, as were those two men on the road to Emmaus.