Sermon for the third Sunday of Easter

preached by Dr Birte Feix, at St Barnabas Jericho on Sunday 19 April 2026

Readings of the Day: Acts 2.14,36-41; 1 Peter 1.17-21; Luke 24.13-35

“Then their eyes were opened and they recognised him” (Luke 24.31a)

May I speak in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

How do we recognise someone? By looking at them, seeing them, you might say, though most of us will testify to our sight being sometimes unreliable, for example in those moments when we frantically search for something which -in the end- was always there, on the side, in plain sight. But then we can recognise our friends from far off -we just ‘know’ it is them, by their walk, their voice, their mannerisms and actions. Recognition is not simply a question of seeing, of visual input.

How then do we recognise the invisible God? What interferes with our ability to see the Divine Love?

Our Gospel today gives us some pointers in the familiar story of the walk to Emmaus but also alerts us just how easy it is to miss Christ’s presence among us.

The moment of recognition for the two disciples came in the breaking of the bread, an act that became central in the Eucharist, one of the Sacraments of the Church. Peter when he addressed the crowd of early followers in our reading from Acts summarises the charge given to the early Christians to repent, to be baptised so that their sins might be forgiven and to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. (Acts 2.38) We can recognise at least one if not two Sacraments of the Church in his words, namely Baptism and Confession of our sins.

So what is a Sacrament? And more importantly, what is it for?

The Catechism of the Prayer Book defines a Sacrament as an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, ordained by Christ himself as a means whereby we receive the same, and a pledge to assure us thereof.

It could be regarded as the means of making that step between seeing and recognising more deliberate but also maybe more obvious. We see with our eyes the matter of bread and wine and through faith we encounter Christ himself in our hearts in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar. The words and actions of the Mass can help us in that recognition through their symbolism but also their familiarity. God accommodates his communication to the means we can take in.

We can regard the Sacraments as a visible sign of an invisible relationship, underwritten not by human confidence but by divine gift. They continue to point to the promise given to us in the Incarnation, that it is possible that human beings can, in the end, see God face to face, we can know and love God who is perfect love, and whose love -in Christ -incorporates every aspect of our being.

As the proper preface for Christmastide in Common Worship puts it: In this mystery of the Word made flesh you have caused his light to shine in our hearts, to give knowledge of your glory in the face of Jesus Christ. In him we see our God made visible and so are caught up in the love of the God we cannot see.

However, if the Sacraments are “signs”, they do not only point at something, they do in some sense connect two things, in this case creation and the creator. We do not just encounter the Divine Love on Sundays at Mass, there are hints of this Love’s presence and activity in our daily lives; these are just more easily overlooked as the disciples said to each other in retrospect “were our hearts not burning within us while he was talking to us on the road” (Luke 24.32). We can see small tokens of that Love in the kindness of others, the beauty of creation, the human love shown to us, as well as in our prayers and scripture reading. But recognition and faith are a gift from God and not something we ‘achieve’ by simply concentrating harder, just as the disciples did not recognise Jesus of their own accord, but their eyes were opened.

We can see the theme of the road to Emmaus as a model for the Christian life -Christ’s hidden presence in daily life, the necessity of faith and the invitation to Communion; the Risen Christ is actively present in His Church, particularly in the Eucharist, but also in the quiet, often mundane aspects of daily life.

Faith and grace are not abstract. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for” (Hebrew 11.1), and thus faith involves placing ourselves and our lives materially into God’s hands. If we see the world as gift, we see it as something to be given, as a call to give -a true gift that cannot be kept and hoarded. To see the Risen Christ is to see our past and our own vocation in a new light, to recognise the call towards a new humanity, to become the people God intended us to be: the ones who know creation as gift and offer it in thanksgiving.

The initial mood of the disciples on the road to Emmaus is so relatable to many of us, at least at some stages of our lives -overwhelmed by the demands of daily life, having encountered defeat, apparent failure and crushed hopes it seems hard to notice God’s presence with us but maybe, like the disciples, we can recognise those moments at least in retrospect, as we review the day and attempt to notice the small, the seemingly insignificant encounters through which we were given glimpses of the Divine Love, a spiritual discipline modelled on the Ignatian Daily Examen.

It is my hope and prayer for all of us that our eyes might be opened this Eastertide to encounter Christ in the Sacraments of the Church and so in the sacramental of everyday life and that we may be given the gift of Faith -Faith, that in the words of Thomas Aquinas, “our outward sense befriending makes the inward vision clear”.

Amen.