Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
Father Don Wolf, a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, offers a Catholic perspective on the issues confronting each person today.
Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
Recognizing HIM in the Breaking of the Bread | June 1, 2025
In this episode, Father Wolf unpacks resurrection narratives to reveal a fascinating pattern: those who knew Jesus best consistently failed to recognize him after his resurrection. Whether on the Emmaus road or in the locked upper room, his followers struggled to perceive who stood before them. What prevented recognition, and when did clarity finally arrive? The answer provides a profound insight into our own spiritual lives.
The breaking of bread emerges as the crucial moment of recognition throughout these stories. This isn't coincidental—it points directly to the Eucharist as the privileged place where Christ becomes known to believers.
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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.
This is Living Catholic with Father Don Wolfe. This show deals with living the Catholic faith in our time, discovering God's presence in our lives and finding hope in His Word. And now your host, father Don Wolfe.
Speaker 2:Welcome Oklahoma to Living Catholic. I'm Father Don Wolfe, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish and rector of the Shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. Before we go about the Easter season, as we approach the celebration of Pentecost, it would be good for us to review some of the resurrection stories of Jesus. After the intensity of Lent and the excitement of the Easter season, these stories can begin to disappear in our imagination, and that's too bad because to become one of the cornerstones of the faith that we celebrate, and the cornerstone of which is Jesus' resurrection from the dead. Now, I've spoken many times about the several aspects that these stories have in common. There's the interesting fact that all of the participants are shocked that the tomb is empty, despite Jesus' assurances about his death and resurrection, and the most understandable fact is, the most obvious, that they were all surprised to encounter him. And the most startling aspect is that the disciples didn't recognize him. Over and over again, in all of the stories, they come upon the resurrected Christ and they don't see that it's him. They spent years with him, following him and listening to his teaching, eating and drinking with him, but when the time comes and they encounter him at the resurrection, they don't know him, whatever it means they have a difficult time making sense out of what they're seeing, and the principal story highlighting this aspect is of the disciples on their way to Emmaus. They're going back home, away from Jerusalem and the great holy day that was there and all that took place surrounding Jesus's arrival. They were all part of the excitement of Jesus's interest and all of the buzz about what it could mean. They were also witnesses to him about carrying the cross and being crucified. And now that the new week has started, it's the first day of the week and all is back to normal. They're on their way back home. Whatever they may have thought about the great promise evident in Jesus' proclamation, they've been disabused of thinking it will inaugurate some new day in Israel. There's nothing more for them at the temple or in the heart of celebration, so they're on the road back home. An unknown man accompanies them and, as travelers do they begin to talk and, according to the story, they've been talking about all that had taken place in the previous days. The stranger asked them about their conversation. They continued with him talking about all that had taken place in the previous days. The stranger asked him about their conversation. They continued with him. They disclosed their disappointment that Jesus was not the Christ, the one anointed sent by God, and the stranger in the context of the conversation disagrees and a long afternoon of Bible study commences.
Speaker 2:He lays out the evidence from the scriptures about the Messiah and how it was necessary for him to suffer in order to redeem Israel. The disciples learn something they haven't understood before. They've never heard it quite this way previously, and we might quickly pass over this reference and go on to the rest of the story. It does leap ahead of us, so we'd be excused for not paying close attention, but it's important to spend a moment on this fact. The disciples of Jesus hadn't heard this part of the promise.
Speaker 2:A suffering Messiah is not part of what Jesus has been saying to them, or at least what they've been able to hear. They are as surprised as anyone else to hear about what suffering means and how it can be redemptive. On the day of the resurrection, that becomes a source of wonder and amazement among those who followed Jesus the longest. They didn't know anything about it. Up to them, it could have been, of course, that Jesus did speak of it, but they didn't hear or understand, so they didn't remember. That seems unlikely in our atmosphere that is so charged with information and ideas. How could it be that Jesus could talk about crucifixion and the need for the Son of man to suffer and they didn't hear it? It's recorded in the Gospels that Jesus did indeed predict his death and resurrection, but in almost every case the accounts also describe that those who were present didn't have much grasp about what he was saying or, as in the case of Peter, disagreed with him. In one scene. They heard what he said but just didn't remember it until they came upon the resurrection as it's described in the scene. They remembered only when they got to the resurrection as it's described in the scene. They remembered only when they got to the empty tomb.
Speaker 2:In a world without books, capturing the attention of your audience and holding them with unexpected ideas was something difficult. We can listen over and over and play back what we've heard or are exposed to, and we can usually read what's been said until we understand. The options are endless for making sure we've really gotten the point before we go on, but there's no such option in Jesus' world. Just about everything was oral and it had to connect at the moment or it was gone. It's easy to see how an unexpected proclamation could simply pass them by, like a skier who's fallen on a mountain could simply pass them by Like a skier who's fallen on a mountain. If it's slick and icy and he's moving fast, the ground can go by so quickly with nothing to grab onto. He can fall a long way before he comes to rest. So it would be with words that come at you quickly, even for us, with all of the options available to us.
Speaker 2:We're not very good at hearing and remembering the options available to us. We're not very good at hearing and remembering All the facility we have to pay attention because of our technology simply facilitates being distracted by other things. We end up not paying much attention at all to what we're exposed to. Even in simple things we have to go back over and over again, to be sure. Both of these aspects combined to make it difficult for the disciples to grasp what Jesus was saying to them, and besides, they were just ideas. Proclamations can move hearts, without a doubt, but they're weak compared to experience. You can josh all day long about something you're thinking about, but that's nothing like the hands-on, direct focus of seeing things with your own eyes and feeling them with your own senses. A good provocateur can lay out a dozen ideas in a few minutes, but even when they're startling and bright, they're hard to get a hold of. But have someone show you, have something happen that involves you, and you're likely not to forget it. Experience is the best teacher, especially when words have become dangerous.
Speaker 2:These disciples on the road to Emmaus were listening to this stranger talk about their experience. His description of the biblical explanation for the suffering Messiah began to take on a life of its own. In the light of all they had seen and done, they were ready to hear what they had not heard before. The one they followed had been hoisted on a cross. They were ready to enter a different level of understanding. What he said mattered to them. It was when they sat down at the table for supper, though, that their experience began to glow. At supper, the stranger took bread and broke it, and when he did, their eyes were opened and they understood the truth of the matter. They were in the presence of the resurrected Christ. As they saw this truth revealed to them, another thought pierced the veil of their blindness Not only was Jesus present to them, he had been there with them all day long. Looking back, they realized they had known something. Something was in the air when they had encountered the stranger, but it took until that moment to clarify the truth. The encounter had been of Jesus and it had been all day long, and when they broke bread together, then they knew who it was. It was Jesus resurrected. He had been their companion and we should take note of this prompt.
Speaker 2:It is an obvious allusion to the power of the Eucharist to evoke the realization of the presence of Christ among us. They didn't know what they knew until they could know him in the breaking of the bread. Everything else had been prelude to that moment, and when the moment came, then they knew. But leading up to the moment was not the moment. They had to experience the presence of Christ in the breaking of bread and then they knew what was actual and real for them. They didn't know Christ until the moment in which he became real for them, when he enacted the memorial he himself had given them.
Speaker 2:I think it was Henri de Lubac, a French theologian, who began one of his books about preaching with a question, and the question was in a place in which it was possible to celebrate the Eucharist but not preach, or preach but not celebrate the Eucharist after a hundred years? In which place would Christ be known best? His implied answer was obvious in the place where preaching occurred. It's not a trick question or a dodgy answer. Preaching makes Christ known, and powerfully.
Speaker 2:Eucharist is more complicated, more implicit, more distant and experienced than the evocative power of preaching, except in the scriptures, and through this example we get a somewhat different story. They heard Jesus talk to them of the scriptures and its value in their understanding of the work of God in their midst, and they heard him all day long. In fact they talked with him. It wasn't like he walked with them and lectured them all day long. It was a conversation and at the end of it they had only the vague intuition that there was something else, something familiar, in this unknown stranger. But it was only at the moment of the evocation of the Last Supper that they began to understand who it was that had accompanied them and, as it turned out, who it was that had died for their salvation. We shouldn't diminish the power of the Eucharist to bring us to the realization of the presence of Christ among us. In this story, they came to know Jesus best in the breaking of bread together.
Speaker 2:The other major story that comes to us is the appearance of Jesus to the apostles. When they're gathered in the upper room on the first day of the week, their doors are locked because they are friends of the man who had just been executed for being a threat to the Roman government. Their fear is reasonable and their actions are justifiable. They squirrel themselves away in the upper room and then lock the door to keep people out. Not only that, they keep people away from what they're doing. And what is that? What are they up to? It's not explicit, but they had celebrated the Last Supper in the upper room on Friday, and in it Jesus told them that when they gathered, they should eat and drink in his memory.
Speaker 2:After the events of the previous days, they came together and did no doubt as they had been instructed, and while they were eating and drinking according to the procedure Jesus laid out for them, he came and stood in their midst. The Eucharist again proved to be the crossover point in which they began to understand what it was that was taking place among them. They gathered, they shared the common loaf and the common cup, and they became aware of Jesus among them, but all the same, they needed some measure of heightened awareness that it was he, the one they knew, who had been crucified and buried. In this case, he showed them his wounds. The marks of the suffering he had undergone were what gave them the chance to see what they couldn't understand at first. He was validated as the real presence because they could see the marks of the spear and the nails. They could see that this person who now stood among them had not escaped the ravages of the torturers or the sufferings of the condemned. More than his voice or his actual physical presence, it was the wounds marking his body that confirmed his true, resurrected presence among them. They had to have their eyes opened and their hearts attuned in order for them to see what they needed to see. And when they did, then he became present among them.
Speaker 2:And with the realization of his presence, they received a mission. They were to inherit the mission that Jesus had fulfilled in his life, as Jesus had gone to proclaim a new initiative of God's love, care and forgiveness. So they were Sounds like a fairly straightforward proposition the students taking on the work of the teacher. But in this case they intuited something greater, that which set them apart from the run-of-the-mill students becoming as the teacher. They understood that in Jesus' commission they were to inherit the promise he was living at that moment, which was that resurrection awaited them. Whatever they were seeing in Jesus had become a mirror. They were empowered by what they recognized in him. In truth, it gave them the vision to leave behind the life of Holy Saturday and pick up the promise of Easter Sunday.
Speaker 2:The world was not going to be the same for them. In fact, the totality of their world was altered From the inside. They knew they had been chosen to carry the message of Jesus out to the waiting world. They would become the source from which this message of a new kind of life would go out. As witnesses of all that had happened, their lives would be the originating proof of the mission of Jesus. One look at them and the world would awaken.
Speaker 2:In fact, jesus' words had this particular meaning for them. He said as the Father sent me, I send you. They heard the power in those words. Not only did they pick up the mission Jesus had been living, they received the promise of God's blessing and faithfulness. The Father was faithful to Jesus beyond death. The divine would accompany them in their faithful fulfillment of Jesus' mission.
Speaker 2:But the world on the outside was also changed. In rising from the dead, the powers of this world were shifted. If it was the case that the old story of disorder and death had changed, there was a new chapter of hope being written. This was a promise of something new that would affect every person and every structure of society and therefore touch every person in the world. The change was already accomplished by the truth of the empty tomb and the promise of Jesus' presence. The apostles would be helped in their mission by the simplicity of their message, which was the world had changed and everyone in it was part of the change. Be free from the old world, become a part of the new. It was the very definition of a powerful message.
Speaker 2:The most important aspect, though, is that they recognized him in the great commission that he gave them. When it was evident what they were supposed to do and why, they immediately understood his intent. No one but the one who had suffered and died and had been resurrected could have entrusted them to the future of which they were being assured. They knew who spoke to them and who was sending them. Uncertainty about what or who they were seeing evaporated as they came closer and closer to the mission that they received from him. That's the paradox of Easter Sunday, the one we encounter every Sunday. Whatever doubts played on them as they saw Jesus raised up, these faded as soon as they were amid carrying the message of Jesus to the world.
Speaker 2:The presence of Jesus wasn't simply the information about him coming to life again after having been crucified, but that the world had changed, and walking into this new world was to encounter him and his promise all the more strongly. An analog to this would be something like marriage, that is to say, a marriage becomes real not just in the vows the couples make with each other, but by the lives they forge together and the relationship that develops among them. Marriage is a real presence in their lives and in the world by way of truth, by way of the truth they encounter, by living their lives in the truth they have found. The more they live it, the more lively it becomes. That's real presence reinforced by mission.
Speaker 2:We can't recreate what the apostles saw when their friend was among them so suddenly in the upper room. They had known him in the years in which he had walked the roads of Judea and called them into his ministry, but rather than a teacher-student relationship in which they sat and listened to him. They were more like a brotherhood, a family. Together they ate and drank and traveled and suffered the life of the road together. When they saw Jesus, they could draw on years of conversation and a treasury of memories they recognized in him. Knowing he was present among them was a powerful realization, an overwhelming moment for them. The accounts we have don't dissemble. They were joyful at seeing him. We don't have the same response. We can't have the same response Not knowing him. As someone who walked and talked with us, our experience is more distant. It might be more disappointing, but it is the case.
Speaker 2:All our talk about the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist has suffered from this deficit. We often don't know exactly what the presence of Jesus is supposed to be like and, as a consequence, so much of the talk about it becomes cerebral. We talk about the theology of Jesus among us as if engineering professors were talking about thrust vectors or friction coefficients, abstract terms describing what builders and architects have to keep in mind when doing their work. The concerns they describe are as real as the sunrise and the terms they use are ways to make sure they're as understood and accounted for as how many eggs make a dozen, but they don't touch the heart.
Speaker 2:Reading the descriptions of the encounter with Jesus from the scriptures is to find the hearts of the apostles changed. We're challenged to find the change in our own lives, parallel to the conversion in the hearts of the men and women who encountered Jesus truly present among them. And so this is the ultimate invitation to find Jesus present in our own lives. Not only that, but to find him amid the realities we live every day, to banish abstractions. What if we posed the question about the presence of Jesus in a way the apostles would have understood, which is, when and where has Jesus appeared to us? When have we had a moment in the upper room of our gathering in which Jesus has stood among us to command us to go forth?
Speaker 2:At the General Hospital in Vatican City, just across the Tiber from the rest of the city of Rome, there is a sculpture reflecting this question. At the bus stop, across from the entrance to the hospital complex, there is a park bench in which a bronze statue of a man in a coat and hat is seated on the bench. He's nondescript and quite lifelike from a distance. Marking him apart from everyone else are the signs of nails that have pierced his hands, but no one can see them at a distance, only up close. And the message is clear to those who are immersed in the story of the resurrection this every man statue reminds us of Jesus' presence.
Speaker 2:In such a place, we might have encountered the resurrection of Jesus all over the place. Recognizing him is the invitation we are continually reminded of. After all, we celebrate the Eucharist when we gather. The promise amid our gathering is that the real presence of Christ is offered to us. We could take a leap of trust and presume he comes to us, inviting us to a mission of going forth, the same that the disciples received. It is true we might doubt we'd have such a direct and unimpeded encounter as the apostles did, but they did have an encounter and it changed them. We might as well Think back at the times in which the presence of Jesus' resurrection from the dead may have brushed against you. It doesn't have to be a moment of some great emotional release or fabulous experience, although it might be just such a moment.
Speaker 2:Remember when the apostles were telling their friend Thomas about having seen the Lord risen from the dead. They didn't have enough excitement or conviction to convince him. He doubted they were telling the truth. It could be the case. We have encountered Jesus among us in a quiet, gentle way, assuring our hearts and comforting our concerns. It may not have been splashy or powerful, it may not have caused us to quiver or to cry, but it was real. Blessed Stanley Rother had an encounter just like that was real. Blessed Stanley Rother had an encounter just like that. I don't know the day or time, but I am convinced it was an encounter and it was real, and like so many it was when he looked at the sum of his life and realized that he had been living the commandment to go out and to make the world aware of the promises of Christ. At a moment in Guatemala, amid the suffering and uncertainty of his life, he knew he had known the Christ of the resurrection. Jesus was with him at every step. Jesus had been with him in every step from the beginning. It can be the same for us. It is the same with us. After all, jesus is risen and he has shown himself to his disciples. He is risen and he's showing himself to his disciples, to us.
Speaker 2:Segment Faith in Verse. We have a poem today called Will we Wait in Heaven? Will we wait in heaven, anticipate the next moment. Our now the gateway to the now to come, ever possibility, one by one, to be there in some. Or will waiting cease so there will be increase in the picancy of next or later, the future, wrecked by immediacy without hour or date. Wouldn't that ruin the pleasure and gusto we know?
Speaker 2:What is it we say about the Yule season Without the kids? It's lost its reason. All the joy evaporates when we have it all and cease to wait. Will it be that eternity happens immediately? God's goodness will be all in a rush. Benevolence and forgiveness will crush us beneath overwhelming grace, without surcease or pause, in that place where angels laud and the saints all sing, beyond desire for applause or any other thing that's, will we Wait in Heaven? Living Catholic is living the life of the faith. I hope that in the weeks to come, that all of us together can explore more thoroughly and in a more profound way what it means to be living Catholic together. Hope to have you with us then.
Speaker 1:Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more visit okcrorg.