Slow to Believe

English Homily- Third Sunday of Elijah- Fr. Peter Patros The two disciples walking to Emmaus were not just sad — they were walking away, in the wrong direction, with hope in the past tense. They had expected a king on a throne and got a man on a cross, and they could not see how those two things fit together. Jesus does not abandon them for going the wrong way. He walks the entire road with them, calls them foolish not for lack of knowledge but for not yet putting the pieces together, and patient with their slow hearts. The cross did not remove suffering — it put the resurrection on the other side of it, giving suffering a meaning it never had before. And it is only at the breaking of the bread that their eyes open. The same Jesus who walked beside crushed hope on the road to Emmaus is the one who breaks bread on this altar — and he is capable of turning a heart from slow and foolish to burning.