The Breaking of the Bread: A Final Sermon for Berkeley Divinity School

Across the widely divergent accounts of the resurrection of Jesus, one curiously persistent theme is that of misrecognition. In very different stories presented by authors whose theological concerns are not completely aligned, people fail to recognize Jesus.

Perhaps most famously, Mary's encounter with Jesus in the garden has her taking him for one of the staff before his tender speech connects them and reveals him. Then, in the appendix to John's Gospel, in chapter 21, Jesus stands at the lakeside and speaks to the men out in the boat; they too do not recognize him until he gives them good fishing advice - certainly something of almost divine importance under any circumstances - before they come to eat his bread and fish.

But this scene in Luke is the most startling, because the two who walk with Jesus do not manage to recognize him even through the time spent on the journey (apologies, Camino pilgrims), or in the extensive and presumably authoritative Bible study that they receive from him (sorry, students and professors). Only when they sit together to eat, and he repeats actions performed on Galilean hillsides with the poor, and in the upper room with the uncertain disciples, do they know who he is. The report that they later give the others is that he was known to them "in the breaking of the bread".

This terminology continues into Luke's second volume, The Acts of the Apostles, and there is clearly not merely a way of referring to meals in general, but a technical term for that Christian community meal that we call the Eucharist. Luke's suggestion is then that there is a Eucharistic presence of Jesus in the ongoing life of the community. The problem of recognizing Jesus becomes the problem - but let us rather say the promise - of recognizing who and what is revealed in the bread and its breaking.

The Church has also acknowledged Jesus' eucharistic presence, perhaps we might say a little too clearly. In the Western Church, we know the idea of transubstantiation, which names the reality - and, I think, the permanence or absolute character - of the divine gift in which we glimpse the risen Lord here, but accepting that doctrine does not obviate the risk of missing how and why the gift is given. 

The Reformers’ critique of the reification of Jesus' presence in the bread which we break and the cup of blessing which we bless is not trivial. We can make a fetish of eucharistic presence, when Luke would suggest that glimpsing, recognizing Jesus in the breaking - not, interestingly, in the bread itself - is not something that can be grasped, not least since he disappears.

Yet the alternative suggestion - or at least the Protestant version now prevalent, that this is a kind of enacted idea, a representative memorial of something done for us once in the past - fails to compel. I defer to Flannery O’Connor’s response to Mary McCarthy's dinner party observation that the Eucharist is "a pretty good" symbol: “if it’s a symbol," O'Connor responded, "to hell with it." I name these competing inadequacies, not to plot the course of some smug Anglican via media, so much as to warn that we may be prone to either of both of these problematic extremes.

The question is whether, in the Eucharist as well as in the resurrection, we are doing something, talking about something related to God that reflects and perhaps changes how we think, or whether in fact it is God who is doing something related to us, that changes how and who we are.

The issue raised in the resurrection stories themselves is more important for eucharistic theology than we tend to assume; for those do not quibble about his presence, but suggest that he can be present but not recognized. That is, the real problem of eucharistic presence might not be whether he is here, but whether we would know him if he were.

What these stories also tell us however is not that - or not just that - a man has risen from death, but that a new world has begun; a world, that is, in which such things as this happen. The two men at Emmaus, the one woman in the Jerusalem Garden, the seven Galileans who had gone back to fishing and end up at breakfast with him, don't need to meet him - they already have done - but they all need to be shown that the world has changed in order to recognize him.

And when we celebrate the Eucharist what we are doing, most essentially, is demonstrating, enacting, celebrating that new world in which such things do happen in defiance of death and all its power. Here we are gathering in, speaking in, eating and drinking in, a different reality; one in which all are fed equally regardless of power and status, in which the earth gives its fruit without being devastated, in which labor brings bread to the table without exploitation, in which we are one, not just with those whom we like or with whom we agree, but with all those with whom we share in the body of the risen one. 

This reality is what might otherwise be called heaven, but it is not (just) another place; it is in this one, rightly perceived. So in the middle of the eucharistic prayer we break into song, claiming not just that we can sing like angels, but that we do sing with angels; we imply that, if we stopped to pay attention, we could discern the air shimmering with the movement in the ether caused by the wings of the cherubim.

When we break the bread then, we assert the reality of this other world, and eating and drinking we take into ourselves bread and wine given over to the power of God in that new world. The bread itself we speak of as the body of Christ, but breaking it we also find it becomes more like bread than before, not less. It becomes the bread of that new world; and eating and drinking, we become more ourselves than we were before, because we glimpse our risen transformed life, which is also the life of his risen body.

The eucharist is then a technology of recognition (don't try that one in a parochial sermon); not merely a technique or an object as though we could either objectify or instrumentalize it, but a means whereby we may encounter him even yet.

What of him though? Even though Luke will recount his departure, he will also recount the sending of the Spirit which animates the community as his body. So he will yet be found in a garden calling our names, teaching us on the roads we travel after this, on the beach telling to throw the nets on the other side, and in the breaking of the bread.  And in all in all the tasks we must go out now to undertake, in the struggles we encounter no less than the triumphs, he will be present and we will in time learn to recognize him, and know who he truly is, just as he knows who we really are.

Given at the Community Eucharist, Marquand Chapel, Yale Divinity School, April 22 2026.