3rd Sunday of Easter – 19 April 2026
There is something slightly uncomfortable in admitting it, but if we are honest, the disciples on the road to Emmaus in today’s Gospel are not simply walking away from Jerusalem. They are walking away from hope. They are not merely sad; they are disoriented. Their expectations have collapsed. And so they do what we instinctively do in such moments: they talk.
Yet, the conversation they enjoy is not the curated, self-controlled exchange of the digital age. It is not efficient, nor is it optimised. It is searching, confused, even contradictory. “They were talking with each other about all that had happened.” Their conversation is an act of grappling with reality. It is precisely this kind of human engagement that our age is in danger of losing.
We live at a moment in history in which the centre of gravity has shifted decisively inward. Feelings now function as a primary lens through which reality is interpreted. This would have been largely unintelligible in earlier centuries, where action, duty, and the external world defined meaning. The emergence of the novel, and later the psychological self, marked that shift. However, the smartphone has intensified it beyond anything previously imaginable.
When the iPhone appeared in 2007, it did not simply give us a new tool; it reconfigured the conditions under which our consciousness develops. As Jonathan Haidt argues in The Anxious Generation, the “Great Rewiring of Childhood” has profoundly altered how young people encounter themselves and others. We have created a world in which interiority is amplified, but resilience and relational depth are attenuated. We are constantly expressing ourselves, yet less capable of truly encountering another. We communicate more but converse less.
And that is precisely where the Emmaus story becomes so strikingly contemporary. Because what happens on that road is not the delivery of information. The risen Christ does not appear as a solution to a problem. He appears as a fellow traveller who enters conversation. “What are you discussing as you walk along?” It is an almost disarming question. The Lord of the Resurrection does not impose meaning; he elicits it. This is the first movement of genuine conversation: the willingness to ask, and to listen. The disciples respond with a mixture of astonishment and incomprehension. “Are you the only stranger . . . ?” Already, we see the tension. The disciples assume they understand the situation; in fact, they do not. And yet Jesus allows their misunderstanding to be spoken. He permits their narrative to unfold, even though it is incomplete, even distorted.
How different this is from our own habits. We tend to curate our speech, to present conclusions rather than to expose confusion. We seek affirmation rather than transformation. But conversation, in its deepest sense, is not about reinforcing the self. Rather it is about risking the self. Indeed, genuine conversation leads to conversion. The Canadian Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan understood conversion as a widening of horizons. That widening happens, not in isolation, but precisely in the encounter with what is other than myself. In conversation, I am drawn beyond the limits of my own assumptions. I am invited—sometimes gently, sometimes forcefully—into a larger vision of reality.
This is exactly what unfolds on the road. Jesus begins to reinterpret their story. “Was it not necessary ?” He does not dismiss their experience; he reframes it. He leads them, step by step, into a new understanding. And significantly, this happens within the conversation, not outside it. The truth emerges through the exchange itself. “Did not our hearts burn within us while he was talking to us on the road?” In other words, the transformation is not merely intellectual; it is existential. Something happens within them as they remain in dialogue. Their despair begins to open into possibility. Their confusion becomes the very space in which revelation occurs.
So, too, for us. If we lose the art of conversation, we do not simply lose a social skill, we lose a pathway to truth, and ultimately, a pathway to God. Because the Risen Christ still comes to us as the Stranger on the road. Not always in clarity, not always in certainty, but often precisely in the ambiguity of our questions, in the unresolved tensions of our lives, in the slow and sometimes frustrating process of trying to understand. He meets us ther, not by bypassing the conversation, but by entering it.
This has implications not only for personal discipleship, but for the very fabric of our society. A culture that cannot converse cannot convert. It becomes enclosed within itself, trapped within its own assumptions, increasingly fragmented and isolated. Hence we are faced with the extraordinary outcome of research into loneliness that the loneliest group of people in Australian society today are young men aged 18-24 years of age.
The Emmaus story offers a quiet but radical alternative. It suggests that the way forward is not first through better information, or more efficient communication, but through deeper presence, through walking together, through allowing time for the slow unfolding of meaning, hrough asking questions whose answers are not immediately apparent. “Stay with us,” the disciples say. That, perhaps, is the decisive moment. Conversation opens into hospitality. Dialogue becomes communion. And it is there, in the breaking of the bread, that their eyes are opened.
We might say: conversation leads to conversion, and conversion leads to communion. For us, then, the invitation is clear, though not easy. To resist the temptation to retreat into the safety of our own curated worlds. To risk the vulnerability of real conversation. To allow our certainties to be questioned, our horizons to be widened. To remain faithful to the journey, even when clarity is slow in coming. For it is precisely thee on the road, in the conversation, in the searching that Christ draws near. And if we have the courage to remain in that space, then we too may come to know what the disciples discovered: that even in our confusion, even in our uncertainty, something is happening within us.
Our hearts begin, quietly but unmistakably, to burn.
