Easter 3 2026

Luke 24.13-35

Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

We have, these Sundays in Eastertide, been considering what it means to see Jesus and to touch his wounds. And we are this morning confronted with yet another facet of our interactions with the risen Christ. This time, as we shall see, our own situation is much closer to that of the disciples, them on the road to Emmaus. 

Like Mary Magdalen and Thomas, these disciples do not yet understand that their Lord is risen; Thomas because he had not yet seen him; Mary because she had seen but not understood, though she caught on as soon as he spoke her name. In comparison, these disciples seem rather thick. They have talked with him at length, and walked with him too, but they were none the wiser. 

And then, they sit down at table to share a meal with him. They invite him in; but it is he who blesses and breaks the bread, and hands it to them; whereupon, they saw him no longer, and yet believed. This is our station too, we who are invited to believe without seeing, to heck with glib empiricists. And we too have been given the gift of Christ’s own presence at the breaking of bread, and sharing thereof. 

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There is a phenomenon known as “open communion”, which sounds rather lovely. It admits several degrees. In the most broadly accepted version, it really is quite common, and is just that thing of allowing Christians of any denomination to receive Holy Communion. To nail my colours to the mast, this does seem very sensible a policy, the Eucharist being—as Father Jack Hackett says in Father Ted, and I won’t attempt the accent—“an ecumenical matter”. In the most generous, and also most controversial version, anyone—even non-Christians—are invited to the Lord’s Table to sup with and, indeed, upon him. 

The Church of England’s history with all this is, as you might expect, complicated. For most of the pre-Reformation history of the Church, it was baptism that was sacramentally linked to communion, not confirmation. Still, there were some who argued that the Eucharist was really for those of a more mature faith than that, for example, children baptised as infants have; and confirmation, requiring as it does some theological preparation, is as good a threshold as any. During the Reformation, although confirmation was dropped as a sacrament of the Church, Cranmer insisted—in his Prayer Book of 1549—that confirmation was formally necessary before admission to communion. 

This strict requirement had softened by our 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which asserts instead that all who are “ready and desirous” to be confirmed may be admitted to Communion. In effect, this retains Cranmer’s intention, but recognises that people cannot always be confirmed in a timely manner: after all, it has to be done by a bishop, and they aren’t always popping by to confirm folks. 

Much more recently, in 1972, the Church passed a measure to open things up a bit more. The Canons of the Church of England now say, for example, that any baptised person of good standing from another Christian denomination may also receive communion; this includes especially denominations that don’t practice confirmation at all. And even more recently still, in 2006, the Church began releasing guidance about preparing children in the Church of England to receive communion, years before they would normally be confirmed. This guidance still stipulates that they be taught about the sacrament; Cranmer would approve. 

This business of children receiving communion is one of the ways in which Anglicans have become more like Roman Catholics over time, who since the middle ages have admitted children to communion, though until the 20th century, this was mainly kids in early adolescence. In 1910, Pope Pius X decided that age 7 was the minimum, and that is now when many Catholic children have their “first communion”. 

In the Christian East, children of all ages are invited to the altar, so long as they are baptised and chrismated, chrismation being their equivalent of confirmation, though it usually occurs at the same time as baptism, even for infants. [You may have seen that my own children receive communion, and have done so long before they turned 7. Mildly heterodox influences of Eastern Orthodoxy, I’m afraid…Don’t tell the bishop.]

But all this still, at least, restricts holy communion to the baptised, and ideally to the baptised who can be taught something about what it means to receive the sacrament. It is not “open communion” in its fullest sense. I’m sure that some Anglicans do practice the fuller version, and I can understand why. It is, for them, and not unreasonably, a sign of God’s hospitality. And, after all, even Judas was at the Last Supper; so why not one’s agnostic best friend who’s visiting for the weekend? Especially if, as this story this morning tells us, it is in the breaking of bread that Jesus is known 

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And yet, that’s not what we do here. Printed in our booklets and announced at every Mass, is the idea that all the baptised are invited to come to receive of Christ’s Body and Blood, and everyone else is welcome to a blessing. It is no small thing, a blessing; and it is, in fact, one of the most cherished aspects of what I am given the responsibility to do, to pronounce blessing upon people, corporately and individually. But there is no blessing that I can utter that holds a candle to the offering to you of Christ’s own offering of himself. 

Our commitment to this restriction—let’s not mince words, it is a restriction—[our commitment to it], which is the Christian Church’s historic commitment too, is not, I submit to you, a matter of meanness. It is, rather, a recognition of what the Eucharist is, as distinct, for example, from Baptism, which is totally open to all. The Eucharist is, so goes one metaphor, food for the journey, nourishment for the Christian life, which begins at baptism; and so it makes no sense to admit the unbaptised to communion. That would be like using the dining room as the entrance to the house. 

But it is, also an expression of another, perfectly reasonable, way to read this morning’s gospel, which is in line with another saying of Jesus, in Matthew’s Gospel, that when two or three are gathered in Jesus’s name, he is in their midst. In other words, the presence of Christ in the Eucharist is not merely a vertical affair, a unilateral motion from above. There is also a horizontal component. Christ appears to us when we break bread together. This is also why Mass cannot really be celebrated by the priest alone. The presence of the disciples to one another is essential to the story; Jesus does not share a meal with just one disciple. 

And so, the Eucharist is not only a meal for the baptised, but also of the baptised, a manifestation of what it means to be baptised, which is to be the people who are “in Christ”, and so are able to offer Christ’s own offering of himself to one another. It is crucial to remember that the celebration of the sacrament is something that we all, the baptised, do together: it is not, for example, the act of the priest. For this reason, we avoid describing the priest as the “celebrant” in liturgical manuals, preferring instead the slightly awkward but more accurate language of “president”, the one who presides over the celebration that is the work of the whole people of God. Perhaps particularly important to remember when the incumbency is vacant. You are the people of God, whose sacramental celebrations, at which priests are graciously invited to preside, invoke Christ’s presence in your midst, and in the midst of these villages.