Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Foreward to Hearts Burning, Eyes Opened: Learning from Jesus on the Road to Emmaus
By Scott Hahn
February 15, 2025
When I was a seminarian at the Pontifical North American College in the Vatican in the late 1990s, Scott Hahn came to Rome to give some lectures at one of the pontifical universities. Several other Americans and I made sure not to miss.
Speaking with him after one of his talks, I asked whether he had tickets to the papal liturgy with Pope John Paul II the following day. He lamented he didn’t but said he would love to go. I happily informed him I had an extra pass and we made plans to attend.
During Mass, as the saintly Polish successor of Saint Peter was about to give a characteristically polyglot homily, I asked Scott and the other English speakers surrounding us whether they would like me to translate. This was something I enjoyed doing at papal Masses, general audiences and other events, putting to good use the language studies I had done in high school, college and seminary as well as during programs and extended stays in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Austria.
Scott, by this point, was a huge hero of mine. During my university years, as I was discerning a call to the priesthood, I would listen to recordings of his talks on the long car rides back and forth from Boston to Washington, DC and many places in between: about his dramatic conversion story, salvation history, the sacraments, the Letter to the Romans, the “Fourth Cup,” and whatever other cassettes I could get my hands on.
I learned from him far more than Biblical interpretation and theological insights. His passion — for God, for Sacred Scripture, for the Church, and for the sacramental encounters by which God seeks to give us life to the full — simply lit me on fire. As a disciple, I wanted to love God like Scott did. If God were indeed calling me to be a priest, I yearned to be able to preach and teach the faith with a heart and tongue of fire like the blowtorch that came from Scott’s life and lips.
So it was an incredible honor to be able to translate that homily for Scott and the others seated with us in the southern transept of the Basilica, close to the relics of the apostles Saints Simon and Jude on whose feast Scott was born in 1957. For me, it was a chance to give something back to someone through whom God had given me so much.
I still remember Scott at the edge of his seat, leaning in, ravenous to hear every softly-spoken syllable — smiling, occasionally whispering “Yes!,” and frequently nodding his head vertically in appreciation of various papal insights.
He thanked me several times later that day for what I did. He honestly hasn’t stopped thanking me since. Without the translation of the non-English parts of the homily, he told me, he would not have understood what the 264th Peter was saying. Just like the returned exiles to Jerusalem needed Ezra to translate the rediscovered scrolls from Hebrew into the language people understood (Neh 8:1-12), just like the Christian people needed Saint Jerome to translate the Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek into the everyday Latin of the people, so all of us occasionally need translators not just for some basic interpersonal communication, but also to hear the message God seeks to impart.
Scott has been an extraordinary “translator” of the meaning of God’s revelation to Catholics for the past three decades.
In this short but profound book, we learn where he learned to exercise that art of translation.
Scott teaches us how to sit at the feet of the same Master at whose feet he sat — or better, how to get up off our feet and journey with that Master — as that Teacher seeks to interpret for us “all the Scriptures” and “everything written about him” (Lk 24:27).
This is a book about how Jesus himself translated and translates the entirety of the Hebrew Bible and the meaning of his own messianic life and saving mission.
It’s a work about Scott’s favorite passage in Sacred Scripture, the lens through which he reads the whole Bible, and what he calls the interpretative key to his own life and ours.
Scott believes that getting us to understand and enter into Jesus’ interaction with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus is the most important lesson he could teach us and the greatest treasure he could bequeath to his kids and grandkids.
That’s why this book — his thirty-second and counting, short, unapologetically simple and intentionally non-scholarly — may prove to be his most important of all.
Everyone who has ever benefitted from Scott’s books, articles, videos, podcasts, audio series, interviews, missions, keynotes, lectures, question-and-answer sessions and personal interactions, should read this book — more than once.
Scott brings us into the drama of how Jesus spent Easter afternoon and early evening. He entered into the conversation of two of his disciples — Cleopas and another anonymous disciple, representing, perhaps, each of us — as they journeyed crestfallen and confused away from Jerusalem and all it symbolized, heading downhill into darkness.
In his risen body, although still bearing the wounds of his crucifixion, Jesus somehow looked and sounded considerably different than two days before, and for that reason they had no idea who their itinerant Interloper was.
They had placed their hopes in Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah whom they anticipated would restore the kingdom of David and evict the Romans, only to have their religious leaders and pagan occupiers conspire to execute him in the most sadistic and humiliating way. The disciples were trying to make some sense out of it only to become more disoriented when hysterical women returning from the tomb — almost certainly hallucinating out of grief, they must have thought — were saying they had seen a vision of angels announcing that Jesus was alive.
For the Wayfarer to ask what they were discussing as they made their seven-mile journey would have been akin to asking Americans a similar question the day after Pearl Harbor or 9/11. They expressed astonishment, as if he were the only pilgrim to Jerusalem oblivious to the events of Jesus’ betrayal, arrest, sham trial, conviction, and execution.
He got their attention by calling them fools — the worst insult a faithful Jew could hurl, since the greatest compliment was to know and live by God’s wisdom — and said that they were “slow of heart,” not slow of mind, to “believe all that the prophets spoke,” especially about how it was “necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and enter into his glory.”
Just like the apostles to whom Jesus had mentioned at least three times that he would be betrayed, crucified and rise on the third day, and later like Saul of Tarsus before his conversion, they had totally missed the main point of all God until then had revealed.
The unnamed Interlocutor made their slow hearts burn by explaining to them how “all the scriptures” showed that Jesus’ crucifixion and death were not a contradiction of the Messianic prophecies, but a confirmation. Their universe was flipped right-side-up. And their hearts were able to recognize the Savior and Messiah anew in faith as he celebrated in their home what he had prayed in the Upper Room three days earlier. As soon as he had become present in their midst under sacramental appearances, he disappeared in his risen physical manifestation.
Having recognized with astonishment their Risen Lord in the Holy Eucharist, they couldn’t keep that truth to themselves. Even though they had already journeyed for more than two hours downhill, even though the sun had long set, they laced up their sandals and ran seven miles uphill in darkness to share the greatest news of all time with the similarly sullen and slow-hearted apostles hiding behind bolted doors in the Upper Room. Soon after their arrival and recounting, the risen Lord himself appeared anew to all of them to help them stop questioning, cease doubting, and start believing.
In this work, Scott masterfully takes us through all of the elements of the Emmaus encounter so that we might recognize that the same risen Traveler who journeyed with the two disciples now journeys with us — especially in the Mass, where the Church recapitulates the ambulatory Liturgy of the Word over which Jesus himself presided on the way to Emmaus.
The Church does so to make our hearts burn and eyes open to behold the Lamb of God, to hear his voice as he says, “This is my Body” and “This is the chalice of my Blood,” and to be ignited to go forth, with God’s blessing, to fulfill the great commission by announcing the Gospel of the Lord.
As the Church in the United States continues the National Eucharistic Revival, meant to reform and transform the Church in a Eucharistic key, Scott reminds us that the journey of the “pilgrim Church on earth,” as the third Eucharistic Prayer calls her, is on an Emmaus walk. That journey is ultimately a Eucharistic procession, as the risen Good Shepherd — really, truly and substantially present in the Most Blessed Sacrament — walks with us, not to Emmaus, not to the earthly Jerusalem, but to the heavenly Jerusalem.
That’s why the U.S. Bishops, as they launched in 2024 the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage — a 65-day journey unprecedented in the history of the Church, which I was privileged to help catalyze — entitled it, “Our National Emmaus Moment.” Indeed, the Church’s whole dynamic life between Pentecost and the Parousia is the continuation of what Jesus started on Easter afternoon.
In Emmaus, Jesus shows us that the Eucharist is essentially the pinnacle of salvation history. It wasn’t enough for the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity to take our humanity. It wasn’t sufficient for him to suffer, die and rise on the third day. He loved us so much that he humbled himself to become our spiritual food, the new and eternal Covenant incarnate, so that we might ever abide in him, remain united in him, and, as his Body and Bride, continue his saving mission in tandem with him to the ends of the earth.
That’s why what Scott Hahn gives us in this book is so important.
He helps us to understand the meaning of Jesus’ whole life and our own, to grasp how Jesus seeks to interact with us, to hear his voice and understand his words and actions.
He provokes us to ask Jesus to “stay with us,” to recognize him in the Holy Eucharist, to love him and adore him, conscious that by means of the Eucharist, God-with-us fulfills his promise to remain with us until the end of time.
And Scott inspires us urgently to share our Eucharistic Emmanuel, inviting all we know to journey with Jesus and us on the Eucharistic procession of earthly life into eternity.
So don’t waste another minute. With hearts burning and eyes opened, turn the page and begin to plumb the depths of what Scott says is the greatest gift he could give us, as he expertly translates for us the life-changing lessons we all learn from Jesus on the Road to Emmaus.
January 25, 2025
Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul
Vigil of Sunday of the Word of God