A Glimpse of Forgiveness
When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight.
Luke 24:13-35
April 10, 2026, Words By: Joel Aguilar, Image By: Street Psalms
Made Flesh
A couple of years ago, I taught a class on contextual Bible reading to a group of pastors in Ixcan, in the northern jungle of Guatemala close to the border with Mexico. This region of the country experienced extreme brutality during the Guatemalan armed conflict.
For one of our lunch breaks during the class, a group of us went out to a local restaurant. The hostess walked us to our table and gave us some menus. After we ordered our food and drinks, we began making small talk. As our food arrived, one of the leaders of the group invited one of the pastors to share a little bit about his personal story.
At first, Marcos (I have changed his name to preserve his anonymity) hesitated to share. After taking a big sigh, he proceeded to tell the story of how he saw his whole village being massacred by the army, and how he ran to the mountains to hide. He hid with his sister in the jungle for days without food or water.
Marcos shared some of the most horrific details of the Guatemalan armed conflict that I’ve ever heard. We ate our meal very slowly. It was a hard meal to eat. I couldn’t swallow my food comfortably through the narration of Marcos’s story.
My experience that day reminds me of two other meals. One is the night that Jesus was betrayed. The other is from this week’s lectionary text, when Jesus appeared as a stranger to his disciples with forgiveness and love at the end of the road to Emmaus. In Luke 24, the stranger takes forgiveness to a whole new level. He sits at a table and serves those who abandoned him, betrayed him, and joined the crowd to crucify him. “When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them.” When he does that, the disciples recognize that it is Jesus sharing a meal with them – and then Jesus disappears right in front of them.
As I chewed a bit of tortillas con carne, Marcos grabbed the pitcher from our table. He took my glass and poured a generous amount – it was all there was left to drink. That’s when I realized that I was being forgiven. At our table, we were all being forgiven by Marcos. He had taken the risk to share his story and pour all of it out to total strangers. He had poured the waters of his brokenness with generosity for all of us. We were forgiven not because we had participated directly in the war. Forgiveness happened because the history of our violence had been entrusted to us through the lips of a survivor with a will to forgive.
Marcos became Jesus in front of us. And when we realized it, somebody asked for the check and our meal came to an end. Marcos got up, said goodbye, and left. It felt like he just disappeared. Perhaps, I didn’t notice him leaving because I was too shocked by his account.
When I recall this story, I wonder if I was in the very presence of Jesus, “were not our hearts burning when within us while Marcos was talking to us during that lunch, while he was opening the living scripture of his story and our history of violence?” I wish I would have realized it was Jesus right there and then. It has taken me a couple of years to process this experience and realize that in Marcos, I was in the presence of the divine. I had experienced a glimpse of forgiveness.
Dwelling Among Us
When have you experienced Jesus’ forgiveness in your life?
How have you encountered Jesus in the eyes of those who have experienced violence?
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