He Was Known to Them in the Breaking of Bread
The Second Sermon — Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026
Two processions entered Jerusalem that week. One from the west — cavalry, armor, the eagle standards of Rome. Pilate rode in at the head of a military column, the annual show of force to remind the festival crowd of Empire’s power. The visual grammar was unmistakable: war horses, weapons, the empire announcing itself.
The other procession came from the east. A man on a donkey, surrounded by Galilean peasants spreading their cloaks on the road, shouting a word that means save us now. The donkey was a citation — Zechariah’s king who comes humble, who cuts off the chariot and the war-horse and commands peace (Zechariah 9:9). The crowd understood what they were seeing. Two kingdoms entered the same city from opposite directions.
By Friday, it looked like the west had won.
The Bones Are Showing
The cross was not originally a religious symbol. It was a method of execution, reserved by Rome for slaves who rebelled and subjects who claimed sovereignty against Caesar. The Spartacus revolt in 73 BC ended with six thousand crucified slaves lining the Appian Way. In the Jewish War of 66–70 CE, Roman soldiers ran out of wood for crosses. Crucifixion was state terror — public, prolonged, and designed to make sure everyone understood what happened to people who challenged the establishment.
The charge nailed above Jesus’s head was not metaphor. “King of the Jews.” The official Roman record of the crime: rival sovereignty. Sedition. Pilate did what Rome always did. High Priest Caiaphas delivered what the collaborating establishment always delivered. Everything functioned as designed.
James Cone, one of the most important American theologians of the 20th century and the founder of Black liberation theology, asked the question American Christianity still flinches from: how can you sing about the cross on Sunday morning without looking at what hangs from your own trees?
The cross and the lynching tree are the same instrument serving the same function — public execution of the despised, performed as social control, targeting those who stepped out of their assigned place. The theology of the cross that does not see this is the whitewashed tomb: beautiful on the outside but full of bones.
The bones are showing this Easter.
Today is Easter Sunday. Minnesota communities are still processing what happened when two thousand federal agents descended on their neighborhoods in the largest immigration enforcement operation in American history. Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot dead in her car on January 7. Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, was shot ten times on January 24 while filming officers and trying to help people. The videos contradicted the official account before the press conference was over.
The cell phones are the cross in the hands of the occupied. Not the sword. The cross. The thing that makes the violence visible as violence.
This is what the theology of exposure looks like in 2026: six camera angles from six different phones, capturing the same event from six different positions — and not one of them matching the official story. The lie collapses under the weight of its own visibility.
What Rome Does and What Jesus Does
The crucifixion is two things at once. Both must be held together.
It is the full force of state terror — the empire doing what it always does to those who challenge its sovereignty. And it is the culmination of everything Jesus spent his ministry building. Each strand converges at the cross.
The messianic war, fought on the moral battlefield. Jesus spent three years redefining the expected war from military battle to moral confrontation, because the military path gets your neighbors crucified.
The Romans burned Sepphoris, four miles from Nazareth, when Jesus was a child. He grew up in the shadow of what the sword produces. On the cross, the reframing reaches its conclusion. The messiah fights. The messiah defeats the enemy. But not with a sword. The crown is thorns. The throne is a cross. The victory is not the destruction of Rome’s legions but the exposure of Rome’s moral bankruptcy — the revelation that the empire can kill but it cannot be right.
The theology of exposure boiled down to a radical redefinition of the cross.
The woes named the whitewashed tomb.
The temple cleansing confronted the collaboration.
But the cross is the exposure — the moment where the arrangement between religious authority and imperial violence becomes fully visible. Pilate washes his hands. The Sanhedrin delivers the body.
The collaboration that depended on hiddenness is performed in public, in daylight, on a hill outside the city. Everyone can see what the arrangement actually is: the religious establishment handing a prophet to the empire for execution.
Nonviolent resistance, embodied. Turn the other cheek, carry the pack two miles, give your cloak (Matthew 5:39–41) — these are not abstract principles. They describe what Jesus does on the cross. He does not fight back. He does not flee. He does not collaborate. He absorbs the violence and refuses to return it, and in doing so strips the violence of its moral cover.
And the centurion — a Roman soldier, standing at the foot of the cross — says it: “Truly this man was the Son of God” (Mark 15:39). He uses the emperor’s own title for a crucified provincial. The empire’s own witness names the inversion.
But Here Is the Critical Distinction
Theologian Delores Williams’s corrective must be heard, especially this morning: suffering inflicted is not redemptive. Suffering for suffering’s sake is not Christlike. The master’s minister who preaches “take up your cross” to people he is already crucifying is weaponizing the second sermon’s language in service of the first sermon’s purposes.
What is redemptive is not the suffering. It is the love that drives the choice and the exposure that results.
Jesus said it himself. Luke records the moment when Pharisees warned him that Herod wanted to kill him — get out, save yourself. Jesus refused. And then he said this:
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” (Luke 13:34)
This is not a random metaphor. Throughout the Hebrew scriptures, God shelters Israel “under his wings” — the phrase runs through the Psalms (Psalm 17:8, 36:7, 91:4), through Ruth (Ruth 2:12), through Deuteronomy. It is the language of YHWH’s protection. When Jesus uses it, he is placing himself in the role of God sheltering the people. N.T. Wright’s reading of this passage makes the stakes explicit: Jesus is not simply expressing sadness over Jerusalem. He is announcing that he will do what YHWH does — stand between the threat and the people, at the cost of his own body.
And here is what a hen does when the fire comes. She does not fight the fire. She gathers her chicks beneath her and covers them with her body. The fire takes her. The chicks survive.
That is the theology of the cross in a single image. Not the glorification of suffering. The love that places its body between the vulnerable and the violence, knowing what the fire will do.
It is not suffering that redeems. It is love of neighbor. The suffering is what love costs when it confronts empire. The exposure is what love accomplishes.
Alex Pretti was not redeemed by being shot. He was an ICU nurse who went to help people — a hen walking toward the fire. The redemption — if we can use that word — is in what the cameras captured: the lie made visible, the arrangement exposed, the bones showing through the whitewash. What redeems is the love that put him there and the exposure that followed.
The Part the First Sermon Leaves Out
Here is where Easter begins.
Two of Jesus’s followers are walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus, a village about seven miles away (Luke 24:13–35). They are walking away from the catastrophe. Their hope — “we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” — has been extinguished by the crucifixion. The Roman execution method for seditious troublemakers has done its work. The threat is neutralized. The movement’s leader is dead.
This is how empires win. Not by killing the body — any regime can manage that — but by killing the hope. The walk to Emmaus is what defeat looks like. You leave. You go home. You accept that the arrangement is permanent and the sword always wins.
A stranger joins them on the road. He asks what they are discussing, and they stop, their faces downcast. They tell him everything — the prophet mighty in deed and word, the chief priests and leaders who handed him over, the crucifixion, the women who went to the tomb that morning and found it empty. All the facts are present. The meaning is missing.
The stranger walks with them. He opens the scriptures — Moses, the prophets — and reframes everything they thought they knew. The conversation takes the entire seven-mile walk. They still do not recognize him.
When they reach the village, he moves as if to continue down the road. They urge him to stay. “It is almost evening,” they say. “The day is nearly over.” He goes in with them.
At the table, he takes bread. He blesses it. He breaks it. He gives it to them.
Four verbs. The exact gestures of the feeding of the five thousand (Luke 9:16). The exact gestures of the last supper (Luke 22:19).
And in that moment — not during the scriptural interpretation, not during the theological explanation on the road, but at the table, in the breaking of bread — their eyes are opened. They recognize him. And immediately, he vanishes.
They turn to each other. “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road?” They get up that same hour and walk the seven miles back to Jerusalem in the dark — back toward the city they had just fled — to tell the others.
He was known to them in the breaking of bread.
Where the Sacred Moved
This is the most radical claim in the Easter story, and the first sermon almost never makes it.
The risen Jesus is not found in the Jerusalem Temple. He is not found through a doctrinal declaration or a miraculous sign or a creedal confession. He is found at a table where bread is broken and shared (Luke 24:30–31).
This is not incidental. It is the entire argument.
Jesus spent his ministry relocating the sacred. Away from the Temple — the institution that had fused religious authority with economic extraction, where the money changers operated under priestly license and tithes flowed upward to families appointed by Rome. Away from the building. Toward the people.
The temple cleansing was not Jesus purifying the Temple so it could function properly. The fig tree cursed on either side of that action was the interpretive frame — a tree with leaves and no fruit (Mark 11:12–21). The Temple judged. And what replaced it was not a new building or a new priesthood. It was the community gathered around the table.
The last supper founded the new Temple. “This is my body” — the body of the community gathered replaces the body of the sacrificial animal. “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19) — the repeating meal replaces the repeating sacrifice. The bread is the sacred act. The table is the altar. The people gathered are the Temple.
The feeding of the five thousand was the new Temple in operation: five thousand people fed in the wilderness, outside every institutional structure (Luke 9:10–17). No building, no priest, no toll collector. The sacred is wherever the community gathers and shares.
The sheep and the goats defined the new Temple’s liturgy: “I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me” (Matthew 25:35–36). Caring for the poor is not a moral instruction added to worship. It is the worship.
The Emmaus road is the proof. The Temple veil tore at the crucifixion (Mark 15:38). The Temple’s role as mediator of sacred presence is over. And what replaces it is two people on a road, a meal in an unnamed house, bread broken by someone they did not know was the risen Jesus. No priesthood, no building, no purity credentials required to enter. Just the practice of sharing.
The Practice Survives
Here is what empire could not account for.
You can destroy a building. Rome proved that in 70 CE when they burned the Temple to the ground. The Jewish communities that depended on the Temple as the center of religious life were devastated. But the Jesus communities had already relocated the sacred to the gathered people. The destruction of the building confirmed their theology rather than threatening it.
You can kill the leader. Rome proved that on Friday. But by Sunday morning, the practice was already continuing — bread broken in a stranger’s house on the road to Emmaus.
You can surveil the neighborhoods, run license plates, call activists by name and recite their home addresses from a passing SUV. You can deploy two thousand agents into a single metropolitan area. You can arrest a man and detain his five-year-old son. You can shoot a nurse ten times for holding a camera.
But you cannot shut down a distributed temple.
Each house where someone is sheltered. Each meal shared with a stranger. Each person who shows up at a detention center with water and a phone number for a lawyer. Each church that opens its doors as a sanctuary. Each neighbor who patrols for ICE — not with weapons, but with cameras. Each act of mutual aid is a Temple that the empire cannot reach.
That is what Easter means. Not just that the leader came back. That the practice could not be killed.
The Counter-Kingdom Assembles
The early church in Acts organized itself exactly this way. “All the believers were together and had everything in common. They broke bread in their homes and ate together” (Acts 2:44–46). Not a utopian fantasy — a survival strategy. The mutual aid network met real needs under Roman extraction: food, care, community, hospitality, burial. People joined not only because of theological conviction but because the counter-kingdom actually worked. It fed people. It sheltered people. It visited people in prison.
Rome noticed. Within a generation of the crucifixion, Nero was persecuting the movement. Not the behavior of an empire worried about a mystery cult or a private hope for heaven. The behavior of an empire that recognized a counter-kingdom. Rome read it correctly. The shared meals, the refusal to offer sacrifice to the emperor, the proclamation that Jesus — not Caesar — is Lord. These were political acts.
The movement survived the cross because the cross was never the point. The point was the table. The point was the practice. The point was the community that gathers and shares and refuses to sort people by the categories the empire draws.
This Morning
The first sermon will be preached this morning in buildings across the country. Some of those buildings have made their peace with the arrangement. Some of those pulpits will celebrate the resurrection without naming the execution — without saying what the cross actually was, who ordered it, and why. Without saying whose titles were on the line when a Galilean peasant rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and announced a different kingdom.
The second sermon is what you are reading right now.
The risen Jesus was known to them in the breaking of bread. Not in the building. Not in the creed. Not in the institution. In the practice. At the table. In the meal shared with a stranger on the road.
This morning, somewhere in Minneapolis, someone is bringing food to a family that lost a parent to a detention center. Somewhere in Albert Lea, a farmer is patrolling for ICE with binoculars and a camera. Somewhere in Dilley, Texas, a child is waking up behind a fence on Easter morning.
The first sermon will say: He is risen.
The second sermon says: He is risen — and the practice that rises with him looks like feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, visiting the prisoner, and placing your body between the vulnerable and the violence.
Not the sword. The cross. Not the building. The table. Not the institution. The people.
He was known to them in the breaking of bread.
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Your insights brings it all together this morning…Thank you Mark.
I'm so grateful for your clarity and your balm here, Mark. These days, it takes everything I have to persist through Sunday after Sunday of the First Sermon. Christ rises again today.