· Howard Young · blog · 3 min read
Breaking Bread at Emmaus: How a MASH Episode Brought Luke 24 to Life
When a wounded soldier said 'I smell bread,' it echoed the Road to Emmaus — and everything Lutherans believe about Christ's presence in Holy Communion.
A dying soldier on M*A*S*H was asked what he could see, what he could hear. He answered: “I smell bread.”
That line opened Pastor Bob’s sermon last Sunday on Luke 24:13-35 — the Road to Emmaus — and it stayed with me long after the service ended.
The Road They Walked
Two disciples are walking away from Jerusalem, devastated. A stranger falls into step beside them and begins to explain the scriptures. They listen. They are moved. But they do not recognize him.
It is not until they invite the stranger in for supper — not until he takes the bread, blesses it, and breaks it — that their eyes are opened. In that moment, they knew who he was. And just as suddenly, he was gone.
The breaking of bread at Emmaus is not incidental to the story. It is the moment of recognition.
The MASH Connection
Pastor Bob opened with a specific episode of M*A*S*H in which Major Charles Emerson Winchester III, shaken after a near-death experience, sits with a mortally wounded soldier. He asks what the soldier can sense in those final moments. The answer isn’t what you might expect — no great vision, no sound of trumpets. Just the smell of bread.
Something about that detail cuts through. For me it also pulled up a memory I hadn’t touched in thirty years: camping with my son and the Boy Scouts at Malibu Canyon State Park in California — the same hills where the M*A*S*H opening scene was filmed. Memory and meaning arrived at the same time, the way they sometimes do in a good sermon.
Why Lutherans Break Bread the Way We Do
This is precisely why the breaking of bread in Holy Communion matters so deeply in the Lutheran tradition. We believe Christ is truly present — body and blood — in, with, and under the bread and wine. Not symbolically. Present.
The disciples on the road to Emmaus didn’t recognize Jesus through argument or explanation. They recognized him in the breaking of bread. That recognition is available to us every time we come to the table.
My wife Ann bakes the communion bread on Saturday mornings. I’m often upstairs when she does, and the aroma drifts up through the house. It is one of the simplest and most sacred things I know — the smell of bread rising, the way it has always risen, toward heaven.
Join us for worship Sundays at 10:00 AM at Triumphant Cross Lutheran Church in Dothan, AL. Holy Communion is served regularly.
