Luke 24:13-35
13 Now that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem. 14 They were talking with each other about everything that had happened. 15 As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them; 16 but they were kept from recognizing him.
17 He asked them, “What are you discussing together as you walk along?”
They stood still, their faces downcast. 18 One of them, named Cleopas, asked him, “Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?”
19 “What things?” he asked.
“About Jesus of Nazareth,” they replied. “He was a prophet,powerful in word and deed before God and all the people.20 The chief priests and our rulers handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him; 21 but we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel.And what is more, it is the third day since all this took place.22 In addition, some of our women amazed us. They went to the tomb early this morning 23 but didn’t find his body. They came and told us that they had seen a vision of angels, who said he was alive. 24 Then some of our companions went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but they did not see Jesus.”
25 He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! 26 Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?”27 And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.
28 As they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus continued on as if he were going farther. 29 But they urged him strongly, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them.
30 When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. 31 Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. 32 They asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”
33 They got up and returned at once to Jerusalem. There they found the Eleven and those with them, assembled together 34 and saying, “It is true! The Lord has risen and has appeared to Simon.” 35 Then the two told what had happened on the way, and how Jesus was recognized by them when he broke the bread.
Living Hope Has Come to Find You
There’s something uncomfortably familiar about the road to Emmaus. The other scenes on and after Easter Sunday can be harder to relate to. We weren’t at the empty tomb like those women, face to face with angels dressed in lightning. We weren’t in that locked upper room a week later like those fearful followers, wondering if their enemies would burst in to arrest them. By comparison, two disciples walking along through the Judean countryside sounds perfectly ordinary.
What makes that road uncomfortably familiar, though, is the mood that loomed over it. This is an Easter story, but the sun isn’t shining. There were no dazzling visions or murderous conspiracies here. Just a pair of disciples, downcast and confused, trying to go back to some kind of normalcy after their lives had been flipped upside down. It’s not the type of story we would like to put ourselves in, but it’s too normal for us not to imagine it.
It was Easter Sunday, and the men from Emmaus had lost their hope. Their journey should have been ringing with hallelujahs and hymns of triumph, but instead they hung their heads and heard in their hearts only the dire words of a Good Friday dirge. The wild reports of angels and an empty tomb only threw bewilderment into the mix of emotions. To them, Jesus was still dead.
When a curious stranger came along, Cleopas and his unnamed companion laid it all out—shocked that anyone in Jerusalem would be unaware, and pained that they would have to relive the details. And in the middle of their explanation, we hear three heartbreaking words: “We had hoped.”[1]
Those three words are uncomfortably familiar. They’re especially uncomfortable because they should have no business showing up in an Easter account. These men had hoped that [Jesus] was the one who was going to redeem Israel, but instead their glorious Messiah had been crucified, and their hopes had died with him. Jesus had been a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people,[2] but a prison cell and rusty nails had held him as easily as any other man. They had hoped that God would redeem them from their troubled lives, and now they had even more troubles and no hope to go with it.
We had hoped. We know those words. We’ve walked that road of dashed dreams and disappointment. We had hoped that God was the one to deliver us from our financial burdens, but here we walk with growing bills and shrinking savings. We had hoped that God was the one to rescue our marriage or rekindle the spark, but here we walk with divorce papers in our pockets. We had hopedthat God was the one to keep the dreaded diagnoses away, to bring our loved ones home safely, to grant us some kind of relief from the onslaught of bad news and the worse news we fear will come. We had hoped.
It doesn’t even take disaster to lead us down that disappointing road. Today is the third Sunday of Easter. Just two weeks have passed since we heard and celebrated the news of the empty tomb. Unlike on the way to Emmaus, our morning has been filled with hallelujahs and hymns of triumph. But if you’re like me, those aren’t the only songs your heart has sung over the last fourteen days. We had hoped that Easter joy would last a little longer than the car ride home. We had hoped that we would hold onto that excitement from when we first heard the good news and saw God’s hand at work in our lives. We had hoped that life as a Christian would always be peaceful and invigorating and a break from the monotony of life that so often disappoints us. But Sunday after Sunday, Easter after Easter, our hearts grow numb waiting for God to lift us up in a way that actually meets our expectations.
Those three tragic words, “We had hoped,” reflect a problem we share with Cleopas and his friend. We hope for all the wrong things. The disciples had hoped for a Messiah who would bring glory to Israel, and the humiliating execution they had witnessed frankly didn’t fit into that framework. They were so convinced of that that they couldn’t possibly believe the eyewitness reports from that morning. We could almost shout at them through the pages, “Don’t you see?! Your hope isn’t dead and gone at all, he’s right there! The tomb is empty!” But instead, feeling hopeless, they set out from Jerusalem on a road that would take them far away from the one thing that could restore their hope.
And isn’t that exactly what we do? I’m ashamed to admit that when things go wrong and life gets busy, often one of the first things I give up is time spent in my Bible and in prayer. At a time when Jesus has everything I need to save me from whatever mess I falsely thought could never happen, I run in the opposite direction. I even think it’s up to me to put things back together. And then I wonder why it’s so hard to find hope.
Have you been there? When your future looks like it’s falling apart, do you seek guidance from God or just from Google? When your schedule gets so tight you’re suffocating, how often do you look to Sunday mornings to free up an hour or two of extra breathing room?
If it were up to us, we would just keep walking down that road of disappointment, looking for hope everywhere except the one place it can be found.
That’s the trajectory of those two disciples when we find them on Easter afternoon. Hopeless, because they left their hope behind. And then hope in human flesh came running after them.
Isn’t that amazing? Jesus could have spent that day visiting kings and emperors, making them pledge fealty to him as the rightful ruler of the universe. The disciples certainly would have expected something like that from their Messiah. Or Jesus could have stayed in heaven, presiding over a royal feast while legions of angels went out to herald his victory over death. Yet here he is, taking a stroll with two former followers who couldn’t even recognize him. You could almost imagine Jesus pulling his sleeves down to cover the nail marks in his hands as he innocently—yet genuinely—asks them to share what weighed so heavily on their hearts.
Whether or not you realize it, the hope you’ve been missing has come to find you. You may be distracted by the outcomes you’re hoping for and the disappointments you never expected, but he still walks beside you. And he listens. And he cares. Who are we to claim he let us down or didn’t follow the plan as we saw it? Yet still he walks with us as we pour out all our worries and fears, all the doubts we have about the future and foolish expectations that he never promised we could expect. He listens to our list of woes: the job hunt, the strained relationships, the sleepless nights, the endless tasks, the health scares, the crises of faith—everything we had hoped would never come to us, and everything we would focus on removing if we could call the shots. Everything that makes us wonder how Easter can give us any real hope if it doesn’t take those problems away.
As we lay out our unfulfilled hopes, Jesus isn’t driven away. If anything, he comes closer—the Psalms say The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.[3] He seeks you out and walks with you in your hardships and grief.
And then he speaks. Often he starts, as with the two men of Emmaus, with a rebuke—something to snap us out of our spiraling thoughts and self-centred solutions. But he follows it with tender words of hope and life. “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?”[4]
Jesus responds to our three-word lament, “We had hoped,” with his own three words that transform our understanding: “It was necessary.” From the disciples’ perspective, a dead rabbi couldn’t offer much in the way of hope. But this was part of a much bigger plan, one that had been revealed bit by bit over millennia. And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.[5]
Can you imagine what that sermon would have been like? Walking through the pages of Scripture, Jesus pointing out passages like cameos in a movie all about him. There he is in the Garden, the seed of the woman whose heel would be struck as he crushed the serpent’s head.[6] There’s the first Passover, the feast they had just celebrated, where the blood of the lamb brought salvation to God’s people. There he is, the King crying out in Psalm 22, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”[7] There he is, the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53, who was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.[8]
It was necessary. God has no obligation to anything or anyone—he doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to. Yet one thing he makes absolutely necessary for himself to do: suffer. If all Jesus wanted to do was redeem us from our daily troubles, big or small, he could have whisked them away without ever leaving heaven. But God had bigger plans than we had ever dared to hope for. He wanted to redeem us from the penalty of sin that put us on the road to hell. He wanted us to enter his glory ourselves and share eternity with him. But for that to happen, our sins made it necessary for someone to suffer. Not just anyone; it was necessary for the Messiah to suffer—to die. All the Scriptures place the hopes of humanity on the Son of God—dying.
But here on the road to Emmaus, hope is not dead. It’s a living and breathing hope, a flesh-and-blood hope, a having-been-crucified-but-now-alive-forever kind of hope. It’s the hope that walks beside us through our sufferings and leads us on the road to glory.
As Cleopas and his companion reflected on this masterclass later, they said, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”[9] At first we might think, “Well, sure—I would react that way too if I had Jesus himself teaching me.” But there’s a reason Jesus didn’t simply skip the lecture and roll up his sleeves, like Thomas so pragmatically demanded. If that had happened, they would have had nothing to hold onto the moment Jesus disappeared again. Instead of leaving them with just the testimony of their own two eyes, Jesus pointed them to the sure source of hope that would never be taken from them—the same source he gives to us: his written Word.
What do you think Jesus would say to you on a twelve-kilometer walk? Look no further than the book he wrote for you. Jesus comes to you hiding in plain sight to bring you comfort, certainty, and living hope at every step of your journey. The same pages that foretold both his suffering and his glory promise you that there is a crown awaiting you at the end of your suffering, too. That’s the ultimate comfort that only Easter can give: because he lives, we will live.
When Jesus first joined the travellers on the road to Emmaus, the three words most on their hearts were “We had hoped.” But by the time they reached their destination, three very different words had taken their place: “Stay with us.”[10] The Holy Spirit was powerfully at work in them, and they couldn’t get enough of this hope—it was like warm sunlight breaking through the clouds to rekindle their ashen hearts. Maybe you can remember specific moments like that where you’ve felt such a deep gratitude for the plan of salvation that God reveals in his Word.
That’s not to say that we’ll always feel that way. We still have a tendency to run in the opposite direction of the sole source of true hope. Other times we go straight to the Word, and we still struggle to feel like Jesus is really walking beside us. We can still be foolish, slow-to-believe sinners who need to be reminded of what God has and hasn’t promised. But thankfully, the hope we have doesn’t leave us to wander alone, even when we fail to recognize it. Jesus, our living hope, comes chasing after us. He even offers us food and drink in a holy meal that heals our fractured hearts through the sure promise of forgiveness.
As we cling to our living hope, we pray, “Lord, stay with us”—not because he might leave us, but so that he would hold us close to him and the lifegiving words he has written for us. The closing hymn today is inspired in part by this very prayer: Abide with Me. I invite you all to join me in reading two of those verses now.
Abide with me; fast falls the eventide. The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide. When other helpers fail and comforts flee, Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me.
I need thy presence ev’ry passing hour. What but thy grace can foil the tempter’s pow’r? Who like thyself my guide and stay can be? Through cloud and sunshine, oh, abide with me!
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed. Alleluia. Amen.
[1] Luke 24:21
[2] Luke 24:19
[3] Psalm 34:18
[4] Luke 24:25-26
[5] Luke 24:27
[6] Genesis 3:15
[7] Psalm 22:1
[8] Isaiah 53:5
[9] Luke 24:32
[10] Luke 24:29