On The Road To Emmaus
ON THE ROAD TO EMMAUS
LUKE 24:13-24
The disciples’ world fell apart when Jesus died. They had forgotten his words, and they had failed to realize it had to happen this way.
This exquisitely told story is peculiar to Luke. Two Christian men (they were not apostles) lived at Emmaus, perhaps the modern Kalonich, to the north-west of Jerusalem. They were walking home in animated discussion, with the light of the sloping sun in their eyes, when a stranger joined them. Here is a simple translation of the verses which follow, choosing a reading for the end of 24:17 found in the Codex Sinaiticus and one other ancient and important manuscript. “He said to them: ‘What words are these that you are tossing back and forth as you walk along?’ They stopped and looked sadly at him. And one of them named Cleopas replied: ‘Do you live alone in Jerusalem, seeing you do not know what happened there in these last days?’ He said to them: ‘What sort of things?’ They said to him: ‘Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, a man who spoke the words of God, a man of power in word and deed before God and all the people, and how the high priests and our rulers handed him over to be condemned to death, and crucified him. And we were hoping that it might have been he who was going to redeem Israel …’”
The word for “redeem” is allied to that of 1:68. The whole reply rings with the hopelessness of the disciples after the crushing events of the week’s ending. Set this broken spirit over against the triumph and the jubilation of the days which followed. Only some cataclysmic event could have so transformed a shattered group of men. One and all must have been utterly convinced about the central fact of their faith. How pathetic before such certainty seems the speculation of the philosophic school of post-Christian theologians. “It does not matter,” wrote one of them in 1964, “whether the empty tomb created the faith of the disciples, or whether the faith of the disciples created the empty tomb.” The experience on the Emmaus road was no illusion. It was no group of deluded enthusiasts who were thus transformed. Of course it matters. If the tomb was not indeed vacated by a risen Christ, there is no Christian faith—and theologians who deny the fact might more appropriately seek less compromising employment.
Note the clear and specific report of events in 24:22-24. These were not gullible men. They admit only what their eyes have seen. Their animated discussion when the stranger joined them was probably about the interpretation of those observed facts.