Summary
The Road to Emmaus: A Discussion in Grief
On the first day of the week—the very day of the resurrection—two disciples were walking the seven miles from Jerusalem to a village called Emmaus, talking with each other about everything that had happened Luke 24:13-17. One is named Cleopas; the other remains unnamed. Some have suggested, on the basis of John 19:25, that Cleopas may be the Clopas mentioned there, and that his unnamed companion could be his wife. The Greek spellings differ, however, and the Church has never reached full agreement on the matter. What we do know is that they were followers of Jesus, almost certainly residents of Emmaus who had traveled up to Jerusalem to keep the Passover, as the Lord had commanded in Exodus 23:14-17.
That festival setting is no accident. The Passover was instituted in Exodus 12:21-23, when the blood of a lamb, brushed on the lintel and doorposts, marked God's people and turned away the destroyer. The two on the road had just kept that feast—a feast in which a lamb was sacrificed, and a household was claimed and cleansed through blood. The foreshadowing is unmistakable. The true Passover Lamb had been slain that very week in Jerusalem, and these disciples were walking away from the city still trying to make sense of it.
Their conversation is the unguarded talk of grief. Some people work things through silently and only speak when they have arrived at an answer; others must process out loud, walking and talking until the pieces fit. These two are processors. When the risen Jesus draws near and asks what they are discussing, "they stood still, looking sad" Luke 24:17. The question presses on the wound. Their teacher had been crucified, his body was now missing from the tomb, and nothing in the events of the past three days matched what they had expected. As the discussion on Luke 24 draws out, theirs is the surreal, unbelievable-yet-raw experience of mourning a hope that seems to have died.
And their hope had been misplaced—not in its object, but in its shape. They had rightly placed their hope in Jesus as the Messiah; they had wrongly imagined him as a political deliverer who would throw off Rome and restore Israel to the glory of David and Solomon. When he was nailed to a cross and did not fight back, did not heal himself, did not summon the power they had seen him wield for others, their version of the Messiah died with him. This is a warning to every disciple. We too can place our hope in a Jesus of our own design—a Jesus who exists to do what we want, when we want, where we want, and how we want. That kind of hope, born of a self at the center rather than the Lord at the center, will always be dashed, because it was never aimed at the real Christ to begin with.
The irony in Cleopas's reply is almost unbearable: "Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?" Luke 24:18. The one stranger walking with them is in fact the only one who knows the full weight of those days. Jesus alone knew what it was to sweat blood in Gethsemane, to bear Judas's betrayal, to feel every nail, to absorb the full wrath of the Father against sin. He alone knows what your sin costs, and what its punishment is. And knowing all of it, he went to the cross anyway, because his sacrifice as the true Passover Lamb is the only sacrifice sufficient for sin—and because he knew that by the power of God he would rise, triumphant over sin, the devil, the grave, and death itself.
This is why our hope in Jesus the Messiah is not misplaced when it is placed in the Christ Scripture actually gives us. He is no magical or mythical figure, but the living God-man who reigns at the right hand of the Father, who will come again to judge the living and the dead, and who has promised to gather his people to himself for eternity. The Emmaus road is the picture of how he meets his disciples still: drawing near in our confusion, asking the questions that surface our grief, and teaching us from the Scriptures who he truly is.
Video citations
- "Discussion" 4-16-23 — Everybody is different. Everybody thinks differently. Everybody processes differently. Everybody functions just a little bit differently. There are those who went faced with something that they're…