He said to them, “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?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself. As they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus continued on as if he were going farther. 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.
When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. 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?”
They got up and returned at once to Jerusalem. There they found the Eleven and those with them, assembled together and saying, “It is true! The Lord has risen and has appeared to Simon.” Then the two told what had happened on the way, and how Jesus was recognized by them when he broke the bread. Luke 24:25-35
As we continue to explore Luke’s account of the two men on the road to Emmaus, we have more to learn when we travel that same road.
The Emmaus road deepens our understanding of God’s truth.
As the two men poured out their hearts to this supposed stranger, Jesus just listened. And then after giving them a full opportunity to share their thoughts, He began to respond. On the surface His opening comments in verse 25 seem rather harsh. But the words translated “foolish” or “slow of heart” simply mean that they just weren’t getting the message.
And with that, Jesus began to explain some important biblical truth as He walked them through the Old Testament story from Moses to the prophets. Of course, much of this was old news to them. They had heard these stories their whole lives. But sadly, they didn’t fully understand them. And the lack of understanding was contributing to their struggle.
You see, a great deal of their problem centered around their distorted view of the role of the Messiah. In the first century Jewish mind, the Messiah would be a great military leader who would overthrow the Romans and restore the nation to the status it once held when David was king. Therefore, no true Messiah would allow himself to be killed much less by death on a cross.
But as Jesus pointed out to them in verse 26, that’s exactly what the Old Testament message had been saying all along – that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer these things. And He was right. That was the message, but their own limited understanding blocked their ability to perceive it.
C.S. Lewis discovered this very same thing as he worked through his own Emmaus road experience in the loss of his beloved wife to cancer. At one point he said that in desperation he would cry out to God, and the response felt like a door slammed in his face with God locking the doors of heaven from the inside leaving him in silence. But later he was able to come to a deeper and more informed understanding.
Here’s what he wrote: Was it my own frantic need that slammed [the door] in my face? The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it: you are like the drowning man who can’t be helped, because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.
Can you relate with that? Most of us who’ve walked on the Emmaus road can. It’s not that we don’t have any understanding of God’s truth, it’s just that we have a distorted perhaps shallow understanding. Maybe we thought that if we just lived the right way, went to church, and tried to honor God that we would avoid the pain that other people go through. Or perhaps we convinced ourselves that if we had enough faith or prayed with enough conviction that God would simply step into our circumstances and change them.
But it didn’t happen that way. Despite all the prayers, verses claimed, and spiritual efforts we could muster, we still found ourselves like these two guys – full of profound sadness that life has turned out the way it has. That can be a devastating discovery as it was for them.
But once we’ve finished thrashing about trying to make our circumstances fit into our limited theological box, God can come to us with a deeper understanding of the truth – a deeper understanding that we desperately need and one that can open the door to the final thing I want to share with you in this post.
The Emmaus road leads us to new and transforming encounters with Christ.
As I said earlier, the two men in the story were followers of Jesus. They were a part of the early band of believers that would soon make up the nucleus of the New Testament church. So they knew Christ. And what they knew had made a huge impact on them.
But on the road to Emmaus they came to experience Him in ways they had never experienced Him before. Luke tells us that they shared a meal with Jesus that night, and as He broke the bread before them, they finally recognized that it was Him.
As a result, the scripture says that at that very hour they returned to Jerusalem, found the rest of the believers and told them that “the Lord has really risen.” The way they put it almost seems like they are trying to inform the group about what had happened as if they didn’t know it. But, of course, they did know it. Yet for these two guys it didn’t matter. They knew Him before, but now they knew Him in an even greater way. And they wanted others to know about it as well.
In reading this, you might be thinking to yourself that it sounds great, but does it work? Can you really have a transforming encounter with Christ when you’re right in the middle of an Emmaus road experience?
In response consider a statement by Corrie Ten Boom in her book The Hiding Place. The statement was made as she looked back on her time in a Nazi concentration camp and how she and others experienced the very thing we see in the Emmaus road story.
It grew harder and harder. Even within these four walls there was too much misery, too much seemingly pointless suffering. Everyday something else failed to make sense, something else grew too heavy.
But as the rest of the world grew stranger, one thing became increasingly clear… our Bible was the center of an ever widening circle of help and hope. Like [orphans] clustered around a blazing fire, we gathered about it, holding out our hearts to its warmth and light…
Life in Ravensbruck took place on two separate levels, mutually impossible. One, the observable, external life, grew everyday more horrible. The other, the life we lived with God, grew daily better, truth upon truth, glory upon glory.
So as awful as Emmaus road experiences may be, God uses these very experiences to help us come to know Him in ways that we otherwise never would. So learn to look for them. Look for those seemingly small yet significant signs of His presence. And allow them to lead you to know your Lord in new and transforming ways.