Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Road to Emmaus
Luke 24:13-27
13 Behold, two of them were going that very day to a village named Emmaus, which was sixty stadia from Jerusalem. · WEB
Two disciples walk seven miles telling a stranger why they have given up, and he tells them they have misread everything.
Behold, two of them were going that very day to a village named Emmaus, which was sixty stadia from Jerusalem Luke 24:13.
The episode is this Gospel's alone, and it is the longest resurrection account in the New Testament. Seven miles, on foot, on the afternoon of the third day.
One of the two is named — Cleopas Luke 24:18 — and the other is not, which has the effect of leaving a space at his shoulder. They are not apostles. They are ordinary followers walking home after a failure.
While they talked and questioned together, Jesus himself came near, and went with them Luke 24:15.
He joins them. He does not appear in glory in the upper room first; the first extended appearance in this book is to two people of no rank, on a road, going the wrong way.
But their eyes were kept from recognizing him Luke 24:16. Passive, and the agent is unnamed — the same construction used when the passion prediction was hidden from them Luke 18:34. Something is being withheld on purpose and for a while.
"What are you talking about as you walk, and are sad?" Luke 24:17.
He asks. He knows, and he asks anyway, and the whole method of the passage is in that question. What follows is seven miles of letting two grieving people say the whole thing out loud.
"Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who doesn't know the things which have happened there in these days?" Luke 24:18. The irony is complete and they cannot see it. They are explaining the weekend to the one person who was at the center of it.
"What things?" Luke 24:19. He draws it out of them.
And their answer is a small masterpiece of accurate reporting and wrong conclusions. A prophet mighty in deed and word — true, and much too small. The chief priests delivered him up and crucified him — accurate. "But we were hoping that it was he who would redeem Israel" Luke 24:21.
That sentence is the saddest in the Gospel. We were hoping — the tense does the work. The hope is spoken of as a thing that used to exist, and the reason for its collapse is the cross, which is the very event that accomplished what they had hoped for.
"It is now the third day since these things happened." They know the timetable and are quoting it as evidence that it is over. Three days was the deadline in his own predictions, and to them it is the point at which hope expires.
They even have the report. Certain women of our company amazed us Luke 24:22 — the empty tomb, the vision of angels, the message that he was alive, and the confirmation by some of their own. And the last clause is where they stop: but they didn't see him Luke 24:24.
Everything necessary is in their possession. They have the predictions, the empty tomb, the angelic message and corroborating witnesses, and they are walking away from the city.
"Foolish people, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken!" Luke 24:25.
The rebuke names the failure exactly, and it is not a failure of evidence. Slow of heart — the trouble is not in the data or in the intellect. And what they are slow to believe is all that the prophets said; they had been reading selectively, keeping the glory and skipping the suffering.
"Didn't the Christ have to suffer these things and to enter into his glory?" Luke 24:26.
The must again, and it is the answer to their entire account. They had treated the cross as the thing that ruined the plan. It was the plan, and the order runs suffering first, then glory — the sequence they had inverted.
Beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he explained to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself Luke 24:27.
The first thing the risen Christ does with his time is teach the Old Testament. Not display his wounds, not prove the resurrection — a Bible study on a dirt road, lasting most of an afternoon, and no one wrote down a word of it.
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