The Stranger on the Road

It's the Sunday after the worst Friday of their lives, and two of them are walking home.

Seven miles to Emmaus — and you can hear the pace in the story, the heavy-footed shuffle of people who have run clean out of things to hope for. They had bet everything on a Nazarene carpenter, and Rome had nailed that bet to a tree. “We had hoped,” they say. Has there ever been a sadder tense than the past tense of hope? We had hoped he was the one.

A stranger falls in step beside them. It's Jesus, of course — though “their eyes were kept from recognizing him,” which is Luke's gentle way of saying they hadn't the faintest idea. And here's the first almost-funny thing: the risen Lord of the universe, three days out of the grave, and his opening move is a question he already knows the answer to. “What are you discussing as you walk along?”

They stop. Their faces fall. And one of them says the line I love most in the whole account: “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened?”

Sit in that irony a moment. They are explaining the crucifixion — to the Crucified. They are catching the risen Christ up on current events. He is the one thing that has happened, walking at their elbow, and they inform him he must be out of the loop.

Aren't we often exactly this? Christ nearer than our own breath, and we trudge along cataloging our disappointments to a Presence we cannot see. We are so certain we know how the story ends — badly — that we miss the Author strolling beside us.

So what does he do? He doesn't reveal himself. Not yet. He opens the Bible. “Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.”

Stay there. The greatest Bible study in the history of the world, and Luke gives us no transcript — but he gives us the thesis: it was always about him. Every lamb, every rock struck in the desert, every scapegoat driven into the wild, every priest and prophet and king — shadows thrown forward by a Light they couldn't yet look at. He is on every page. He had been on every page the whole time they were losing hope.

And still they don't know him. Not until the table.

They reach the village; he makes as if to go on; they beg him to stay — “it is toward evening” — and he does. And then, at a borrowed table, the guest quietly becomes the host. He takes bread. He blesses it. He breaks it. He gives it. And “their eyes were opened, and they recognized him” — and in the same breath, he is gone.

Of course it's the bread. Of course it's the breaking. Where else were they going to see him, if not in bread broken and handed over? They knew him at last in the most ordinary act there is — a shared meal — made holy because he was in it.

“Were not our hearts burning within us,” they say, “while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” The whole way. He had been with them the whole way.

And here is the grace of it. They did not find him. He came and found them — walked seven dusty miles with two nobodies who had given up — and he did it before they knew who he was. That is how he always comes. Not because we recognize him, but so that, at last, we will.