Beginning with Moses

Two disciples are walking away from Jerusalem on the afternoon of the first Easter, and the road runs downhill in every sense. Their faces are downcast (Luke 24:17), and their sentence about Jesus has already slipped into the past tense: “we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21). A stranger falls in step beside them, and Luke tells us the one thing they cannot see — that the stranger is Jesus himself, for “their eyes were kept from recognizing him” (Luke 24:16). Grief has a way of holding the eyes shut; the very One they mourn walks at their side, and they take him for a passer-by who somehow missed the news.

What the stranger does next is the heart of the story. He calls them “foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken” (Luke 24:25), and then he opens the book. “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). Consider the claim folded into that sentence: the whole Old Testament — law and history, psalm and prophet — had been about him all along. The covenant God cut with Abraham, when he passed alone between the pieces (Genesis 15:17), was concerning himself; every sacrifice and every promised king was a line in a portrait whose face these two had not yet learned to recognize.

We are so often these two. We can carry our Bibles for years and read them as a rulebook to keep, or a record of other people’s centuries, or a mirror held up to our own progress — and miss the person on every page. Our trouble is rarely a shortage of information; it is a slowness of heart (Luke 24:25). And the cure is not that we try harder to feel something, but that Christ himself draws near and opens the text, until — as they confessed once he had gone — “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” (Luke 24:32). The fire was not worked up from below; it was kindled by the Word himself expounding the word.

The recognition, when it comes, comes at a table. The stranger is pressed to stay, and “when he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him” (Luke 24:30–31). The opened Scriptures and the broken bread arrive together, and this is no accident: they knew him in the breaking — his hands broken as his body would be broken, the true bread come down from heaven and given for the life of the world. He had told them its shape on the road, that the Christ must “suffer these things and enter into his glory” (Luke 24:26); the book they thought had ended in a grave had always been driving toward a cross and out the far side of it. So the risen Lord is himself the interpreter of the Scriptures that foretold his death; he “opened their minds to understand the Scriptures” (Luke 24:45), and he opens ours. When he does, our hearts catch fire, and we recognize at last the face that was on every page all along.