The Road Trip that Changed Everything

Kent has had some road trips worth remembering. One of them ended with a nervous man on a Mexican bus pointing a gun at him and his friend Jerry, hand shaking, asking for their money. He had been smart enough to leave his wallet behind. Jerry had not.

But that trip doesn't hold a candle to the one Luke records. Two followers of Jesus walking the seven miles from Jerusalem out to Emmaus, on the same day he rose — and Jesus himself came near and walked with them.

And they had no idea.

"Their eyes were kept from recognizing him." Not because they were foolish. Because grief has a way of narrowing your vision until the only thing you can see is what you lost.

Here is the quiet comfort of this story: Jesus was with them the entire time they thought they were walking alone. Before they recognized him. Before they felt anything. Before the conversation got good.

His presence was never conditional on their awareness of it. That is still true on the road you are walking today.

Three of the saddest words in the Bible: "But we had hoped."

Had. Past tense. We used to. We don't anymore.

These two are describing the death of an expectation. They had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel — and then Friday happened, and the hoping stopped. Notice they aren't lying. Every fact they list is accurate. He was a prophet mighty in deed and word. The rulers did deliver him up. He was crucified. It is the third day.

They have all the right information and exactly the wrong conclusion.

That is worth sitting with, because it is possible to be completely correct about the details of your life and completely wrong about what they mean. They thought they were walking away from a failed hope. They were actually walking beside a risen Lord.

The facts were not the problem. The ending they assumed was the problem — and the ending had already changed without them.

Here is what Jesus does not do. He does not immediately say, "It's me, look." He could have ended their grief in a second with one gesture.

Instead he gives them a Bible study.

Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he walks them through the whole of Scripture and shows them himself in it. Seven miles of it. The risen Christ's first instinct on resurrection Sunday was to open the Scriptures and say: this was always about me.

Which tells you something about how God usually works. We want the dramatic reveal. He often gives us the slow walk through his Word until the pieces move.

It also tells you what the Bible is for. Not a rulebook, not a collection of moral improvements — a book with a person at the center. If you have ever read it and found it dry, it may be that you were reading it for information rather than for him.

He is on every page. He said so himself, on the best walk anyone ever took.

They finally recognize him at a table.

Not during the sermon. Not while he was explaining Moses and the Prophets. At dinner, when he took bread, blessed it, broke it, and handed it to them — and their eyes were opened.

There is something almost tender about that. The moment of recognition comes in the most ordinary act in the world: someone passing you food.

It is worth noticing that these two had begged him to stay. "Stay with us, for it is toward evening." They did not know who they were inviting in. They just did not want the conversation to end. And their small hospitality to a stranger turned into the moment they saw the risen Christ.

And then he vanished — because he did not need to stay at that table. He had given them something better than his visible company: he had given them himself in the Scriptures and at the bread, which is exactly where his people have met him ever since.

After he disappears, they look at each other and say it: "Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?"

They felt it before they understood it. Something was happening on that walk that they could not name until later.

That is often how it goes. You are in the middle of a season and it just feels like walking — long, dusty, unremarkable, sad. It is only afterward, looking back, that you realize your heart was burning the whole time and God was doing something you could not see from inside it.

And then look what they do. It is late. They are seven miles out. They have already eaten. They get up that same hour and walk the whole seven miles back to Jerusalem in the dark, because news like this cannot wait until morning.

That is the pattern of Easter. He meets you on the road, he opens the Word, your heart burns — and then you go tell somebody. The walk back is always worth it.