I veered from the lectionary this week to look at Jesus’ encounter with the two on the road to Emmaus, one of the stories I most love.
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One of my favorite things about reading scripture is coming across the gaps that remind us that we don’t have the whole story. We have talked about them often. We read a name we haven’t heard before or become aware of a relationship we know nothing about or see a connection we had missed, like the man who had the donkey ready for Jesus to ride into Jerusalem or the man who knew Jesus would need the Upper Room for their last supper together.
Jesus knew more people and had more disciples than the ones who made it into the gospels. And Jesus did a bunch of things we don’t know about as well.
Our story this morning offers us another one of those gaps, as we read about the two walking from Jerusalem to their home in Emmaus, a town about seven miles away, on what we would call Easter night. The two who were walking home are also identified as disciples, though they were not among the twelve. We are only given the name of one of them: Cleopas. The other guy remains anonymous.
Luke tells us the two were walking and talking about what they had seen and heard involving Jesus’ death and resurrection when Jesus joined them and asked what they were discussing. His question brought them to a halt. They stopped in their tracks and responded to Jesus query with a question of their own, “Are you the only person in Jerusalem who doesn’t know what happened?”
Luke also offers an interesting detail. He says their faces “were downcast.” Perhaps, then, the tone to their question might have sounded a little harsh, as in “Have you not been paying attention?” or “How did you miss this?”
Nevertheless, they were followers of Jesus who had heard news of the empty tomb and yet they were walking home covered in gloom. Luke doesn’t say why. Their question to Jesus seems to intimate that they were involved somehow in, or at least adjacent to, all that had happened, but we know nothing of their stories: who they were, how they met Jesus, what they were walking home to in Emmaus. All we know is they were down-trodden and sad as a result of what they had seen and heard, the empty tomb included, and maybe a little edgy as a result.
We also know they didn’t recognize Jesus when he asked what had happened, which is why they told him the story as best they could, ending with news that the women had found the tomb empty that morning and received the angelic message that Jesus was alive, but no one had seen him. In the middle of it all, they said something that grabs me every time I read it:
“We had hoped he was the one to set Israel free.”
We had hoped . . . .
If I can be a grammar nerd for a minute, it is the present imperfect tense, which is to say it describes an action that was ongoing in the past but has now stopped in the present.
We had hoped . . . .
There is a poignant and powerful sadness in those words. As one commentator writes,
I have heard families use that phrase when they were packing up the things they had brought with them to the ICU. “We had hoped … ,” they say, and then they go home alone. I have heard families use this phrase when addictions return, or jobs go away. Although theologies of hope focus on a dawning future, the moment that catches me is that moment of deep disappointment, when only a painfully imperfect verb tense will express what needs to be said.
They had hoped Jesus was going to free Israel from Roman occupation. Blinded by their disappointment, they couldn’t see the Risen Christ walking with them as they talked about how their lives had fallen apart.
When Jesus speaks, his response sounds harsh, especially in the way our translation reads this morning: “You foolish people! Your dull minds keep you from believing all that the prophets talked about. Wasn’t it necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and then enter into his glory?”
Much like what we saw when Jesus spoke to Thomas about seeing and trusting, I think something has been lost in the translation of this scene. For one, Jesus had a better sense of pastoral care than to listen to two grief-sticken disciples pour their hearts out and then say, “Are you really that stupid?”
Just as we entertained the idea that Jesus was telling Thomas and the others that it must be nice for the few that can trust without seeing, perhaps we might infer a tone here that would translate Jesus’ words as something like, “Are you so blinded by grief that you can’t see how God has shown up all through Israel’s history? Weren’t you listening to anything I said about how God worked through me?”
Still not overly pastoral, I know, but perhaps Jesus was also reflecting the tone of their earlier question to him when then asked if he had been the only one who didn’t know what had happened. Jesus, too, was saying, “How did you miss this? Have you not been paying attention?”
Luke says Jesus went on to spell it out for them, which means he would have reminded them of all the stories about God’s presence and care—of being brought out of Egypt, of the quail and manna that fed them in the wilderness. The history of Israel was one of struggle, captivity, and oppression and it was also the story of God’s steadfast love and presence.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want . . . .
What he had to say must have taken up most of the seven miles, because when they looked up and they were home. When this stranger walking with them looked like he was going to keep walking, they invited him in for dinner, still not able to recognize him through their grief, and then he picked up the bread and offered it to them and they recognized that it was Jesus who had been with them the whole time.
And then he vanished.
The got up and went back to Jerusalem—seven miles—to tell the others who were in hiding because they couldn’t see beyond their fear and disappointment either, When they got there—and by then it must have been late at night—the eleven in the room told them Peter had seen Jesus. Cleopas and his friend then told their story, which was interrupted by Jesus appearing in the room to all of them and asking, “Do you have anything to eat?” which I find humorous because he had just disappeared from the dinner table in Emmaus. If he had stayed for dinner with Cleophas, he might not have been so hungry. Or maybe it was that Jesus liked sharing a meal anytime he had a few people together.
That he was hungry made him real and human and present. He was right there with them.
Still, even though seeing Jesus alive mattered a great deal to all of them, it didn’t change the reality that what they had hoped for didn’t happen. Cleopas and his friend were so enlivened by recognizing Jesus that that got back to Jerusalem as quickly as they could, but their hope that he would free them from Roman oppression didn’t come back to life. It had ended at the crucifixion and stayed that way.
They had hoped . . . .
This is one of the reasons I love telling and listening to stories in scripture: they say out loud what we sometimes find hard to say. “We had hoped” are words most all of us have known to be true. Perhaps in the past, maybe this very morning we hear the present imperfect tense and we understand it, even if we aren’t grammar nerds. We know what it means for crucial hopes to collapse. We understand the reality, the truth, of the present imperfect.
What we need is help to see life beyond those broken hopes.
How do we live after we had hoped the surgery would go differently, or the job we wanted didn’t materialize? How do we live after we had hoped family relationships would heal and the rift remains?
I don’t need to keep posing hypotheticals. We can each name times in our lives when we had hoped and then hope ended in the imperfect present. We can also name times when we learned that imperfect present wasn’t forever. Where hope finds new life is when something happens that allows us to recognize God in the middle of it all—not to make it all turn out okay, but to call us to keep living. To eat something. To find those who can help us. To keep going.
Luke ends his gospel soon after this story. Jesus takes them all back to Bethany, says a few things he wants them to remember, and then leaves. Most of the stories of what happened after that are lost. We have a lot of blank spaces to fill. What we do know is we are here this morning, because we are people who belong to a a legacy of love, who share an ancestry of lives that came to see beyond the grief, fear, busyness, or whatever it was that kept them from seeing God was still there even after they had hoped and what they hoped for didn’t happen, but life kept going. Amen.
Peace,
Milton