Arriving at Emmaus: Reflections on Finding Jesus in the Unexpected

When the two disconsolate disciples on the road to Emmaus are joined by a total stranger, they pour out their disappointment to him at the death of their Saviour and the supposed end of their mission. The stranger accompanies them to their destination and when they invite him to eat with them, he breaks the bread with them, and they recognise him. They have just realised that he is the risen Lord, but they are denied any further contact as he vanishes from their sight. In this study, I wish to consider how the Lord Jesus, God himself, allows us just enough of his presence for us to recognise him before he leaves us to continue our walk in faith and trust. I wish to consider how the presentation of Our Lord in the gospels often differs in its variety and uncertainty; he is one whom we may partially grasp, then momentarily lose before he returns in some new situation and guise. This has been my experience while adjusting to the new reality of my wife’s dementia and her move to a care home. While I acknowledge the Lord’s presence throughout, in reality he seems to come and go, leaving me to await his next appearance and meanwhile to move on in trust that he is not as elusive as he sometimes seems to be.

Of the four gospels that bring Jesus to us, three of them bear close resemblances to each other, but despite the obvious similarities there are notable differences. Richard Bauckham observes: ‘The figure of Jesus in any of the gospels is actually very difficult to describe directly. There is so much about him, but we cannot grasp him or sum him up. As the subject of a biography he is peculiarly elusive, always transcending the stories about him.’¹ John Barton, in a recent article reflecting his new book A History of the Bible, writes: ‘The stories in the gospels do not merely supplement each other, but sometimes conflict. This is true of the stories of Jesus’ birth as much as of his resurrection. In Matthew, Jesus and Mary live in Bethlehem and only move to Galilee to escape Herod, whereas in Luke they go from Galilee to Bethlehem for the census.’²

At the trial of Jesus, the accounts differ in significant ways. While John and Luke have Jesus involved in a detailed dialogue with the authorities, and in Luke, Jesus’ reply to the question: ‘“Are you then the Son of God?”’ is: ‘“You are right in saying I am.”’ (Luke 23:70-71),³ in Mark and Matthew Jesus is silent in answer to the questions and accusations. But Rowan Williams makes the interesting point that when the High Priest asks Jesus at his trial: ‘“Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?”’, Jesus replies: ‘“I am”’ (Mark 14:61-62). Williams continues with the observation that the words ‘“I am”’ echo God’s words to Moses (Ex. 3:13), and that John has Jesus say ‘“I am”’ at various points in his narrative. It is as if at the acute moment in his trial, according to Williams, ‘then and only then does God declare himself’.⁴ Williams also points out that, while Our Lord declares himself as ‘“I am”’, Peter in his moment of denial replies ‘“I am not”’ (Luke 22:58).⁵ It is almost as if Williams sees a pattern in the gospel whereby the writer deploys his information cryptically at crucial times to achieve the maximum effect, while Jesus, the subject of his account, remains almost elusive. John Barton describes the New Testament as ‘a series of slanting beams of light on something that always just eludes our gaze’.⁶

Jesus is the master of the unexpected. When, at the start of Mark’s gospel, John the Baptist promises: ‘“After me will come one more powerful than I, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie”’ (Mark 1:7), one might expect Jesus to choose disciples who would be strong, even heroic and worthy of following him. However, the picture is quite different. John Proctor writes that Mark’s ‘picture of the twelve is realistic and exemplary. Jesus was a difficult person to get hold of. Those who first followed him, and those who do so since, stumble many times on the road. Our perplexities and our pride get in the way of faith and following. The twelve are typical of Christian experience then and now. In them we see something of ourselves, of our own blend of faith and failure.’⁷ Obvious examples are Peter, Thomas and Judas. However, Williams also highlights the moment when two disciples, James and John, ask to sit on either side of Jesus when he comes in his glory. Jesus teaches them the lesson that they must learn the meaning of sacrifice exemplified in the Lord himself: ‘“Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be the slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many”’ (Mark 10:39-45). This is fulfilled in the crucifixion of Jesus bearing the sins of the world in his sacrifice. The irony inherent in the exchange recorded in Mark 10 is that the two disciples, who, when asked by Jesus: ‘“Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptised with the baptism I am baptised with?”’ state that they can drink the same cup (Mark 10:38-39), is that in the long term, they, like the other disciples, do in fact drink the cup that their Master drinks in their own sacrificial life as his disciples to the world, many of them suffering persecution even death for their allegiance to Christ. The disciples appear therefore to be a true reflection of fallible, failed humanity during the time of Jesus’ life and ministry, but nonetheless he chooses them for the spreading of his gospel of salvation to the world, indeed making Simon Peter the Rock on which his church will be built.

Jesus himself often behaves in an enigmatic way, never rejecting an appeal for help and healing, but instructing the person healed not to disclose to others the miracle that has been wrought. Yet when he heals the man brought to him by his friends and lowered down through the roof, he first grants the sick man the forgiveness of his sins before healing him (Mark 2:5). It is not surprising that the authorities are outraged by this healer who, in their eyes, is usurping the authority of God himself by forgiving sins. He also speaks enigmatically when, in delivering the Parable of the Sower, he says that the disciples will understand what the rest of his listeners will fail to grasp: ‘“Though seeing, they do not see; / though hearing, they do not hear or understand”’(Matt 13:13). But the disciples too often fail to grasp what he is saying. And one wonders how they managed, if at all, to interpret the second half of his earlier words: ‘“Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him”’ (Matt 13:12).

Thus the picture of Jesus emerges as one that is often apparently confused, with much that is similar in the four gospels. But it is one of a healer and teacher who seems to place an unjustified faith in his band of fallible disciples, talks in riddles in his parables, deliberately antagonises and provokes the Pharisees and never refuses a plea for help or healing while aware throughout that it is the sick person’s sins that need to be forgiven before anything else. And in the last week of his life, the King and Messiah comes into Jerusalem riding on a donkey, then dies the miserable death of a common criminal, having apparently disappointed all the hopes of a messianic revival.

It is at this point that the two disciples walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus, to whom we now return, lament the end of their hopes. Contrary to the words of Philip Yancey who writes: ‘I seldom run into visual clues that remind me of God unless I am looking’, the two disciples are not looking for Jesus at all; they have abandoned all hope and are presumably returning to their previous normal life.⁸ So many people have given up looking for God that it is unreasonable to assume that we have to be seeking him in order for him to reveal himself to us. In the event, Jesus surprises the two unhappy disciples by coming to them. It is important to consider how he approaches them.

Firstly, he asks them questions. The first question is: ‘“What are you discussing together as you walk along?”’ (Luke 24:17). He knows that they are disappointed disciples and from their long faces he would already know what they are discussing, but it is his beginning of the dialogue by which he will eventually restore their faith. When the disciples mention Jerusalem and ‘“the things that have happened there in these days”’ (Luke 24:18), he invites them to spell out what has happened: ‘“What things?”’ (Luke 24:19). This unties their tongues, allowing them to relate the apparently sad recent events, including the fact that the women had found Jesus’ tomb empty, in their eyes yet another sign of failure and mystery. Though Jesus is apparently alive, he is nowhere to be seen, another indication of the confusion surrounding the man they had believed to be an all-conquering Messiah.

Having firstly drawn out the two disciples by asking them questions resulting in their reference to the empty tomb and the missing body of Jesus, he then appears to want to leave them, presumably to leave them thinking about what he has told them in his answer to their account: ‘“Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?”’ (Luke 24:26) before relating everything in the Scriptures concerning himself. But far from being allowed to leave them, Jesus has made a sufficient enough impression on them that they invite him to stay with them. It is on their arrival at Emmaus when Jesus breaks the bread that they recognise him. Hardly have they recognised him when he disappears from their sight, and they are left to return in haste to Jerusalem to announce what they have seen and witnessed.

Yancey makes the further point which seems slightly to contradict his earlier one: ‘God must set the pace of communication, so that we can only know God as he chooses to make himself known.’⁹ How does God make himself known in this case? There seem to be three ways. Firstly, his responses and explanations touch and warm their hearts: ‘“Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”’ (Luke 24:32). And it is in his relating the Scriptures to them that their hearts are warmed, convincing them of his authority and personal involvement in what he is relating. Thirdly Jesus is revealed to them in what had become for the disciples the breaking of bread, a reminder of the meal in the upper room and a signal to us his later followers of the immense importance of the Eucharist as the place where we can meet the Saviour and share communion with him. Nicholas Lash widens the implication of this when he suggests that their recognition of Jesus only makes sense when it is seen as ‘not some “religious” event in a sacred space, but an act of human hospitality’, demonstrating the earthy, everyday presence of the risen Lord in that most common experience, sharing a meal together.¹⁰ Tom Wright indicates that this is ‘the first meal of the new creation’, cancelling out the original failed act when Eve feeds Adam, creating the curse and revealing the risen Jesus as ‘the beginning and sign of this new world’.¹¹

The picture described above may look reassuring, and this is undoubtedly the case in the episode leading to the arrival in Emmaus. One might think of the numerous followers of Jesus who never experienced his coming to them on the Emmaus road, a Jesus who might seem to choose his moments to reveal himself while at most times seeming to be hidden or at least hard to identify. Lash writes: ‘The God who acts, appears and speaks in history remains the hidden God, the God who may never be identified with particular forms of his appearance.’¹² The Jesus of the gospels often appears as an enigma leaving his followers and others who hear him feeling uncertain, forced to trust what he says and to follow obediently Jesus who ‘came to seek and save what was lost’ (Luke 19:10). Lash speaks of the ‘Christian hope, which is received and cannot, with integrity, be constructed at will, that being lost, we are – nevertheless – being found.’¹³

When Jesus was in the Garden of Gethsemane praying that he might possibly be spared the forthcoming agony of the Cross, he was momentarily dispossessed, as he was later on the Cross when he felt that he had been abandoned by his Father. Many Christians have felt the same in their own experience of abandonment, but they will also often claim that the Lord has come to them quietly at their lowest moment and shed sufficient light on their darkness for them to be able to move forward. Rowan Williams, in his study of Mark’s gospel, writes that ‘it is a book about Faith, and more specifically about that fundamental aspect of faith which is the trustful letting go into a love that is completely surprising and works completely by its own rules, not yours’.¹⁶ But faith is not the only issue, as Philip Yancey shows when he includes in a small box in his book an observation by the writer, Flannery O’Connor: ‘When we get our spiritual house in order, we’ll be dead. This goes on. You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don’t expect faith to clear things up for you. It is trust, not certainty.’¹⁷

All the disciples have lived previously in the presence of Jesus, listening to his words, observing and questioning his actions, mesmerised or puzzled by what he says. It is after his unexpected resurrection and return to them, whether by the lakeside, in the upper room or in the garden, that they learn to trust him, to trust that, as he has come to them in his resurrection, he will come to them again and again in his Spirit, often remaining in the shadows, but never leaving them. We who have never seen Jesus can know from the experience of his early disciples that we can trust him to come in the unexpected.

Trust, says O’Connor, is more than faith. Trust means forward movement, obedience, action and progress into the unknown. When I visit my wife, I have little idea how she will be and how she will react. Unlike the two disciples going to Emmaus who are visited unexpectedly by Christ who then leaves them at the moment of clearest recognition, leaving them to return to spread the news to the other disciples, we have to move forward from what might well be a brief shaft of guiding light into our daily world of decision making and action. We are often apparently left to make the right decision, not knowing where it will lead, but aware that our decisions are infused and guided by the light from our encounter with the Spirit on the road.