We Were Hoping

Two people were walking home on a Sunday afternoon, away from the city, talking about the worst week of their lives.

Luke gives the distance, about seven miles from Jerusalem. Nobody is certain today where the village of Emmaus stood. What’s certain is the direction. They were walking away from Jerusalem, where everything had happened, toward wherever home was.

One of them was named Cleopas. The other one is never named. Some readers connect Cleopas with a Clopas whose wife Mary stood near the cross in John’s Gospel, and guess the second walker was her. That’s a guess, and an old one, and the text doesn’t settle it.

They had been with the others that morning. They’d heard the women come back from the tomb with a story about angels, and they’d heard it treated the way Luke says the whole group treated it: their words seemed like nonsense to them, and they did not believe the women. Some of the men had gone to look and found the tomb just as the women said, But Him they did not see.

So they left. The text doesn’t give a reason. It just says that same day they went.

They talked the whole way. Luke says they talked and deliberated, going back over it, the way people do after a death, trying to find the place where it could have gone another way.

Jesus Himself came up and walked along with them.

He didn’t stop them. He didn’t stand in the road and turn them around toward the city. He fell in beside them and walked in the direction they were already going.

But their eyes were kept from recognizing Him.

He asked what they’d been talking about. What are you discussing so intently as you walk along? And Luke records a small, human detail. They stood still, with sadness on their faces.

Cleopas couldn’t believe the question. Are You the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in recent days? Everybody knew. It had been the only thing anyone talked about all weekend.

What things? he said.

It’s a strange thing to ask. He was the one person on earth who didn’t need it explained. He asked anyway, and let them tell it in their own words, the whole sad story, start to finish, to the one it was about.

So they told him. It’s the longest speech anybody makes in the scene, and it’s worth reading slowly, because it’s the account of someone whose hope has just died.

Jesus of Nazareth, they said, was a prophet, powerful in speech and action. The chief priests and rulers handed him over to be condemned, and he was crucified. And then the sentence that holds the whole chapter.

But we were hoping He was the One who would redeem Israel.

We were hoping. Past tense. They had built their hopes on him, and they said it the way you talk about a business that folded, or a marriage that ended, or a church you gave twenty years to. It’s what disappointment sounds like when it’s still new. And besides all this, it is the third day since these things took place.

Then they mentioned the women, and the empty tomb, and the angels. They told it all. They had every piece. It just hadn’t added up to anything they could believe.

He answered them bluntly. O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! It’s a hard line, and Luke doesn’t soften it. Then a question that turns the whole weekend over: Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and then to enter His glory? The very thing that had killed their hope, the cross, was the thing he said had to happen. They’d read the week as the end of the story. He read it to them as the middle.

Then, instead of leaving it there, he spent the rest of the walk with them. And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He explained to them what was written in all the Scriptures about Himself. Seven miles is a couple of hours on foot. That’s a long time to spend with two people who had just given up.

They came near the village.

He seemed to be going farther.

That line is the hinge of the whole story. He didn’t invite himself in. He’d walked every step of their road with them, and when they got to their door, he kept walking. He left the next move to them.

But they pleaded with Him, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening and the day is almost over.”

The King James has it the way many people still know it, the words behind the old hymn “Abide with Me”: Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent.

They didn’t know who he was. They just didn’t want the stranger out on the road in the dark. It was hospitality, the ordinary kind. So He went in to stay with them.

At the table he took the bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them.

Then their eyes were opened and they recognized Jesus. And then, in the same breath, He disappeared from their sight.

Not on the road, while he was explaining the Scriptures. Not in the city, not at the tomb. At a table, in a house in a village, in the middle of an ordinary meal, the moment he broke the bread. And then he was gone.

They looked at each other. Were not our hearts burning within us as He spoke with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us? Looking back, they could feel it. At the time, they’d only known they were sad.

Notice what they didn’t do. They didn’t sit there wishing he’d come back. He was gone from the table, and they didn’t need him in the room anymore to know. The bread was still broken on the table in front of them.

He walks with you in the direction you’re already going, and he waits to be asked in.

Where this meets your week

The direction you’re already going. Some people reading this are walking away from something, and they know it. A church, a belief, a version of themselves. There may be no plan to turn around. On that road, he didn’t turn them around. He went with them. You don’t have to reverse course this week to be accompanied. Just notice, the next time you’re going over the old story in your head, that you might not be talking to yourself.

We were hoping. Somewhere you’ve got a past-tense sentence like theirs. We thought it would work out. I believed he’d get better. We were hoping this was the place. Write yours down in their shape, I was hoping, and finish it honestly. Don’t fix it. They said theirs to his face without knowing it, and he stayed and listened.

The stranger at the door. They recognized him because they did something ordinary for someone they didn’t know. They wouldn’t let a traveler walk on in the dark. Somebody near you this week is at the end of a long road and about to keep going alone. A neighbor, someone newly alone, the new person at work. Ask them in. You never know who’s at the table.

Looking back and feeling it. Almost anyone who spent years inside carries at least one memory of something that burned. A song, a quiet moment, a sentence that landed. They’ve since filed it under emotion, or youth, or the music. The two on the road only recognized theirs after the fact. You don’t have to decide tonight what yours was. Just stop pretending it didn’t happen.

Ask him in.

Tonight, at your own table, at whatever meal you actually eat. Say their words, or your version of them. Abide with us: for it is toward evening. Stay with me. The day’s almost over.

You don’t have to set the table differently or say grace the way you were taught. It can be a sandwich at the counter. They weren’t at a feast. They were at the end of a long walk, sitting down to bread in a village.

You don’t have to know who you’re talking to. They didn’t. You don’t have to be sure he’ll come in. The whole story turns on the fact that he waited to be asked.

The story doesn’t end at the table.

And they got up that very hour and returned to Jerusalem.

Seven miles, with the day already almost over, back the way they’d just come. And when they got there, they found the Eleven and those with them, gathered together, who were saying already, The Lord has indeed risen and has appeared to Simon! The two from the road added their part. They told what had happened on the road, and how they had recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread.

He found them on the road, walking away. And the first thing they did, once they knew him, was go find their people.