Recognizing the Good Part - Together

The Road to Emmaus is a fairly well-known biblical account from Luke 24:13-35 where the resurrected Jesus Christ appears to two dejected disciples walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus on Easter Sunday. I encourage you to read Luke 24:13-35 to follow along on this journey of revelation.

Two disciples are walking away from Jerusalem. It is the first day of the week. The same day, the tomb was found empty.

Two disciples – probably a married couple.

Seven miles from Jerusalem. Not a short walk, especially after everything that has happened. Long enough for a conversation to circle back on itself more than once.

They are talking as they walk.

About Jesus of Nazareth. About what he did. What they saw. About the report from the tomb that they cannot yet make sense of. The two of them are speaking back and forth, trying to hold together what has happened and what they thought was going to happen.

The timelessness of scripture invites us to walk along with these disciples on the road to Emmaus, because reading and discussing these stories teaches us how Jesus cares for his people and how we begin to care for one another. This is what makes the Bible essential to the “good part” and not just a relic of the past.

While they are talking and discussing, Jesus himself comes near and walks with them. But they do not recognize him. Jesus asks them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?”

The Gospel writer in Luke tells us, “They stood still, looking sad.” The two disciples stop walking. Their faces changed—somber, drawn, carrying the weight of what has happened. Their posture reflects it. Their pace has already slowed. Now they come to a full stop.

One of them answers, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” They assume everyone should know. The events are that immediate, that consuming.

Jesus asks, “What things?” And they begin to tell him.

They answer him, They begin with what they know to be true. What they saw. What they heard. The authority in Jesus teaching, the works that drew crowds, the way he stood before both God and the people with a kind of clarity that was hard to dismiss. And then the account shifts.

“And how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him.”

Handed over. Delivered into the hands of others. They name their own leaders. Not outsiders. Not distant powers, but the ones responsible for teaching, judging, and guiding the people.

The centrality of betrayal by their own people is personal and forefront. “He was handed over.” They felt powerless, there was nothing they could do but watch. Jesus, still unknown to them, remains with them, letting them process, letting them mourn, without interruption.

Their grief and betrayal turn to disapointment, “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” These disciples name their expectation in specific terms. Not a vague sense that things would improve, but a conviction that God was acting through Jesus to bring redemption in a way they could recognize—something that would change their present reality.

They speak about that hope in the past-tense.“We had hoped.” They aren’t speaking as if anything is still unfolding. Their expectations are pivoted from anticipating something good, and turn toward expecting nothing at all. Their bodies carry this hopelessness, their postures and faces. Their story told to Christ the stranger. The story is over.

 Jesus meets them in their disapointment to guide them through the things that they can still trust in - God’s works in the Hebrew prophets. Jesus answers them,“How slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared.” Jesus reminds them that God’s work is never finished and that they can trust those promises - reminds them of the familiar. He’s not dismissing what they have experienced, but draws them to see their conclusions in new light.

Their thoughts re-shaped, they begin to believe the impossible. They continue,“Moreover, some women of our group astounded us.” They describe what happened Easter morning. That their friends and fellow disciples, the women went to the tomb early. They did not find Jesus’ body.

The disciples move into thinking perhaps their sister disciples we’re hysterical, but instead prophets proclaiming God’s work. This couple begins to believe that the tomb is empty.

The sliver of the possiblity of hope, opens them to see what is right in front of them. That God’s work never stopped and that they were never and aren’t now alone. Jesus reminds them, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interprets to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. He returns them to what they already know. He walks them through the story again, not to add something new, but to reframe what they are living through. He teaches them how to process what has happened on Good Friday and Easter Morning light of what has always been there.

They all come near the village they were heading toward. They urge him strongly, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is nearly over.” So he goes in to stay with them. When he is at the table with them, he takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to them. It is a familiar pattern. Not something new. Something they have seen before.

They recognize him.
And he vanishes from their sight.

They say to one another, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” They name what had already been happening. While they were walking. While they were listening. While he was opening the scriptures to them. Some part of their spirit was responding before they could identify it.

I imagine them looking at one another, wondering “Did that really happen?” “That was real, right?” They decide it was real because in that same hour they get up and return to Jerusalem. They find the eleven and their sibling disciples gathered together, and already speaking,

“The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” Then they tell what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

Throughout this story, Jesus is teaching them how to read their experience differently. What they have seen. What they have heard. What they have lived through. He gathers all of it back into a story that is still unfolding.

In this Gospel, recognition does not remain private. It moves toward community. It is spoken, heard, and shared among those who are also trying to understand what God is doing in their midst.

They were walking in the Good Part before they knew it.
Talking through it. Struggling with it. Trying to understand it.
God had always been with them.
Jesus was already with them.

The Good Part is already here, walking with us, even when we don’t recognize it.

Sometimes we can only recognize the Good Part together.