Emmaus

The conversation contains a magnificent reversal. In the answer that follows, the travellers explain Jesus of Nazareth to Jesus of Nazareth. Cleopas even wonders whether this companion is the only visitor to Jerusalem who has missed the news. The person treated as least informed is the person the news is about. The Book of Luke lets that irony stand without making their sadness ridiculous.

Their sadness is explicit, and so is their failure to recognize him. But the preceding verse says their eyes were holden. It does not attribute that failure to tears or a changed face. Jesus has drawn near and joined their walk before they can identify the companion beside them. His presence and their recognition are not the same event.

The question draws out an account full of information: Jesus' public deeds, his condemnation, the crucifixion, the hope attached to him and the unsettling reports from the tomb. These are not people who simply failed to hear that something had happened in Jerusalem. Their difficulty is what all those things mean together. They have enough facts to sustain a long conversation and not yet enough understanding to end their sorrow. Jesus meets them in the middle of that unfinished explanation.

Jesus does not begin by displaying his wounds. He begins with Moses. The rebuke concerns slowness to believe all that the prophets have spoken, not a failure to collect the Jerusalem news. All is doing substantial work. A reading that can accommodate glory but not suffering has left part of the testimony outside the door.

The decisive correction is not that the death never happened or that the condemnation was less terrible than they thought. Jesus joins suffering and glory in a necessary sequence. The cross is no longer the fact that disqualifies him from being the Christ. It belongs to what the Christ had to undergo. The same event that seemed to have demolished their hope is being explained as part of its fulfillment.

Luke gives the breadth and subject of the exposition, not a transcript of every passage Jesus used. Moses, the prophets and the things concerning himself define its sweep. Supplying an exact reading list would claim more than the account provides. What is supplied is extraordinary enough: the risen Jesus explains his identity from the Scriptures before the travellers recognize his face. The Messiah has not been explained away by the cross. In his exposition, the Scriptures explain the cross.

The guest takes the bread and becomes its giver. The actions have a familiar rhythm in Luke: taking, blessing, breaking and giving recall the feeding of the multitude. The evening meal has become a place of recognition, but Luke locates the change in their opened eyes. No description of visible scars supplies a different explanation. They know him, and in the same verse he is no longer visible.

That disappearance does not return them to the disappointment with which they arrived. Instead, they reconsider the road. Their hearts had burned while he explained the Scriptures, before they knew the identity of the speaker. The warmth belongs to the unfolding meaning of the text, not merely to the shock of recognizing a face. The conversation they had experienced as an encounter with a stranger was already an encounter with Jesus.

The same hour reverses the practical decision to stop for the evening. The day was far spent when they urged him to stay; it has not become earlier when they leave for Jerusalem. What has changed is what they have to report. They return to a gathered company, not to keep the encounter as a private consolation. The road is the same. Their account is not.