When your heart burns!
Paul wrote to believers at Corinth, “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable. But now Christ is risen from the dead, and has become the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep” 1 Corinthians 15:19-20.
But on that first Easter day that living hope was far from being established in the experience of the two people we read of in our text. Let us put ourselves in their shoes as they set out on the seven-mile walk from Jerusalem to Emmaus. It was a:
1. A HEART-BREAKING EXPERIENCE.
Have you ever noticed that some of the saddest words in our language begin with the letter D? For example, discouragement, disappointment, doubt, disillusionment, defeat, despair and death. All of these are summed up in the words of Cleopas and his companion to the stranger who joined them on the Emmaus road. They had left the discouraged and confused band of disciples with the events of Friday fresh in their memories.
The Lord they had revered, loved and followed had been horribly put to death, a cruel death of the most shameful kind. Only a week before, on Palm Sunday, the disciples’ hopes had risen to fever pitch when the excited crowds had hailed their Master as the longed for deliverer from the oppression of Roman occupation but now he lay dead in a sealed tomb! Their hopes were dashed; the dream was over!
The band of Jesus’ followers was leaderless and was falling apart, with two of them already on their way home. The reports that Christ’s tomb was empty did nothing to alter their thinking; it only confused them. Their entire world had come apart. The two despondent disciples summed up the situation very neatly saying, “We had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel.”
Human hope is an easily broken, and when it withers it is difficult to revive.
Hopelessness is a disease of the human spirit and it is desperately hard to cure. When you see someone you love and care for overtaken by illness, which goes on, and on, despair sets in. It almost becomes impossible to hope for recovery, to be even afraid to hope because of not being able to cope with another letdown.
The Two had erected a wall of hopelessness around them, and they were trapped in their misery. “We had hoped.” What they were saying is “We do not expect it now, but once we did. We had it, this thing called hope, but now it is gone.” I wonder if this is something that we can identify with. Has something or someone come between our relationships with God? If so, listen to the Emmaus story because the heart-breaking experience is only its beginning!
As the travellers made their weary way to Emmaus a stranger came alongside them. It was going to turn into one of the most wonderful walks in history! We know, of course, that it was the risen Jesus, but somehow they did not recognize Him. In fact Luke tells us they were kept from recognizing Him.
It was not an accident that they did not notice who He is or that they were too preoccupied to look at him in the eye. No, they were not allowed to recognize Jesus for a purpose. I believe it was so that they might be in the same position as we are some 2,000 years later.
The stranger saw they were downtrodden and asked them, “What are you discussing together as you walk along?” And so they poured out their sad story to someone who seemed so willing to listen. How wonderfully kind and compassionate is our Lord. He could well have chewed them out, to say the least, for their lack of faith in him. Had not he told them that unless a seed dies, it abides alone, but if it dies it bears much fruit? (John 12:24).
But no, Jesus does not rebuke them. The way that Jesus dealt with the situation is a lesson to all that are in a position to help those who have lost hope. They need companionship. They need a listening ear before a stream of good advice. The last thing they need is a brisk “cheering up” talk or being told to “snap out of it.”
Instead, let us be there with them. Let us love them by listening, by accepting what it is that they feel. There will be time later to point them to the way of hope, to the One in whom hope is to be found, but first things first. It is then that the heart-breaking experience changes to a:
2. A HEART-SEARCHING EXPERIENCE.
“He was” - notice the use of the past tense, which strongly implies that he was not relevant to the present or otherwise they would not have been in their present downcast state of mind. Their experience of Jesus was in the past, and they thought they were alone. The Cross had taken Him from them, and their minds had not made sense of the changed situation, or adjusted to it. The Cross was just a great negative to them.
We have all heard exciting testimonies of what Jesus has done in the past - but what about the present? The past is history. The question must be: is Jesus “a present, bright reality” to those who give their experience, to you and me? Do we always recognize him beside us? Life has many distractions - hard work, routine, and tiredness, ill health - which can so grind us down that we become mechanical, never lifting our eyes - or minds - from the dust of the earthly road we travel.
We become unaware of the glory and strength of his presence with us. Life loses its meaning and leaves us washed out, but this story gives us hope. Jesus is still there. He is the unseen “stranger,” walking with us, listening to us and, if we are willing to hear his voice, revealing himself to us. As the two disciples spoke of the Cross he took hold of their bewilderment and sorrow and gave them a heart-warming experience.
How did he do it? He pointed them to God’s self-revelation in the Scriptures. Luke tells us, “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, Jesus explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.” Jesus must have given the Emmaus travellers the greatest Old Testament exposition in history - to a congregation of two! It was then that the jigsaw of the types, shadows and symbols of the Old Testament revelation began to come together.
He would have reminded them that right back at the Fall of Mankind the apparently victorious Satan, in the form of the serpent, was told that the seed, the offspring of the woman “will crush your head, and you will bruise his heel” Genesis 3:15. What a wonderful anticipation of Jesus at Calvary.
And so was foretold the story of the cosmic struggle between death and life, of the pattern of death and resurrection in the Old Testament revelation. It is clearly visible in the life of Abraham, sacrificing his dear and only son Isaac and getting him back again; of Joseph, preserved to become the benefactor of his brothers who tried to destroy him.
Of the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt after having been saved from the angel of death through the sign of the blood of the Passover lamb. Jesus would have recalled His own teaching of how the Israelites escaped physical death in the wilderness from a plague of serpents when they looked trustingly to a great bronze serpent which Moses raised on a pole, pointing out that He too would be lifted up on the Cross, “that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life in him” John 3:15.
Jesus would surely have taken the now speechless disciples through the Suffering Servant of Jehovah passages in Isaiah. He would have recounted how the nation of Israel, taken into exile and brought back again to rebuild Jerusalem, was a symbol of the greater redemption through personal salvation through faith in Him.
Here was proof that Jesus had fulfilled that which had been prophesied over the centuries; that these Old Testament anticipations of His passion and triumph of life over death, proved that He was indeed the Messiah. The two disciples could not have expected that sharing their problem with the stranger on the Emmaus road brought them towards a solution.
But there was more to it than that. Christ was not there beside them simply to help them to find solutions - he was in the problem itself. Jesus told His two listeners, “Did not the Christ have to suffer these things.” In other words, did He die in vain? Was there no purpose to His life?
Cleopas and his companion accepted the gentle rebuke that Jesus made as He said they were slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken. Perhaps the key word is “all.” It was not that they had not read the OT, but perhaps they had read the Scriptures selectively, concentrating on those parts that spoke of a triumphant Messiah who would be kind to his enemies and be victorious.
The passages that spoke of a suffering servant did not fit in with their expectation of the Messiah and they would tend to skip over them. When they had been given the exposition from the Scriptures they reacted positively, and in fact they wanted even more, which led them to:
3. A HEART-BURNING EXPERIENCE.
God gave to the world the greatest and the most perilous gift in the world, the gift of free will; and we can use it to invite Christ into our hearts or allow Him to pass on and knock on someone else’s door.
“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me” Revelation 3:20.
This door, there is no outer knob or handle to it. I expect there is a handle, it is on the inside! This is very much the situation in the Emmaus story. It was a test to see if the disciples had more appetite for the things of God. They did. We are told that they urged Jesus strongly, ‘Stay with us ...’ that is the sort of invitation that Jesus cannot resist!
They need not have asked Him in; He was ready to move on. But no, their hearts had been won over. A basic meal was quickly got ready. The bread is on the table and the moment for Jesus’ disclosure has come. How does He do it? “He took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them.” It was the action of the breaking of bread. They saw His hands - they were different from when He had broken bread at the Feeding of the Five Thousand, and at the Last Supper. They were the nail-pierced hands of Jesus. In an instant they knew Him. And in an instant, He is gone...vanished out of their sight!
Why did Jesus have to disappear? Could not He have stayed longer? He could, but He did not because it is all part of the education of His last 40 days on Earth - how to manage without His bodily presence from now on; exactly the same as we have had to do for some 2,000 years now. But He is with us still by His Holy Spirit; He is with us as we fellowship with Him in worship and, in obedience to His command, as we remember Him in the “breaking of bread” communion service.
I can imagine Cleopas and his friend standing in amazement; perhaps embracing in great joy, asking each other “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” Their world had come together again. That heart-burning experience is something that we all need. We need it in a conversion experience when the Spirit of God makes us realize that we need Jesus as our Saviour and Lord. We need it as we allow the Holy Spirit to apply the truths of Scripture in our daily walk with Jesus.
CONCLUSION:
The two disciples lost no time in retracing their steps back to Jerusalem to share the Good News. May that be our experience as we leave and continue walking our road?
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