The Stranger on the Road

On the road to Emmaus, two disciples walk away from everything they had hoped would be true—until a stranger joins them. Except, it's not a stranger; Jesus meets them in their disappointment, He opens the Scriptures, and He reveals Himself in Word and Sacrament. He does the same for us.

If you’ve ever found yourself saying, “we had hoped…”, this is for you. Because the risen Christ still walks with you—and gives you new words to speak: “The Lord has risen indeed.”

Transcript

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In Matthew 28, Jesus said, Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. He calls you to be that disciple. To hear his word, to receive his promises, to repent, to believe. That Jesus is the way. Grace to you and peace from God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. Now hear the good news. It's a long walk for you. Seven miles. But walk it. And you'll see. If you're doing it while you're talking, it's probably somewhere between two and three hours to walk seven miles. Walk it. Don't take a car. Don't have headphones on the whole time. Don't be distracted. Just you. The road and your thoughts. Seven miles is long enough for everything to just kind of spill out. Long enough for disappointment to begin to truly settle in. Long enough for those words to come out with crystal clarity. We had hoped. That's where this story begins. Two followers of Jesus are walking away from Jerusalem. Walking away from everything that had just happened. Walking away from hope. That's what they say. We had hoped. We had hoped he was the one. We had hoped things would turn out better than they did. We had hoped God would act sooner or differently or more clearly. Seven miles is long enough to say all of that. Again, they had seen what Jesus could do. They had seen him heal the sick, give sight to the blind, make the lame walk, cast out demons with just a single word, feed thousands from almost nothing, turn water into wine. They had seen power and authority. They had seen what looked like the beginning of something that was going to be extraordinary. And so, of course, they had hope. But that's all gone now. They had hoped that he was going to fix everything and bring victory and remove suffering and reign in glory. Not hang on a cross. And so they had a picture. They had a picture of how this story was going to play out. And then it all changed because the cross happened. And everything they had hoped seemed to fall apart. And if we're honest, that's not just the sentence from these two followers that are walking away from Jerusalem. Because we've seen things too. We've seen what Jesus can do. We've heard the promises. We know his power. We believe that he is the one. And so we build our own pictures in our minds of how this story is going to play out, how we expect it to, how we think it should play out. And so we say those words. We had hope. We had hoped that this season of life that we're in right now that it would be easier than it is. We had hoped that things in our lives would feel maybe a little bit more settled by now. We had hoped we'd be further along than this. We had hoped that our family wouldn't have the kind of strain that it does. We had hoped our kids would stay in the faith, that they'd stay close in the faith. We had hoped that a particular conversation, we hoped that it would have gone differently, but it didn't. We had hoped that forgiveness for others, for ourselves, would come easier than it does. We had hoped our faith would feel stronger than it does right now. And that we wouldn't still have these doubts, and that prayer, when we would go to God in prayer, it would feel more certain. And that God would feel closer to us than He maybe feels right now. Those are just a few of those things. And then there are the heavier things that we hope for, and we say, that hope feels like it's gone. We had hoped that the pain would be gone by now. We had hoped that things in life wouldn't have gotten this difficult. We had hoped that the cross that we're carrying right now wouldn't actually be our cross to carry. We had hoped that we wouldn't feel so alone, or that we would be past this particular sin, or that we wouldn't keep falling into the same kind of patterns over and over. We had hoped that we had more time than we do. And even in the life of the church, we say those same kind of things. We had hoped that more people would come and that things would grow faster and that there'd be more fruit from all of the work and that people would respond differently. Seven miles, two, three hours. Seven miles is long enough to say all of that. And that's when Jesus meets them. He meets them on the road. And Luke tells us that as they were talking together about all these things that they had taken that had taken place, and all these things that they were hoping for, and now that hope is all gone. It says that Jesus drew near and he went with them. But, and here's a key detail, their eyes were kept from recognizing him. In other words, he's walking right next to them, but they don't notice who he is. They don't see him for who he is. They think that he's just a stranger on the road. And so he acts like a stranger. He listens, he asks questions. What are you talking about here? And he lets them do all the talking. And so they stop and they're sad, their faces are downcast. Are you the only one who doesn't know all these things that have taken place at this point? The news would have traveled so that even a stranger would have understood this, but not this one, apparently. And so they tell him all of it about Jesus, about the cross, about the tomb, about the confusion that they had, even though the women went and told them that all this took place, still confusion. And that's when we get those words that resonate so well. We had hoped. Jesus comes to them. Not as they know him, but he comes to them as a stranger. Not in triumph or glowing or in this kind of unmistakable glory that we even associate with the resurrection, but as someone they don't recognize. Someone even ordinary. Someone who walks with them and he listens to them and he lets them tell their version of these events. But they get it wrong. They get the story wrong. And here's why this matters for us, because we get the story wrong too, don't we? And when you get the story wrong, you don't just talk differently, you live differently. If the story goes like this, if God is supposed to fix all things and is strong enough to fix all things, then why hasn't he fixed this? And then what happens? What happens when he doesn't fix things the way that I expect those things to be fixed? When that doesn't happen, you start looking somewhere else. You start chasing advice that promises those quick answers, quick fixes. You start listening to different voices, voices that feel more certain, more immediate, more like they really have a handle and are in control of things going on in your life. You start building your life on whatever seems to work in this moment in time. And again, maybe that means self-help. And self-help that ends up replacing this kind of dependence on God. And instead it turns to dependence on you. You handle your life. Or maybe it means seeking a kind of wisdom that comes from the world that slowly pulls at the fabric and the truth of Scripture of what it's actually telling you. Maybe it means, and we see this a lot, maybe it means isolating yourself. Isolating yourself from family, from friends, isolating yourself from the church, because it just doesn't feel like those spaces are working for you. Maybe it means treating God like a reasonable option, but really just one of the options, instead of letting God kind of define the whole story. And that's what happens. Before you realize it, you too say those words we had hoped. And again, it's not just what you say, you start living it. And you're walking away. Away from the promises, away from the word, away from the place where Christ has promised to meet you. That's what these followers are doing. They're not just disappointed, they're headed in the wrong direction. So Jesus listens for a while and he asks questions. But eventually he does speak. And when he does speak, it's not soft like we'd imagine, at least not at first. He calls them foolish. He says they're slow to heart and to understand what the scriptures have been saying and pointing to. And he's not harsh just for the sake of being harsh. He's being clear. He's saying that you're missing it. You're misunderstanding all of this. You're looking for the wrong kind of savior. And that's when Jesus says, wasn't it necessary? Wasn't it necessary that the Christ should suffer and then enter into his glory? Necessary. You see, the cross, the cross was not a detour. On this road that is on to bigger and better things. It's not a failure. It's not plan B. The cross was the plan. And so for the rest of their journey together, Jesus opens the scriptures to them to show them this plan. And so imagine that walk. Jesus opening the scripture, every promise, every sacrifice, every prophecy, all pointing to him. Not one story that's kind of disconnected from another, not one story that has a really nice moral lesson that we can attribute to it. But no, each story coinciding with one another, connecting each to each other, all pointing to this story, to his story, to this one plan of salvation for the world. From Moses to the promised land and to Joshua and to Saul and to David and to Esther and to Job and to all of it, pointing to Jesus. And slowly something begins to change. They didn't recognize him quite yet, but later they do say, didn't our hearts burn within us as he did all of this? Because that's what the word does. It doesn't just tell us information, inform us, it ignites something inside of us. It creates faith. That's what scripture says. Faith comes by hearing, not by seeing. And so they get to the end of their trip, the end of their journey, as they get to Emmaus, and Jesus acts as though, he pretends as though he's going to continue on. And they do what? They invite him in. They say, come in, have a meal with us. Again, they don't have everything figured out, but they do know that they want more of whatever they've had in these last seven miles together. And so they invite him in and they begin to share a meal, and then Jesus takes the bread. Jesus takes the bread and he blesses it and he breaks it and he gives it to them. And that's when they have the aha moment. Ah. This is Jesus. They finally recognize him. And just like that, he's gone. Earlier, Luke says they were kept from recognizing him. Now that's a strange detail. We would expect it to say something like, they just didn't figure it out, or they couldn't make sense of the fact that Jesus was right next to them. But no, it says that they were kept. Something stopped. It prohibited them from being able to see Jesus. That's not a throwaway detail, by the way. Because this is what Jesus is doing here. He's not simply trying to get them to realize that, oh, by the way, it's it's me, the same Jesus. You've watched me, you've walked with me, you know who it is. Because if he wanted to do that, he'd do the same thing that he did with Peter and Thomas and the rest of the disciples. He'd say, Hey, look, you see the scars? They're right here, they're right here. Take a look at them. No, he doesn't do that. Because he's intentionally trying to shape something in them so that they understand, they truly understand what has taken place. Not just that Jesus is alive. It's more than that. But showing them the kind of Messiah, the kind of savior he really is, so that they don't carry these assumptions about how they think God should work or how they think then their story should turn out. But that they can look at all of it and say, ah, this is how God works. And that's not an accident. Faith is not built on recognizing Jesus by sight. If it were, then you and I would have no chance. But it's not. Because here's the truth: soon, Jesus will be gone from their sight. He will ascend and be at the right hand of the Father. And they won't see him again like this. And so he's teaching them and us how things are gonna move, how things are gonna work going forward. We often call this the means of grace, the way that God has promised to show himself to you and to me. Through these means, these ways, the way that God is going to deliver his grace to you and me. And he does that through his word, through his sacraments. Again, this is no accident. This is how God promises to be present with his people, how he promises to be present with you and me. And notice, notice where they have that aha moment. It says, in the breaking of the bread. That is intentional. That's where they recognize him. In the breaking of the bread. The same Jesus who walked this road, who went to the cross, who rose from the dead, he still comes to you. But not as a stranger anymore, but as your savior. And yet, still he does it in ways that often look ordinary. Through water and word, through bread and wine, words that are spoken. And he says, This is where you're gonna find me. Through the Bible. He says, I'm all over the pages. I'm right there. After this long day, remember how it started. We often disassociate this story from other ones, but earlier this morning, the women went to the tomb thinking Jesus is dead, and they see him and they tell. And then they're walking away. After this long day, now they've walked seven miles in the heat of the day. They recognize Jesus, he vanishes. And then what do they do? They run back. They run back to Jerusalem. Seven miles again. But this time it's different. Because they're not walking back with those words we had hoped. They're walking back, they're running back, and they know the full story. Now it's Jesus really is alive. The Lord is risen indeed. The same road, the same distance, the same circumstances, mind you. The same circumstances in their world around them, but they have completely different words, and they have completely different and changed hearts. They have a completely different way of looking at and experiencing the world around them. And that's what the resurrection does. It doesn't change your circumstances, certainly not immediately, but it does change your language. It changes the lens by which you look at the world. And it changes, and this is important, it changes how you travel on that road. And so instead, instead of saying, we had hoped, they say, Christ is risen indeed, even here, even now. And that matters for us today as well. Because someone that is going through a particularly hard season in life and nothing seems to be breaking the way that they wanted, they can still say that Jesus is alive and Jesus is with me in this. Or someone who's just been diagnosed with something that is very hard for them to hear, and they hear that word, they hear those words, and it sounds ugly, and everything changes for them overnight, and yet they can still say, even in this, Jesus is victorious. Not because that particular diagnosis is good, but because death doesn't get the final word. Or someone who's burdened by guilt, by what they've done or what they've said, or what they can't undo, even though they'd want to. And instead of being stuck in it and say, Oh, I wish I hadn't done that, or I had hoped that I would be a better person, or I wish I didn't let the people around me down, or I wish I didn't let God down. They can say, that's all true, but my sin is forgiven. That Christ has paid for that, that there is no condemnation, zero, for those who are in Christ Jesus. Or someone who's stuck in a pattern of sin, and they're wondering, will this ever change? And what they could do is they could just give in to it and say, you know what, this is just who I am. But instead they say, No. In Christ, I am a new creation. I'm not defined by that anymore. You see, the road, it looks the same, and yet it's not the same at all. That stranger on the road is not a stranger at all, it's your savior. And he has been with you every step of the road, and he will be with you every step. And he is not just changing the destination that you're going to, he's changing your perspective of the whole story. That whatever you encounter, no matter what, whatever you encounter, you still have hope. Scripture says that hope is not. What you can see, but it's what you can't see. That's what makes it hope. And he gives you new words to say that you are forgiven. Those are new words to say over and over again that you're not alone on this road ever. And that even in this, whatever this is, even in this, Christ is victorious. And how do you know? Because Christ is risen indeed. Hallelujah. Amen.