Encountering the Risen Jesus in Scripture | Luke 24:13-35 | April 19, 2026

Teacher: Jay O'Brien

Scarlet City Church - Columbus, OH

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Well, I want to invite you to open your Bible to Luke chapter 24. I have some good news and some bad news. Are we a good news first and then the bad news kind of people, or do we want the bad news and then then with the good? Bad first, okay. Bad news, sad news, is we only have two more weeks in the Gospel of Luke. I hope some of you don't experience that as good. I'm genuinely sad. The good news is we will still be with Luke, journeying through the book of Acts in the Spirit's work through the church. So praise the Lord. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

All right, good.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

Um last week was Easter Sunday. This morning is Easter Sunday. The Orthodox Church celebrates this week as Easter, and the power of the resurrection is still at work. And at Scarlet City, we're still processing through and wrestling with encountering Jesus. Last week we looked at how to encounter the risen Jesus. Luke sets up the whole resurrection experience with uh women going to the tomb and they're going to anoint Jesus' body with spices. And this was common in their time. It was a way to honor the dead, and it was a way to preserve some of the smell from decay. And when they stumble into the tomb, Jesus is gone. There's two angels that say he is risen. They go and tell Jesus' disciples, and they don't all know what to do. They're confused. Do we believe this? What does this mean? Did someone steal his body? Luke sets all of that up to then how to encounter Jesus. And he begins with this, with two disciples, two followers of Jesus leaving Jerusalem on a road to a town called Emmaus. And we explore this encounter with Jesus, and we're reminded that we encounter the risen Jesus with him accompanying us in our pain and in sacrament as they see their eyes are open to the presence of Jesus when he breaks the bread. Next week we're going to wrap up the Gospel of Luke of what does it look like to encounter the risen Jesus through the church? And this week we continue that theme of encountering the risen Jesus through Scripture. I want to point us to a few passages that Luke presents to us here on this road to Emmaus encounter with Jesus and these two followers. In verse 26, wasn't it necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and enter into his glory? This is what Jesus says to them when they're confused. They've heard the news of the resurrection, they don't know what to do with it, they're perplexed, they're confused. And then Jesus says, Look, why are we surprised here? Wasn't this necessary? And verse 27, then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things written about himself in all the scriptures. This absolutely incredible process. I mean, sign me up for being right here on this road. As Jesus is interpreting the Bible and what it says about himself. Lest we think this is just one small little thing, Luke points our attention later in chapter 24, when Jesus is now with his disciples who had been hiding, they're all together. He surprises them and says, Peace be with you. And then he says this in verse 44. Then he said to them, These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. Then he opened their minds so they could understand the scriptures. This morning we want to explore encountering the risen Jesus through Scripture, through God's word. And this will require, as we're journeying together through basically these passages I read, going, asking some important questions. Questions like, what is the Bible and which scripture? Questions like, how do we interpret? What does this mean when Jesus does this? And how do we, what is this calling, what calling does this bring on our life? And as I was sharing this with Megan, you know, anything that I don't say you don't like, just blame her. That's uh thank you for laughing, Josh. That's a joke. It's really the opposite. Because, you know, as I'm thinking through here, like I had, I don't even know how many notes on different papyri and manuscripts and textual criticism and the first codex and all of the stuff. And some of you are hearing this right now and you're like, is there like an uncut version of this sermon we can get? Because that sounds amazing. How Megan experienced it was can you make it make sure you make it relatable? I think for many of us, as we try to get to some of these kind of behind the scenes yet important conversations about the Bible itself, our eyes can glaze over. And I think there's a few reasons why. One, it can feel very technical, using words like canon and referencing certain church councils and what thinking about the deuterocanonical or apocrypher works. It's like a foreign language, and sometimes, like anytime you get technical in any profession, we can it can feel like work to learn the terms to even understand what we're talking about. I mean, just hang out with an engineer and just be like, hey, tell me about the things you do, and you might experience some of that. So there's work to even kind of get into the conversation. Another reason our eyes can glass over is it can feel irrelevant. You know, it can feel irrelevant. Like I kind of, you know, don't tell me how something works. Just help me understand what it can do for me. I think this way with my with most devices I encounter, like my iPhone, I'm not really curious about how it works. I just use it. My watch. I'm sure someone put a lot of work into this. A lot. I just, to me, it's just magic. Tells me how many steps I do and the time. Who could have ever figured that out? But people did, people worked. There's a whole process to this right here, this piece of technology. This is much of how I experience everything in life because I, in many ways, am a consumer. But you know, it's one thing to experience our technologies this way and so forth. But then other areas like food, if I just like, you know, pick up things, I'm like, is it edible? Ah, you know, like, no care about the process of what I'm eating, it can have some damaging effects on my health. If we look to this as an authority of our life and the means to discerning the nature of God, ourselves, and our world, we should want to take some time to understand how this is what it is, and what it even means, and how do we relate to it? So there's this temptation to view it as irrelevant. There's this temptation for many to view it as a distraction, like these kind of academic conversations. For some, it can feel like it takes away from the mystery. And then for many in their journeys, some of these conversations related to the Bible and what it is and how we have it can actually be damaging to their faith. And I think one of the reasons for that is because we don't talk about it in our churches. And so we watch a YouTube video where all the great truths of the world are unpacked, and we see someone who's an academic or appears smart, and they start to undermine some of our things. And we're like, I didn't know that was part of how, you know, the how it was made, and and it can lead to questions. One of the beauties, and I want to say this right from the jump, that does not need to be your story. For me, in one of my seasons of, I would say like a crisis of faith, where I really began to ask some hard questions, it was the topic we're talking about today that really bolstered my faith. That what we have in our scripture is amazing. And the work and what it says about God and his work in the world, when we ask these behind the surface questions, can be one of the most formative and faith-affirming aspects of our spiritual journey. All that to say there's nothing to be afraid of. We are people of the truth. We're not spinning here, we're people of the truth. And so, when it comes to, if we think of this as truth, what is the truth behind getting to it? Now, that's a lot. And I can't get to all of it. And so, my kind of hope is we're gonna touch on some of this, and I I hope you're curious. And I hope there's a party that's like, wow, that's interesting. Can we like explore that more? And if that's where you're at, shoot me a text, an email. I don't really read Facebook messages, but you can try. And I would love nothing more than to hang out and we can be Bible nerds and we can do this together. But I hope this wets the appetite. Let's go. All right, that's the longest disclaimer.

SPEAKER_00 10:34

Again, encountering the risen Jesus through Scripture.

SPEAKER_01 10:43

The first way we do it, I'm gonna be a little more like we're gonna kind of look on the passage and journey through it rather than kind of walking here, okay? That's kind of how we're we're looking at this. The first thing when it comes to encountering the risen Jesus is submitting to the authority of scripture as established by Jesus and the church. Jesus submits to and affirms the binding authority of the scriptures. It's how he relates to it, it's how it plays out in our passage over and over in the Gospel of Luke. The scriptures for Jesus are not just, hey, this is some kind of wise things among many other wise things in life, but it's binding for him, it's authority for him. He appeals to it, interprets himself, and so forth. Verse 27, we see Jesus, then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things written about himself in the scriptures. In just a moment, we're gonna get to the interpreted about himself part of this passage. But first we want to ask scriptures. Which scriptures? What does it mean? What is scripture about? You see, at Jesus' time, and we mentioned this uh several weeks ago, there was debate about what the scriptures were. The sect of the Sadducees believed the scriptures were confined to just the Torah or the law, or in Jesus' language, Moses. These are the first five books of the Bible. So the Sadducees, which is largely the priestly leadership at the time of Jesus in Judea, they only held to the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, as the Bible. The Pharisees, who we've had so much fun with in this journey through Luke, they viewed the Torah and the prophets and what is often called the writings or the Psalms as scripture. That's the camp where Jesus is. And we see that even how he labels it. Again, you know, the writings of Moses and the prophets, that's what he's getting at when he says that. Later, he says then in verse 44, then he said to them, These are my words that I spoke to you while I was with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses, Torah, and the prophets, and the Psalms must be fulfilled. So the Psalms is shorthand here, Jesus referring to the writings. He puts it this way in Luke chapter 16. Verse 16, the law and the prophets, do you understand? When Jesus is saying that, what he's saying is the Bible, the law, first five books of the Bible and the prophets, everything else were in force until John, since then the good news of the kingdom of God has been proclaimed, and everyone is urged to enter it. But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than one tiny stroke of a letter in the law, in the Torah, in the works of Moses, to become void. So Jesus is saying we're not doing away with the Hebrew scriptures. He's come to fulfill them. So which scriptures, what is the Bible? And I want to give a definition here that I'll unpack. Scripture is a library, a library of writings, both human in origin and divinely inspired, recognized by Jesus and the church as authoritative for Christian belief in life. Let's have some fun. Here we go. Scripture is a library of writings. All right. This is the Bible. This is Andy Ware's Project Hail Mary. A book before it was a movie. Both what are the what are similarities here? Both have bindings, pages with words in them. You can read them. That's about where uh the uh and in English in the in this version. That's about where the similarities end. This is a unified book, it's a narrative, it's fiction, it's not real. This is a collection of books. This is a library of books, letters from from different genres. When Jesus and his contemporaries read the Bible, they did not hold something like this. They read it from scrolls. They would have had the scroll of Isaiah, the scroll of Daniel, and that scroll would have been placed in a collection of other scrolls. Scripture is a library of writings from different authors and different genres and different time periods. And this leads us to our second component here. Scripture is both human in origin and divinely inspired. Often people will weigh one over the other, but they're both important. I mean, think about it. Jesus himself, when he refers to the law, what does he say? Moses. He references the author. When you open your Bible and you look in the table of context, you know how they label most of the books? With the author. Jesus just doesn't say the Bible. He connects it to Moses. There's people behind these works. The Bible that we have is written by particular people in particular time, to particular people in particular times. It has a human element to it. God has chosen to reveal Himself through human culture, language, experience. It is not an alien text where God said, you know what? These people are a mess. We're gonna, we're gonna, like, you know, the was it called Artemis II? Yeah. Send the Bible down, it'll be a foreign language, they won't know anything about it, but eventually they'll hopefully figure it out because they're human and I'm God. And no, just like Jesus is human and divine, so is God's word. And when we read it, we we see that, right? I mean, the Psalms. The Psalms are some of the most human works anywhere. Pain, suffering, lament, joy, struggle, doubt, hope, faith. It is the human experience. Continuing on, recognized by Jesus and the church as authoritative. There is a term called canon, which refers to, canon is a Greek word which means rule or measuring stick. It refers to what which books belong in here and which do not. As you can imagine, you know, when they have scrolls, and this is how they're experiencing scripture, there's a collection of scrolls. Some people have many of them, some don't. But when you start binding it together, which the first bound books actually were a few years after Jesus, it was the late first century. And by the fourth century, it became the dominant form of passing on written material, and it was called a codex, where they began to write on the front and back of pages and bind it together. And when you started to do that, you can imagine, well, which books do we include? Right? Which ones make it? And so the early church had these debates and conversations, and it was a little wild. And so they went through this process of discerning which books in this library have authority, which books are inspired by God, and which are just helpful and useful, but not authoritative and binding in our life. You know, for example, a question would be like, why don't we have in our Bibles the Epistle of Barnabas or the Shepherd of Hermes? You're like, yeah, that is not a question I had, you know. You need to go back to Megan's advice here, you know. But those books were in the first full codex of the New Testament. Why are they not in ours? And so there was debate. Just like the Bible itself is human and divine, the process of getting the Bible has human and divine components in it. And so it kind of leads to this question like, why do we have the why are the books in here that the ones in here that we have? And this is a fun and amazing conversation. And you know, there are different views as one can imagine. But I think kind of the best scholarship would acknowledge these things. First, in order to have in the New Testament, the books in the New Testament that we have, the early church discerned. What were the books that were earliest written? They didn't want books written later. And can the book be tied to one of the apostles? These were the questions the early church was asking because there were letters and works going around that maybe had the name of a church leader, but it was pretty clear that it couldn't be traced directly to that person. And they didn't want to include those accounts. So which were authentically written by some of the apostles or connected to them. For example, Luke and Mark, two of the four gospels, were not written by one of the apostles. Luke was not one of the twelve apostles. And yet it's commonly assumed that he's connected to them, and so we trust it as authoritative. So what's your earliest written, which were tied to the apostles? And third, and probably most important, the early church, as they're discerning all this, I mean, wow, what a wild time. Jesus rises from the grave, beginning in Jerusalem, and people whose whole faith was tied to preserving their Jewish heritage and faith. All of a sudden, thousands in an instant are transformed. They encounter the risen Jesus, their whole life is shaped, and their whole future is changed. And they're now making sense of all of this.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

They were asking the question which works are most profitable? For our congregation. Which works did God work through here to produce fruit of the Spirit?

SPEAKER_01 22:11

You see, our the early church fathers and mothers, they weren't ivory tower theologians hanging out on campus somewhere, gathered together saying, What do we think about this? These were people living this out. Missionaries, husbands and wives and kids, and people who are single and making sense of all of this. And the Spirit worked through God's word and transformed lives. And so one of the most important measurements of which books belong is did this does this work have a record of blessing the church? And what we have in the New Testament are 27 works that pass all those tests. Early written, connected to apostles, and the church having experienced it as a blessing to them. And now, continuing on, I don't have a good transition. Encountering the risen Jesus through scripture, which scripture? Right? And what was the process of getting it? We didn't even touch much on the Hebrew scriptures, but continuing along. Next, we see that we encounter the risen Lord through Scripture and interpreting and internalizing the unifying message and story of both Jesus and Scripture. In our passage again, verse 27. Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he what? He interpreted to them the things written about himself in all of scriptures. Verse 44. Then he said to them, These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. Jesus' relation to scripture, they both inform each other. We understand Jesus' mission in the reading of the Hebrew scriptures, and now we understand the mission and message of the Hebrew scriptures in light of Jesus. One example of this is Jesus' first sermon that he gave, recorded in the Gospel of Luke, in Luke chapter 4. Jesus' first sermon, he's in Nazareth. We'll just pick it up in verse 16. Now Jesus came to Nazareth where he had been brought up and went into the synagogue on the Sabbath on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. Again, scroll. Here's Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and the regaining of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. This is what Jesus is reading from Isaiah. Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, sat down, the eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fixed on him. I mean, can you imagine? Then he began to tell them today this scripture has been fulfilled even as you heard it being read. Wowzers. They end up a little bit later trying to kill him.

SPEAKER_00 25:54

This says something about Jesus and something about Isaiah. Do you see?

SPEAKER_01 26:04

Later, and this in this road to Emmaus encounter with Jesus and these two disciples, when they encounter him and they realize it's Jesus, they say this to themselves in verse 32. They said to each other, Didn't our hearts burn within us while he was speaking with us on the road? Now some of us we encounter some heartburn. This is some good heartburn. This isn't bad.

SPEAKER_00 26:32

This is some good scripture heartburn. Why?

SPEAKER_01 26:39

Why were their hearts burning when Jesus was interpreting to them the scriptures? I was thinking about that, and it hit me. The reason I think their hearts were on fire as Jesus is interpreting to them all the Hebrew scriptures and showing how they were connected to himself and his mission.

SPEAKER_00 27:01

These two people had grown up around the Word of God, memorized it, prayed it, lived it, gave their whole life to it. The law was absolutely central to everything in their life. And now Jesus shows up and he shows them the point of it all.

SPEAKER_01 27:33

And can you imagine your whole life and you've read these stories and you've committed to your life to it? And Jesus shows up and He just takes you right to the whole point.

SPEAKER_00 27:47

And their heart's just on fire. What is the story of Scripture? And what is the story of Jesus? It is a story of creation and new creation.

SPEAKER_01 28:07

I mean, why is Jesus healing? These aren't just fun little party tricks. They're communicating that God is among us, and just like he was bringing life before, he is bringing life new. Why does the spirit so important in Luke? We're going to talk more about this next week and the next year. Why is the spirit so important? The same spirit that was present in Genesis 1, 2, hovering over the chaos, about to bring life, is at work now. Jesus' story and the story of Scripture is a story of creation and new creation. It is a story of humanity and new humanity. Why in the Bible do they always connect Jesus to Adam? You see, Adam represents us, but Jesus is the new Adam, bringing a new humanity, a new creation. We see the story of the temple. You can trace the temple story all the way back to Genesis 1, which, in my view, Genesis 1 is a poem and song setting up God as creator, inhabiting and filling his temple. We see the temple. How to encounter the presence of God. And now this temple imagery is connected to Jesus. It's why he brings judgment on the temple earlier in Luke. It's why he calls the church the very temple of God. It's why the veil is torn. All this imagery and fulfillment, do you see? Jesus is the new Exodus. Why so much connection to Moses? And why is our communion meal that we're celebrating a renewed Passover? It's a connection to the story of God at work in Exodus, liberating God's people from all that enslaved them. Jesus is the fulfillment of the church is the continuation. Why the kingdom?

SPEAKER_00 30:02

The atonement? The Sabbath. You see, the story and message of Scripture is connected to Jesus.

SPEAKER_01 30:14

The story continues. As you said, not one letter of the law is going to be abandoned. He is fulfilling it all. And ultimately, this is the story of God and his self-giving love. And these two followers, having encountered that, their hearts on fire. They're like, wow, it all makes sense. And for us, that moment where the Spirit takes the word of God and the good work of Jesus, and it's just like right to the heart. When we encounter that, it is beautiful. When we're reminded of the sheer mercy and grace and love of God and the power of that love, of the power of God and the promises of God, the grace of God to work today.

SPEAKER_00 31:12

Because the Spirit didn't stop then. And we all, like these two disciples, we have longings.

SPEAKER_01 31:21

We have hopes. We have a story of our lives that we long to be fulfilled. We long for goodness and justice and beauty and acceptance and belonging and meaning and love. And Jesus is the only one who can minister in all of those spaces, all of those human spaces of our lives. Again, encountering the risen Jesus in Scripture, and I'm about out of time. We submit to Scripture, and we're wise about what we mean by that. What is the Scriptures? There's an interpreting and internalizing of the story. And lastly, there's a joining. Joining Jesus in embodying the character and way of God taught in Scripture. Again, looking at verse 32, they said to each other, Didn't our hearts burn within us while he was speaking with us on the road, while he was explaining the scriptures to us?

SPEAKER_00 32:32

So they sat there and continued about their lives together. No. So they what?

SPEAKER_01 32:41

So they got up that very hour and returned to Jerusalem. They found the eleven and those with them and gathered together. Their road was taking them this way, and once they experienced that good and crazy scripture heartburn, they go back. When we encounter the risen Lord in the Bible and we internalize who he is, it will transform our life. It changes us. I want to point us here to Luke 10, this famous encounter in this parable called the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and it opens with Jesus and an expert in the law, and they're having a Bible debate. He said to them, What is written in the law? This is Jesus saying to him, to this expert in the law, how do you understand it? They're having, this is the Moses, this is the Torah, the written in the law. That's what he's asking. The expert answered him. He summarizes it with this Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. This is a good and acceptable thing to Jesus. Jesus said to him, You have answered correctly. Do this and you shall live. Good job. But the expert, wanting to justify himself, asked Jesus a question, Who is my neighbor? And they have a really fun conversation. Well, Jesus gives a really fun parable. Getting to the heart of this, and we explored this and we can't go into all the detail right now, sorry. One of the most beautiful stories in Scripture, Jesus here's this parable of this person who had been robbed and left for dead. And at the end of it, Jesus asks him a question. And the uh expert responds to this, the expert in religious law said to him, the one who showed him mercy to him. Jesus' question was, Who is the one who is neighboring rightly here? Who is loving his neighbor? Who is fulfilling this? He says, the one who showed mercy to him. Jesus said to him, Go and do the same. And that's what I want to emphasize. Go and live this. For Jesus, the story of God, the Bible, was not just something to study and interpret. It was something to go and do, to live, to embody. You see, God is revealing Himself today. The Spirit that was at work in the life of Jesus and the early church is at work in our lives today. And the Spirit is working in our hearts to help us interpret and internalize the message of the Bible and to form us and empower us to embody the message of the Bible.

SPEAKER_00 35:39

The story of Scripture is the story of God, his heart, his character, his goodness, his love.

SPEAKER_01 35:49

And that story is continuing now through us. We encounter the risen Jesus by joining him. By joining him in embodying God's character, God's way, God's love. When we think about the Bible, we need to be cautious of two ditches that we could fall into. One side is to relate to the Bible like some scientific textbook, studying it, learning it, becoming experts of the law in it, but doing it in such a way that it demands nothing of us and calls us to not embody and live. And the other ditch is to relate to the Bible as just some moral good news on some tips on living well, among other tips on living well. And Jesus reminds us that the Bible ultimately, fundamentally, is a story not about what we need to do to earn the love of God, but about how Jesus embodied the love of God on the cross and in resurrection. And our faith is in him, his work, his record that then shapes us and motivates us to live it. Let's enter now in encountering the very presence of Jesus through holy communion.