Second Pass at This Weekend's Bible Lesson: Luke 24:13-35

[For an explanation of what this is about, see here.]

The Passage:

v. 13 Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, 14and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. 15While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, 16but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. 17And he said to them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” They stood still, looking sad. 18Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” 19He asked them, “What things?” They replied, “The things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, 20and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. 21But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things took place. 22Moreover, some women of our group astounded us. They were at the tomb early this morning, 23and when they did not find his body there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. 24Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said; but they did not see him.” 25Then he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! 26Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” 27Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. 28As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. 29But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. 30When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. 31Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. 32They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” 33That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. 34They were saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” 35Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

Verse-by-Verse Comments:
v. 13: (1) The location of Emmaus is still unknown. It's thought to have been about 6-8 miles from Jerusalem. There, excavations have found the remains of a first-century village. Apparently, the Crusaders thought this was the site of Emmaus, too. The best manuscript evidence says that Emmaus was located 60 stadia from Jerusalem. According to the New Interpreter's Bible (NIB), one stadium was 600 Roman feet; 60 stadia is about 7.5-miles.

(2) While v. 18 will give the name of one of the disciples as Cleopas, the other remains anonymous to us. Significant though, is the fact that Jesus here reveals Himself, as was true at the tomb, not to the apostles, the inner circle, but to others of His followers.

The word disciple translates the Greek New Testament word, mathetes, which means student or follower. Disciples attached themselves to teachers or rabbis, literally following them to learn.

Jesus, by the time of His execution on the cross, no doubt had many hundreds of disciples. The apostles made up that group of people, by the time of Jesus' resurrection down to 11 in number, who were called to a special ministry by Jesus. The word apostle is a transliteration of the Greek New Testament word, apostlos. It literally means sent one. The apostles were charged with leading the Church in carrying the Good News of new life through faith in Jesus Christ to all the world.

The fact that the risen Jesus first appeared to His female disciples and now appears to these men who were followers, but not apostles, points us to the fact that there are no spiritual superstars in God's Kingdom. All who turn from sin and believe in Jesus Christ are part of it, even if God calls them to differing functions. (First Peter 2:9-10) All believers also enjoy direct access to God and all are called to share the Gospel with the world, in their own particular ways, among their own circles of friends and acquaintances.

By the way, Paul reports that at least five-hundred of Jesus' disciples saw Him after His resurrection, each risking enmity, rejection, persecution, and death to affirm that He was risen. (See here.) (Also see here, where I discuss Jewish New Testament scholar Pinchas Lapide's conclusion that Jesus was physically resurrected from the dead.)

v. 14: The two are discussing Jesus' death and the report they've received of His resurrection. Like others of Jesus' followers, they had either heard first-hand or through others, the report of the women who had gone to the tomb to anoint Jesus' body only to be told that He had risen. Like the others, apparently, they dismissed the report as an idle tale. Now, as they walk along toward Emmaus, they evidently are trying to understand what has happened.

Of course, they might well have wondered what had become of Jesus' body. But at a deeper level, they probably wondered what had become of their hopes that Jesus was the Christ, God's anointed.

Like their fellow Jews, in spite of Old Testament prophecy, they no doubt believed the triumphalistic notions of a Messiah who would liberate Judea and establish a long reign of earthly prosperity for God's people. Jesus' submission to a cross, the most debasing and humilating form of execution ever devised, simply didn't compute for Jesus' first followers. This was the case even though He had told them many times that He would die...and then rise.

vv. 15-16: I must confess that I'm a bit confounded by these two verses or more precisely, by most interpretations of them offered by scholars.

Most say that the two disciples were prevented from recognizing Jesus by God. They point to the passive voice in which the passage is written, the verb form indicating that the two were acted upon by someone or something.

But I find no reason to suppose that God would prevent the two disciples from recognizing Jesus only to help them to see Him later. The sight/blindness motif is particularly strong in Luke's writing (the Gospel and the book of Acts). Luke makes it clear that God's aim is always to help us see--or understand--things like Jesus' Lordship, God's acceptance of sinners by grace, that Jesus is Messiah and Savior, and so on.

My own feeling is that the thing that prevented them from recognizing the risen Jesus was their own unbelief, the same thing that initially prevented Thomas from believing that Jesus had risen in John 21.

It would make no sense for Jesus to later gently upbraid these two disciples for being "foolish" if God had enforced foolishness on them.

Indeed, it's impossible for me to imagine that God would force unbelief on any of us. God doesn't play those games. Just as He will not force any of us to believe in and follow Christ, nor would He do the opposite.

v. 17: (1) Here we have an irony in its ultimate Greek sense: One who seems not to know, who actually knows more than the ones who think they know it all. The disciples are incredulous that Jesus doesn't know about Jesus.

By the way, Shakespeare used such irony, too. His court jesters were usually smarter than the people for whom they worked, who assumed their superiority to the jesters. And one of the things that makes the comedy of Laurel and Hardy so funny is that, as I think their biographer John McCabe pointed out, you had a dumb one and a smart one who was actually dumber than the dumb one.

These comedic references are appropriate as we look at this passage. After all, what could be more hilarious than God coming into the world largely unrecognized, allowing Himself to be sacrificed for the sins of the very people who kill Him, and then, refusing to stay dead? The resurrection only proves that God knows a few more things than we do, in spite of all our pretensions to the contrary. (In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the Christ-figure, Aslan, tells the children that the White Witch who had executed him in conformity with the Deep Magic was unaware of the Deeper Magic that if one who was without treachery died in the place of a traitor, "Death itself would start working backwards...")

(2) "They stood looking sad." These words confirm that the two disciples are hopeless and unwilling to believe the reports of the women from the tomb.

(3) Their sadness, Chris Haslam says, also has to do with the fact that, "Jesus has disappointed them; they expected him to deliver Israel from Roman domination, and to begin an earthly kingdom of God." They not only mourn Jesus' death, but the death of their triumphalistic aspirations.

v. 18: More irony.

vv. 19-24: (1) As NIB points out, Jesus' question is even briefer in the original Greek than it is here. "Poia?" He asks. "What things?"

(2) This brief question unleashes a torrent of words in response, 112 in the Greek.

(3) In their telling of the events of the previous three days, the two convey the same skepticism seen in v. 11.

vv. 25-27: Luke's fulfillment motif--Jesus as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy--plays out here in Jesus' response to the disciples. Throughout Luke's other book, Acts, he portrays the first-century Church proclaiming the story of redemption through Jesus Christ by telling the story of God's people, as recounted in the Old Testament. Jesus doesn't represent some break with the Jewish past; He is its fulfillment, His story the seamless continuation of God's plans for His people and for the whole human race from the beginning.

The NIB says, "The revelation of the Easter reality begins with the fulfillment of the Scriptures, just as the Gospel opened with emphasis on this theme in the first chapter."

vv. 28-32: (1) According to NIB, Jesus' apparent initial intention of walking on past the strangers' home in Emmaus comports with first-century Near-Eastern social convention. "The guest was obligated to turn down such an invitation until it was vigorously repeated (see Gen 19:2-3). Theologically, Jesus' action demonstrates that he never forces himself upon others. Faith must always be a spontaneous, voluntary response to God's grace."

(2) Opinion is divided on whether the meal that is shared here is the Eucharist, Holy Communion. I don't think it necessarily needs to have been. In three of the four epiphanies cited in my first pass at this lesson, recognition of God or of an angel happens over a meal. Luke has a big meal motif in his telling of Jesus' story, the sharing and fellowship at the table being a place of intimacy, hospitality, and openness to God.

(3) What I do think is happening here is that at the moment the two disciples were open to showing this stranger hospitality, they saw Christ.

(4) When one takes the various resurrection accounts from the four Gospels together, we get a picture of Jesus as both material and immaterial. He is no longer bound by space and time, though He voluntarily accepted these limitations before His death. In His resurrected being, Jesus, I think, points to two important realities:

• His ability to be with us and to intercede for us in the counsels of heaven wherever we are, whenever we are.

• What we will be like in our resurrected form. Eternity isn't, as C.S. Lewis points out, life forever--although that's not a bad way of expressing what it is. Eternity really is the "eternal now." That's the time dimension all who believe in Jesus will inhabit with God. An analogous spatial dimension will also be ours, what we might call the "eternal here."

(5) NIB suggests that in v. 29, Jesus models the ministry He commends to His followers in Luke 10:7 and 9:4.

v. 33: (1) Although it was already late and it was dangerous to travel outside the walls of a city at night, Cleopas and the other disciple trek back to Jerusalem. They're excited!

(2) In this passage, we see another motif of Luke's: Once a person has seen Jesus or understood Who He is, that good news isn't to be kept to one's self. It needs to be shared. In the book of Acts, chapter 9, the former persecutor of the Church, a guy who would come to be called Paul, immediately began telling others about Christ. When is the right time for a Christian to begin sharing Christ with others? Right away! Sure, new believers may get some things wrong. (So do old believers.) But how can one possibly not tell others about the Savior Who died and rose so that all who sin can be reconciled with God and live with Him in eternity?

v. 34: When they get back to the other disciples, they're told what they already know, that Jesus has risen from the dead. The report that Simon (Peter) saw the risen Jesus is consistent with what Paul writes in First Corinthians 15:3-5. (Note: Cephas is the Latin version of the Greek name, Petros, transliterated from the Greek as Peter.)

v. 35: This is when the two tell the others that they too, have seen the risen Jesus, and recognized Him in their fellowship over the meal.