Sermons
April 27, 2025 (2nd Sunday of Easter)
“There was something in our eyes.”
Luke 24:13-35
Today’s story is, I suspect, among the Easter stories second in popularity only to the one in John 20, in which Mary Magdalene encounters the risen Christ in the garden outside his tomb. The reason may well be because we can all identify with it—even though none of us was there when they crucified our Lord, even though none of us was in that upper room when the women came rushing back from the tomb to tell the disciples the tomb was empty and angels had said Jesus was alive.
I’m not sure who it was who first suggested these two travelers on the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus that Sunday night might have been husband and wife. This is contrary to the famous rendering by artists such as Rembrandt[1] and Caravaggio,[2] which show both of the travelers as bearded men. (Oddly, both of these have not two but three people at the table with Jesus; but they’re still definitely all male.) Robert Zünd’s 1887 depiction,[3] which hangs on church walls all over the world, is a tad more ambiguous. One of the travelers is only shown from the back, so we can’t see whether it’s a man or a woman.
We are only told the name of one of the travelers; it’s fairly common in the Bible, unfortunately, that women are not named. The ones we do know the names of are generally pretty prominent women, like Mary Magdalene, but this is the only time we hear of Cleopas and his anonymous companion at all. (Well, actually, there might be one other mention: in John’s Gospel there is a “Mary the wife of Clopas” listed among the women who were at the Cross.[4] But we don’t know if these are the same people we hear of in today’s passage from Luke.)
A lot of us preachers nowadays like the idea that these two were Cleopas and his wife, whose name might have been Miriam (the Hebrew version of the name Mary). Personally, I find it easier to talk about people if I know their names, so I’m going to use that name for Cleopas’ companion—and assume she was his wife.
I think it’s quite interesting that scholars have no idea where Emmaus was. All we can do is guess, but nobody knows for sure.
Because of that, we can imagine that it could be just about anywhere.
When we leave the cemetery after burying a loved one, heading home to figure out how to live without them, we get there via the road to Emmaus. When we walk out of our place of employment for the last time, personal effects in a copy-paper box, we may leave on the road to Emmaus. If we graduate during a difficult economic time, maybe with the burden of student loan debt looming over us but no particularly bright job prospects awaiting us, the path forward is the road to Emmaus. If our marriage ends and we find ourselves asking questions like, “Who gets the house?” or “Which furniture goes and which stays?” or “Which friends are your friends and which are mine?” we might well be standing at a fork in the road to Emmaus.
The road to Emmaus is the journey of anyone who wonders, “What do we do now?”
That’s where Cleopas and Miriam were. They had been at the Last Supper, where Jesus said, “One of you will betray me,” and correctly predicted that Peter would pretend he didn’t know him when the chips were down. They had watched from a frightened distance with some of the other disciples, as Jesus hung on that cross, crying out the words of the Psalm: “Why have you forsaken me?”[5] They had sat silently through the awful Saturday after that, when they couldn’t do anything to keep their minds off what had just happened.
On Sunday they gathered what few belongings they had, and went to say goodbye to the others. But when they got there, all the disciples were talking at once, excited and confused and frightened—and maybe a little hopeful—all at the same time. Several of the women had been to the tomb that morning and found it empty. They said they’d seen some people in dazzling clothes—they had to have been angels, right?—who told them Jesus had been raised. And they said that when they heard that, suddenly something Jesus had tried to tell them, clear back in Galilee, had come back to them.
“Don’t you remember? He said that when we got to Jerusalem, he was going to be arrested and crucified, and then he would rise again on the third day. He knew all along, and he tried to tell us, but we didn’t understand.” But the rest of the disciples still didn’t understand, even though Peter did go look at the empty tomb for himself.
Cleopas and Miriam stayed for awhile, talking things over with the others, trying to make sense of what the women had seen; but they had a long walk ahead of them, so they eventually said their goodbyes and went on their way.
As they walked they talked over what had happened and what they had heard that morning. They talked about how what Jesus had told them in Galilee would happen when they got to Jerusalem didn’t make sense then, and wondered if it made any more sense now, really.
There was an empty tomb, but so what? It wouldn’t be the first time a grave had been robbed, although what robbers could hope to find in the tomb of a hastily-buried crucifixion victim was beyond them. Maybe it was some of Jesus’ enemies, just trying to insult him that much more by desecrating his grace and stealing his body. Maybe they’d make a display out of it, to mock him and those who dared to call him Lord.
Cleopas and Miriam sure didn’t want to be around when that happened, and as if to avoid it, their steps away from Jerusalem grew a bit quicker.
It was then that they noticed they weren’t alone. A man had joined them on the road, someone they didn’t immediately recognize. He asked them what it was they were talking about.
At that they just stopped walking; the enormity of the weekend’s horror suddenly felt like a ten-ton weight on their shoulders. But the stranger took the story in his stride, not even a little bit nonplussed by the confusion Cleopas described among the disciples in Jerusalem. And then he started quoting Scripture!
He told them about how their sacred texts had pointed toward a suffering Servant, an anointed ruler of a completely different sort than the world had ever seen. Cleopas and Miriam had always enjoyed studying the scriptures—no, Miriam couldn’t have studied with a rabbi in that time and place, but maybe she had a father who wanted to make sure she had the opportunity to learn anyway—it seemed to give them energy like nothing else in their lives. This time was no different. They didn’t even notice how much more intense that feeling of excitement at studying God’s word was as this stranger taught them.
Then they came to the turnoff where they would head into the town of Emmaus. Their house was close by, not more than a block past the city limits, and they could see that a neighbor had lit a lamp, so anyone up to no good would think the house was occupied. The stranger began to say his goodbyes and head on down the road, but Miriam urged him to stay with them; the roads weren’t safe at night, and they had a little bit of unleavened bread they had brought with them from Jerusalem.
They went into the house, and Cleopas and the stranger sat down at the table to talk some more, while Miriam went into the kitchen to put together a bite of supper. She brought the food in, and set the table.
Since the stranger was clearly a rabbi and worthy of some respect, Cleopas asked him to bless the meal. He took up the bread and said the traditional prayer: “Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.” Then he broke the bread, as Cleopas and Miriam remembered all the times they had been with Jesus and heard him say those words over broken bread…and in the same instant both of them looked up and realized it was him, saying the blessing and breaking bread again, right there in their house!
But as he put the bread back down on the plate, he vanished, and they sat stunned in the dim light of the tiny olive-oil lamp Miriam had carried to the table.
Again they remembered what Jesus had said in Galilee, but now it made sense. And as they tried to process the reality that Jesus is truly risen, they remembered the feeling they’d had as they listened to him teach from the Scriptures as they walked. Of course they always felt elevated after studying the Law and the Prophets, but the feeling had been so much more this time—almost as if their hearts were on fire! They knew those texts, had always known them, could remember the first time they had been asked to memorize them in Sabbath school or at their father’s knee; but they had understood them in a completely new way as Jesus had reminded them of them on that road, that road that had seemed so long and so hopeless until he began to speak.
Miriam jumped up from the table and wrapped the broken bread in a napkin. They were going back to Jerusalem. It didn’t matter that it was the middle of the night—didn’t matter that everybody knew the open road was not a safe place to be at night. They had to go back, and tell the others it was true! They had to tell Peter and James and John that the women had been right.
Now that they remembered, they understood what the events of the weekend meant, and they had to go tell the others, right now! It couldn’t wait till morning. Jesus had met them on their journey of despair, just as Jesus has met his people many times since, on our own journeys of despair, and set our hearts ablaze with hope.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supper_at_Emmaus_%28Rembrandt,_Louvre%29
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supper_at_Emmaus_(Caravaggio,_London)
[3] https://bibleconnections.wordpress.com/the-road-to-emmaus/
[4] John 19:25
[5] Psalm 22:1