Christ Meeting with Doubters

“And it came to pass, as He sat at meat with them, He took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew Him; and He vanished out of their sight.”—Luke xxiv. 30, 31.

The passage: As Jesus sat at table with the two disciples, He took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it to them. Their eyes were opened and they knew Him, and He vanished from their sight.

We tend to suppose that people in the first century had spiritual advantages over people in the nineteenth, and that the inhabitants of Palestine had some access to the Eternal World that the inhabitants of England lack. The Apostles and Evangelists do not encourage this idea. They work to dispel it. Before His Passion, they say, Christ spoke with them about a Kingdom of God, and they had only the most confused glimpses of it. He told them they could not bear then what they would know after He had gone. They describe themselves as misunderstanding Him, as failing most when they thought themselves wisest, and as learning through terrible experience that they were no less cowardly or heartless than anyone around them.

If they discovered before the Resurrection that they were like other men, we might have expected His appearances afterward to be of a very special kind, marking the superiority of that age over all later ones. But the narratives of the forty days differ markedly from those of the earlier time. Christ appeared rarely and vanished quickly. While He was present to their bodily eyes, His chief lesson seemed to be that His intercourse with them did not depend on that presence. He was preparing them for a time when they could not look on Him even for a moment. That was the time He wanted them to look forward to, the beginning of their true knowledge of Him and full communion with Him. And in that time the Apostles stand on the same level as we do.

The story of the two disciples going to Emmaus records the most remarkable of those appearances, and none is described so minutely. It is also the one that later ages have most connected with their own experience, and the one that has done most to bridge the gap between them and those who saw and handled the Word of Life. Men have been sure it was written to tell them that this Word of Life is not far from any of them, and that it is their fault, not His, if they do not hear His voice and follow Him. Let us consider the narrative and see how this impression has been produced.

I. “Two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, about threescore furlongs from Jerusalem, and talked together of all these things which had happened.” Think what those events were, and what mark they have left on human society. After eighteen centuries Passion Week is still remembered in every city of Europe. So you try to imagine what those on the spot must have felt, with personal attachment and reverence deepening their amazement. Perhaps they could not speak at all; if they did, what words would come! All such expectations are disappointed. These men are like other men: perplexed and bewildered, unable to take the measure of what they have witnessed. The events must mean something, and they want to know what. There is gloom over their hearts, a misty sorrow, a sense of blank, and a craving for someone to interpret their strange doubts. We could guess this much even if we heard no more of their talk, and shortly we shall be sure of it. So we see that their thoughts were in all essentials like those of many friends walking this day to villages near London. These may not be talking of Passion Week, or even believe that what we hold to be so significant happened. But they may be asking each other gloomily whether their old hopes of something better for the world and themselves have not been scattered; whether friends they looked up to have not gone from sight or broken their promises; whether the tidings they heard in childhood of a Revelation and a Redemption have not lost their meaning, or turned into prophecies of darkness. How many live now with this weight on their hearts, and show by their speech and looks that they are sad!

II. “While they communed together and reasoned, Jesus Himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were holden that they should not know Him.” Again the Evangelist disappoints every notion we would have formed of how such an incident should be told. A man who has been laid in the grave suddenly presents himself to two men who used to see him and speak with him. Surely we expect a description of his look and manner, or at least some hint of doubt in their welcome. There is nothing of the kind. His tone is as unimpassioned as before. Jesus draws near and joins them. They do not know Him. That is the narrative. Nothing heightens the effect, and not a word makes us feel this was a new occurrence in the world’s history, one that would scarcely be repeated.

And why not? Because, brethren, I think it did not strike St. Luke as new or rarely to be repeated. He took the stranger’s coming as a sign of what had continually happened whenever two men, near Jerusalem or anywhere else, communed and reasoned together. He took it as a sign of what would happen later in cities and villages he had never heard of, where men of the same nature would meet and engage in the same arguments. Our Lord said, “Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.” If such men are asking what bond holds them to each other, what their friendship means, how they can share each other’s feeling and suffering, who gave them their sympathies, and whether these can survive separation and death, then they are asking about His name. He will show them the asking is not vain, and that His is the Name of a living Lord, not a dead one. He will prove He is in their midst not by revealing Himself to the eyes but by debating with their hearts and consciences the topics that concern them most. So the disciples’ advantage, which seemed so great at first, was in St. Luke’s judgment no advantage at all. They were to know Him just as all other men must know Him, and until they knew Him that way their eyes would be holden.

III. Jesus asked what they were discussing as they walked, sad. Cleopas answered, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who doesn’t know what has happened there?” “What things?” He said. They told Him: Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, was handed over by the chief priests and rulers to be condemned to death and was crucified. “But we trusted that it had been He which should have redeemed Israel.” Besides all this, it is now the third day. Some women of their company, early at the tomb, found His body gone and came back saying they had seen a vision of angels who said He was alive. Some of the others went to the tomb and found it just as the women said, “but Him they saw not.”

They had been talking a long time about what had happened. Now, at the stranger’s call, they try to put their thoughts in order, and the effort must have shown them their own disorder as never before. First came the bare facts, bewildering enough. There had been a great Teacher and Prophet, whom the people wondered at, whose deeds and words they felt came from God. Yet the priests, the men of God, said He deserved death and gave Him up to the Romans to be punished as a traitor to the Emperor. God let them have their way, and He was crucified. Then came their hopes. They were expecting a Redeemer of Israel; the priests had taught them to expect one, and said all the prophets bore witness to one. They thought this must be He, since none had so many signs of a Redeemer or broke so many chains. And this was the end! Lastly they gathered fragments of evidence, very curious, which they could neither discard nor credit. He had said something about coming back on the third day, and this was the third day. Certain women told a strange tale of an empty sepulchre and angels. Men they could trust more confirmed part of it.

A most faithful summary, brethren, of half-formed beliefs, opinions, expectations and arguments, such as live in many minds today! Some want to scatter them; some tremble to touch them for fear they fall apart and leave the heart utterly empty. But the Stranger who appeared to the two friends as they walked and were sad will sift and winnow them, because He will not have His disciples content with anything less than the Truth that He said would make them free. He will sustain all their dreams of a redemption for Israel. But He knows there is another dream behind that one, which must also be realized, and realized first: the dream of a Redemption of mankind.

IV. Then He said to them, “O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken: ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory?” Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, He explained to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.

The words sound stern and harsh. Were these not honest, earnest men, genuine disciples and seekers after truth, however perplexed or astray? Could they be called “fools, and slow of heart”? Brethren, such language is not worth addressing except to earnest men, who are looking for truth and would die rather than fail to find it. They understand such roughness and welcome it from a Friend. Their consciences own its force, and their hearts taste the sweet kernel inside the bitter husk. “What! You have doubted whether a Redeemer of Israel could die and rise again, and whether a few fond women could be sufficient witnesses of so improbable a fact. Ask yourselves whether a Redeemer ought not to suffer, and be glorified through suffering. Ask what bondage you want to be redeemed from. Ask whether anyone who did not bear death with you and for you could set you above its power. Then see whether the Book you have held most sacred, yet found mostly a collection of dead letters, does not speak from first to last of God Himself as a Redeemer, working out the salvation of His creatures, meeting them in a Man. See whether the shout of a King, a Son of God, does not ring through all its records: in the thunders of Sinai, in the voice to the boy sleeping near the temple, in the prayers and thanksgivings of psalmists, in the anguish of prophets.”

You may wonder that a walk of threescore furlongs could hold the discourse hinted at here. Could He in that time trace God’s Revelation from its mountain bed to the ocean? Brethren, have you never felt a passage of history or poetry, familiar for years, suddenly catch light and illuminate the whole region around it? Have you never studied a subject in despair, wondering what link you had missed, and then been given a clue? The paths look more manifold, even more intricate than before, but the hopelessness is gone, you see your way, and each step is a step toward discovery. Apply that to the case before us. In teaching the disciples to read His own Name beneath every Song, Prayer and Narrative, the Stranger may have given them a wholly new sense of the unity of the Scriptures. At the same time He will have given them a feeling of their variety, and of their relation to themselves, that they never had before, and proved that they deserve and would reward a lifetime of study.

V. “They drew nigh to the village, and He made as though He would have gone further. But they constrained Him, saying, Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent. And He went in to tarry with them.” I am afraid you may suspect me of wanting to make a sentimental or figurative application of this passage. My anxiety is to take it literally, and so find its practical and universal meaning. I would think it a miserable perversion to call the disciples’ house a metaphor for the human heart, or to suppose Jesus did not actually enter it with bodily feet. Such a frivolous method of interpretation would weaken the great doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body, an integral part of Christ’s Gospel. And the inward force of the lesson perishes when we try to make it less corporeal. We cannot take the words “Abide in Me” as honest, substantial words about the spirit of man if we have explained away the common earthly words that correspond to them. If we hold to the manly teaching of our Child’s Catechism about Sacraments, and confess that the outward sign is of highest value because it assures us of the reality signified, we escape that Limbo of Vanity between heaven and earth, where nothing is but all things seem, a region of notions and fantasies that insult us with a promise never fulfilled.

So I regard our Lord’s going with the disciples to their house as a most simple action, just as St. Luke’s narrative suggests. It is no less simple if we take it as a sign of a truth in which all human beings are interested, not only these two Jews. To believe that He is with us on our walks and when we sit down to meat; that by the very constitution of our being we cannot be alone; that He is there when we perceive it least, and that all our perception of what He is, what we are, and what the world is, is awakened by Him: there is nothing strange or fantastic in this. We all profess it in words, and we should not call ourselves Christians if we did not. And oh, some day shall it not become a faith in deed, a faith that makes mysteries light, not dark, and transfigures our whole existence?

VI. “As He sat at meat with them, He took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew Him, and He vanished out of their sight.”

The guest has become the host. He breaks the bread and distributes it, and until He takes that character they do not know Him. He has opened the Scriptures to them and made their dreary, cold hearts burn within them. That He is a Prophet they cannot doubt, for He speaks as one who knows. But that He is the Prophet, the King, the Christ, they have not discovered. This act reveals Him. They did not detain Him by some effort of theirs; He came intending to bless them. But the blessing does not lie in the revelation to the eye, which is granted for an instant and is over.

So, brethren, I think it is in our days. At first it seems that the mighty Teacher is constrained to stay with His disciples by some hard act of faith, some vigorous religious exercise. That opinion is not a delusion. He who trained the old patriarch to wrestle trains us, the latest generation, the same way. As trust and hope are awakened in us, and as we look out of ourselves and seek confidence in the great Deliverer, we rise to a new and better life and exercise the functions of redeemed men. But we may easily persuade ourselves, and no persuasion is so akin to our evil nature or so hard to root out, that we choose Him instead of His choosing us, and that our faith alters His purpose instead of resting on it. So it may truly be said that a veil is over our eyes, and that we do not know Him until He comes before us, in the fullest sense, as the author and giver of all our life, spiritual or animal.

If you ask whether His breaking of bread in that cottage was a sacramental act, I answer that I conceive no act of Christ can be anything else. Was it not a pledge of His stooping to men, His union with men, His dominion over men? But if you ask whether it was like the breaking of bread to which we are invited, who may communicate in a completed Sacrifice and draw near to God through an ascended High Priest, I answer that Christ Himself spoke of His departure to the Father as the beginning of all highest knowledge, and as opening a converse between Earth and Heaven that could never have been possible while He tarried with them. So we are guilty of strange faithlessness and ingratitude when we reckon our position worse than that of those who saw Him before the Passion or in the forty days after the Resurrection. It must be better and grander. Christ does not reveal Himself to one here and there. He is proclaimed as the Universal King and the Universal Sacrifice. As such we are permitted to receive Him, and as such to declare Him to the world.

But if our consciences say, as I am sure they do, “We have not so received Him, nor declared Him so to the world,” let us remember that whatever we have or have not done, He is now, as of old, revealing Himself. It was not the testimony of women or men that discovered Him to the two disciples. That testimony had not dispersed their sadness or restored their hopes. It was He Himself who drew near and reasoned with them. So it has always been, and so it is now. It may lessen some of our pride and some of our despair to be sure of this. We shall not suppose we can convert Jews, Turks, Infidels or Heretics by subtle arguments or wonderful exposures of their ignorance. But if we believe that Christ died and rose again for them and for us, and that He is truly the Lord and Teacher of man, we may believe that He knows the passage to their hearts, that He can tell what presses upon them though we cannot, that He can meet them and reveal Himself, and that it is His good pleasure that they as well as we should come to the knowledge of His truth. For what are we, that we should know it? What arts have we to keep Him among us, even if in past days He has tarried with us? Dependence on His infinite grace, on the love He has shown the world, is the only security and comfort we have. While we cherish this dependence and renounce all pretension to be better than others, He may employ us, as He did the Apostles after they had learnt the same lesson, as His Messengers to all the families of the earth.