Jesus had died. A few of the women had returned from the place he had been buried, claiming that the tomb was empty, and a few of the twelve had claimed to see him. But for the most part, his friends were still experiencing the shock of what had happened and the grief that their friend was gone. And so two of them, later in the day of Easter Sunday, went for a walk.
As they walk, talking about what had happened, the traumatic events of his betrayal and arrest, the horror of his crucifixion and his death, alone, between two thieves, near the city dump, they are joined by a stranger. Isn’t it odd that they didn’t recognize him? They continue to talk about what happened, explaining it to him. “Are you the only one in Jerusalem who doesn’t know about it?” they ask him.
And then, as the sun begins to set, they extend hospitality to the stranger, inviting him to share their evening meal and spend the night with them. It is when he broke the bread for them, in a way reminiscent of the time he fed the multitude, powerfully reminiscent of the way he had broken bread and shared it with his disciples on the night he was arrested—as he broke the bread, they recognized him. It was Jesus.
What is so remarkable about this story is how ordinary it is. The two of them could be any of us. The road to Emmaus could be any road. Emmaus could be the common way you and I cope with loss and grief.
Sacred moments, the moments of miracle, are often everyday moments, the moments which, if we do not look with more than our eyes or listen with more than our ears, reveal only . . . a garden, a stranger coming down the road behind us, a meal like any other meal. But if we look with our hearts, if we listen with our being and imagination . . . what we may see is Jesus himself. (Fred Buechner , The Magnificent Defeat, p. 87–88).
Dr. Willy L Mafuta
Pastor,
Hopewell United Methodist Church, Hopewell, NJ 08525