Their hearts were burning as Jesus explained the Scriptures to them.

Sunday, 4/30/17

Let  us use our imagination to picture ourselves as those two disciples who were getting out of Jerusalem because it was a dangerous place for even the lesser known disciples of Jesus.

If you are like me, it has been many years since we have taken a full day’s walk. In my seminary days once a month we were given a day when we could leave the grounds to walk to a store where we could by some ice cream. The hard thing about it was we could only go to a country store that was over five miles away. Anyway, to make the Gospel reading real for me, I like remembering those ten mile round hikes.

Apparently they had not put much trust in the women who claimed to have seen angels. The two of them had left the Upper Room right after Peter an John had left to check out the tomb. Perhaps the two disciples went along with the story of the soldiers guarding the tomb. They were telling everyone that they had been overpowered by men who stole the body.

On the road to Emmaus they were joined by a stranger who asked them about their heated discussion. They told him they had been talking about the death of Jesus and they said, “We had been hoping that he would be the one to redeem Israel.”

The stranger then called them fools for having ignored all the Scriptures had said about the Messiah, and he quoted long passages from the Old Testament that said the humiliation and death suffered by Jesus, far from being reasons for those two doubting him, should have called forth a full faith in him.

We don’t know what Old Testament passages the stranger quoted for them, but I think we can get some idea of it by reading Chapter 53 from the Book of the Propher Isaiah.