Christian Gems – Past & Present: The Travelers on the Road to Emmaus by Alexander Maclaren (from Disciple Magazine, Vol. 6, #3, 3/24/2014) – Part 2 (Originally published in the sermon collection After the Resurrection, 1902. Edited slightly for modern spellings.) “And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them” (Luke 24:15). I. The Instruction by the Way Now, a very important point, I think, is the entire unimportance of the people to whom the instruction was given. They were not apostles, for the evangelist takes care to tell us that, whilst they were on the road back from Emmaus, “the eleven” were at Jerusalem. They were so insignificant, so evidently merely belonging to the rank and file of the disciples, that the evangelist does not seem to know the name of one of them, and the other, whom he does, never appears again. Yet to these two perfectly insignificant people, Jesus Christ, with the experiences of death and resurrection fresh upon Him, thought it worth His while to come, to enlighten their understandings, and clear up their thoughts. Was not that a revelation, in fact, of an eternal law, that is as true today as it was then? He who let Himself be stopped on His road to the cross by a blind beggar in Jericho, and who came and joined Himself to these two conversing on the road, will come to the poorest and weakest amongst us, and will help us to unravel the tangled skein of our difficulties, and to bear the burden of our sorrows, if only we will let Him. This is part of the message of the Resurrection, that the risen Lord joyfully companies with the humblest seeker after light. And then, if we go a step further, and look at the disposition and temper of the men which drew Him, we get further instruction. The question, with which the stranger who joined Himself to the two broke the ice, passed the usual bounds of courtesy. A chance companion had no right to know what they were talking about. But there was something in the question which evidently showed that it was not curiosity but sympathy, that prompted it, and that there was a proffer of help underlying it. The naïve answer of Cleopas—“Art thou the only stranger in Jerusalem that does not know what has happened?”—forgets that though the pedestrian who had joined the couple might have known about the crucifixion, He could not know that they were speaking of it. But the repeated question—in one word in the original “What things?”—was like the touch of the button that sends the gush of the light out, like the turning of the tap that lets the flood come, for it was answered by the long, voluble, eager statement, which reveals to us the condition of mind of these two men. They had, as it were, two strands of thought in their minds at once, and their effort was to try and braid them together. On the one hand, there was Christ’s death. That left intact their belief that He was “a prophet,” for it was part of a prophet’s role to die. But it shattered to atoms their belief that He had been the Messiah. And there is an infinite depth of despondency, of “throwing up the sponge,” of giving up the whole thing, in that word, “we trusted that it had been He which should have redeemed Israel.” Contrast that with Mary’s “they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him.” She was crushed with sorrow at the death of the Beloved; they were mourning not so much for a dead Jesus, as for the death of their own hopes. They were lamenting not the departure of a beloved Friend, but the fall of a Leader; and with the fall of a Leader, the loss of a cause. And now notice that utter despondency which perhaps had put into their minds the notion of beginning to desert, and of going away to Emmaus, when they should have stopped at Jerusalem, was the beginning of a process which would certainly have gone on, unless something had come in the way to stop it. Why was it that when the Shepherd was smitten, the sheep were not scattered? Here is the beginning of the scattering; why did it not go on? “We trusted,”—how did it come that in forty days they were trusting in that Man more than ever? How was it that when the Leader fell, the cause did not collapse? How was it that it did not befall to the disciples of Jesus the Nazarene, as it befell to the disciples of that “Theudas who boasted himself to be somebody,” and when “he was slain his disciples were dispersed,” and the revolt came to an end? How? Because Jesus rose from the dead. Deny the Resurrection, and you cannot account for the Church. Such was the one strand of their thoughts; and then the other opposite strand, so to speak, which, as I said, they were trying to braid into the former, came from the reports of the Resurrection. Look how incredulous they are. “A woman said”; “the angel said.” Reports of a report; it is all hearsay. And then comes the staggering fact, “Him they saw not,” which extinguishes the faint glimmer of hope. Ah! If they had not been in such a hurry to leave Jerusalem after the news of messages by angels, and the visit of Peter to the grave, if they had stopped an hour or two longer, Mary would have come into the upper room; and instead of their having to commune and question with one another as to what these things could mean, they would have seen what they did mean. We often rack our brains to understand half-finished facts, when, if we had had patience, and waited in the right place for a little longer, they would have cleared themselves. So we come to the Lord’s answer. One might have expected that He would have flashed His presence upon them, and cleared up everything. Not so! They were not ready for that. They needed instruction before they could get revelation. When the instruction came, it all turned round one point. Their error was in thinking that the death of Jesus Christ was fatal to His claims to be the Messiah, and the answer to that was to show them that the death of Jesus Christ was not fatal to, but confirmatory of, His Messianic character, and the necessary condition of His Messianic glory. Now, dear brethren, although in different shape yet just as really as with these two, in this generation the death of Christ is misunderstood. And we need, the Church needs, and the world needs still more, the teaching of that Easter Day on the road to Emmaus, that the cross, which is the stumbling-block, is the very centre of the Messianic work; and that He came to die, “and give His life a Ransom for many.” You will never understand the Resurrection; you will never believe the Resurrection, to any useful purpose, unless you discern, first, the meaning of the death, and have learnt that, therein and thereby, the world’s sins were borne by Him, that He was crucified for our offences, and raised again for our justification. The preliminary of profitable meditation on the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the understanding of the mystery and meaning of His cross. And then, further, let me draw another lesson here, not less relevant to the present, and some of its burning questions; and that is, that we do not understand the Old unless we recognize in it the introduction to the New. You may hold any theory you like, the most advanced that you can find, about the origin and date and method of composition of the Old Testament if only you see what is written plain upon that whole set of books—which are not only a set of books, but a Book, an organic whole—that “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” Through them all “one increasing purpose runs.” In them is a developed Revelation, converging from all sides and all points of the horizon, on the one Person, the Incarnate Son of God, and on the one fact of the cross on which He bore the sins of the world. That is the underlying meaning, without the perception of which, learning and ingenuity and criticism may be expended on the Old Testament for evermore, and yet its true glory is altogether undiscovered.
Posted on: Sat, 01 Nov 2014 11:13:40 +0000
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