The resurrection narrative that recounts how Jesus appeared to the two on the way to Emmaus has always brought me great hope (Luke 24:13-35). Two disciples that numerous historic traditions have held as being Cleopas and his wife Mary. (In Jn. 19:25 Mary is described as the wife of Clopas (Aramaic origin; Cleopas being Greek).) Let’s take it for a moment to be a married couple (my conviction, or at least Luke has written it that way to help us engage with the text).
They are not only physically walking but emotionally walking away from the place where they had been living with so much hope. They had hoped that Jesus would redeem Israel but, post-crucifixion, are now devastated. It seems that Luke is drawing on the narrative of another couple who walked devastated with what had taken place for them. Let’s jump back to that story: Adam and Eve have to walk away from the Garden. The now-unreachable promises of God bearing heavily on them, and they walk with the sentence of death on them. For Mary and Cleopas the evening hour is approaching, that hour when God would come to visit in the Garden. Cleopas and Mary are completely unaware who has come to walk with them, and I suggest that when Adam and Eve (and all those who follow generationally) left their Garden they were completely unaware that they did not walk simply as a lone couple, but a Stranger walked with them, for God did not stay in the Garden but walked also with them, sharing the ‘sentence’ of death with them. God walked it all the way to the place of the incarnation and through the cross, until Jesus becomes a ‘life-giving Spirit’.
This Emmaus walk is one that we often take. Hopes have taken a bash or are even gone. And we don’t walk alone for we are accompanied by shame, disappointment, regret, guilt or another equally burdensome emotion. But Emmaus tells us we do not walk alone. We might use different words to ‘And it is the third day since all this happened’ to express the depth of the loss of hope. But I think heaven responds with those same words. There is a third day when he meets us on the way and invites us to take bread again from his hands.