3rd Sunday After Easter
April 10, 2005
Luke 24:13-35

The Disciples of Emmaus

The gospel narratives about the post-Easter appearances of Jesus are mostly scattered and can be put into a harmonious chronology only with difficulty. Of course, this fact about the resurrection appearances fits well with both the nature of the events and the way in which the intimidated disciples were scattered and in disarray until Pentecost.

Luke’s report on the disciples of Emmaus reflects a fragment of local tradition, which the Jerusalem church remembered and eventually transmitted into the mainstream of the church’s memory of the risen Lord. A list of resurrection appearances quoted by Paul in 1Cor 15:3-9 shows how such chains of events were formed and were repeated in a doctrinal context with some attention paid to the ordering of the events. (Just notice how the words “afterward” and “then” are used repeatedly with a concluding “finally.”)

But the report of this encounter of the risen Christ does not focus on apologetic issues. The truth of the resurrection is made clear when the Eleven meet the risen Christ. The disciples of Emmaus represent a larger group of Jesus’ followers who cannot reconcile the cruel facts of the cross with their messianic expectations. Their comments focus on their frustrated hopes, which the reports of the women cannot counterbalance. The risen Lord evangelizes them by showing from the Scriptures that this was God’s original plan for his Messiah. And so he demonstrates that “all the scriptures” wrote about him in the sense that he had to suffer and so enter into his glory.

Luke’s program for the Easter kerygma is oriented to both scripture and passion. It is a lifelong program for the Christian to understand his own suffering and death as discipleship in the footsteps of the Master by which we also enter his glory and thus his glory becomes ours.

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