04/12/2026 - Luke 24:13-32, Second Sunday of Easter

Scripture: Luke 24:13-32

On that same day, two disciples were traveling to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem. They were talking to each other about everything that had happened. While they were discussing these things, Jesus himself arrived and joined them on their journey. They were prevented from recognizing him.

He said to them, “What are you talking about as you walk along?” They stopped, their faces downcast.

The one named Cleopas replied, “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who is unaware of the things that have taken place there over the last few days?”

He said to them, “What things?”

They said to him, “The things about Jesus of Nazareth. Because of his powerful deeds and words, he was recognized by God and all the people as a prophet. But our chief priests and our leaders handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him. We had hoped he was the one who would redeem Israel. All these things happened three days ago. But there’s more: Some women from our group have left us stunned. They went to the tomb early this morning and didn’t find his body. They came to us saying that they had even seen a vision of angels who told them he is alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found things just as the women said. They didn’t see him.”

Then Jesus said to them, “You foolish people! Your dull minds keep you from believing all that the prophets talked about. Wasn’t it necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” Then he interpreted for them the things written about himself in all the scriptures, starting with Moses and going through all the Prophets.

When they came to Emmaus, he acted as if he was going on ahead. But they urged him, saying, “Stay with us. It’s nearly evening, and the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them. After he took his seat at the table with them, he took the bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but he disappeared from their sight. They said to each other, “Weren’t our hearts on fire when he spoke to us along the road and when he explained the scriptures for us?”

~

Our passage today takes place in the afternoon of Easter Sunday, after the empty tomb has been discovered. The women have spoken to the angels, and told the men of their group that Jesus was alive.

But for Cleopas and his companion here, they can’t quite believe that Jesus’s disappearance means resurrection.

Unlike some of the others who followed Jesus, they still believed Jesus was the Messiah after Jesus was killed. They knew the prophecies in the Old Testament, and they believed that something would happen after three days. So they remained in Jerusalem with the rest of the disciples even after all had seemed lost, still hoping, and still believing in God’s promise to redeem them.

And when the women came and reported that the tomb was empty with angels telling them Jesus was alive, their hearts leapt, believing that those prophecies had been fulfilled. But when the men went and confirmed that that tomb was empty but they didn’t find Jesus or any angels there, their hearts quickly sank again. A missing body could be resurrection, or it could just be grave robbers. And without the angels again testifying to the former, well, they could easily be dismissed as hallucinations of hysterical, grieving women. No matter how much the women insisted that they’d seen what they’d seen.

Now the three days are coming to an end, and redemption doesn’t seem to be anywhere on the horizon. So Cleopas and his friend leave Jerusalem to head back home to Emmaus, back to their families, their shops, their fields and their livelihoods. They’ve been away for too long, chasing what now seemed like a dream. Walking in the dust of the road, as the Easter sun sinks down to the horizon, Cleopas and his friend are left to debate what it all meant.

And given the words used here in the original Greek, this is not a friendly, light disagreement. This is a sparring back and forth of two people who seriously disagree. They have experienced the same things, the same grief of losing their teacher and friend, and from what we’re told it seems as if they hold to the same faith system. They seem to even agree on what happened. What they seem to disagree on is what it all means, and maybe even how they should move forward.

Which to me, reminds me of almost every single conversation that I had during seminary. While I studied in a United Methodist seminary, my classmates were from a wide variety of denominations, traditions, and belief systems. We were all very passionate about theology, we all had very strong opinions, and we were all going into careers where would be interpreting Scripture and talking about theology a lot.

So you can imagine that our conversations would always very quickly turn into debates. We’d be in the cafeteria and arguing about how much humanity influences God over our sandwiches and leftovers from last night’s dinner. We’d get out of class and argue about what happened to Jesus in the three days between his death and resurrection. We’d stand in emptying classrooms, in the hallways and on stair landings until our professors shooed us out the door. Even once we were out of seminary, some habits die hard. There was one Christmas where we all ended up on social media debating whether or not Mary knew every single little detail mentioned in the song “Mary Did You Know?”

The answer is she definitely knew most of it, although she may not have fully realized the implications of it, but that’s not the point here.

The point is that while yes, some of these debates were more like petty squabbles, they were expressions of deeply held beliefs and interpretations about God, humanity, Scripture, and so much more. And they could have real-life impact on how we worked together ecumenically. So these conversations could quickly turn combative rather than collaborative as we determined what we could live with, and what we couldn’t.

And I think that’s where Cleopas and his friend are at as they make the seven-mile journey from Jerusalem back to their home in Emmaus. They are trying to determine what explanations they can live with, and what they just can’t quite accept.

It’s during this debate that a stranger walks up behind them, asking them what they’re talking about. They turn, they look at his face, but they don’t recognize him. Something’s clouding their eyes and preventing them from realizing that the stranger is no stranger at all.

The weight of his question seems to hit Cleopas and his friend so hard that it stops them in their tracks. The debate that they’ve been having has been masking the deep, squeezing ache in their chests that they’ve been living with for three days.

But the stranger’s innocuous question has forced them out of their heads and back into the grief simmering in their bodies. The tears begin to threaten their eyes again, and their feet refuse to take one more step as they begin to sink into their sorrow again. Only Cleopas is able to find his tongue enough to ask if this stranger is the only one who hasn’t been paying attention the past few days. Because how could he not know anything about what happened?

How could he not have awoken to the news of Jesus being detained in the dead of night?

How could he not know of the religious leaders betraying him, handing him over to the hands of the empire?

How could he not have heard the crowds shouting for Jesus to be condemned to death without a fair trial, or even clear charges?

How could he not have seen Jesus being paraded through the streets with the cross on his back?

How could he not have heard Jesus’s final cries, seen the sky going dark in the middle of the day, and gone to sleep wondering if the sun was still going to rise the next day?

How could he know nothing about what was going on? How could he know nothing about what had happened?

But the stranger just simply asks, “What things?”

And that question is the permission that Cleopas needs to tell his story of his teacher, the man he hoped would be the Messiah. Instead of a debate that attempts to intellectualize his grief so he doesn’t have to feel it, the stranger invites him to share the story of his grief so that it becomes easier to carry.

But Cleopas can’t help but bring the stranger into the debate. He tells this stranger of what the women told them, calling their encounter with the angels as just a “vision,” not reality. Because the men hadn’t seen the angels when they’d gone to the tomb, they’d only seen the empty linens. They still don’t quite know what to make of it. And while they don’t ask the stranger for his opinion, I don’t think he would’ve shared about the empty tomb if he wasn’t welcoming it.

The stranger laughs, shaking his head affectionately as he says, “You foolish people! Your dull minds keep you from believing all that the prophets talked about.”

It’s not necessarily condemnatory, Jesus isn’t necessarily frustrated with his disciples. Well, maybe a little bit annoyed at the fact that they’ve dismissed the women’s encounter with the angels. Jesus knows that he’s asking his disciples to believe the impossible, that resurrection has happened and death has been defeated.

It takes more than the logic they’ve been debating during their walk.

It takes daring and faith and hope beyond hope to believe that death is not the end.

And sometimes, we need a little help to imagine that.

So Jesus falls back into the familiar routine of teaching his disciples, of interpreting the prophets and the Old Testament, as Jerusalem shrinks behind them and Emmaus appears on the horizon. Because Jesus knows that Cleopas and his friend knew these Scriptures, knew the prophecies. They’d stayed in Jerusalem for three days, they’d listened to Jesus’s promise that he would rise again.

They know all of this. But in their grief, they’ve lost the finer details.

So Jesus is here to remind them of that. He’s here to restore the hope that they’d had, to rebuild the structures that had started to crumble under the weight of their grief and sorrow. And as he speaks, their hearts begin to burn. Because the day is far from over, and resurrection is still occurring. The same grief and sorrow that they were trying to ignore through their debates and conversation is now being turned into a hope and joy that they would be unable to ignore.

Their hearts and souls, the very places that had been carrying their grief, recognized Jesus before their eyes and minds ever could.

When they reach Emmaus, Cleopas and his friend convince the stranger to stay with them, to at least have dinner. And it’s only when the stranger sits down to eat with them and breaks and passes them the bread, that their eyes realize who Jesus is. It’s only in an ordinary moment, sharing dinner after a long walk and conversation together, that they realize Jesus has been in their midst the entire time.

Because throughout Scripture, Jesus shows up in more places than just the lightning and the fire and the miracles from heaven. He shows up at tables, either to sit down and eat, or to flip them to make room. He shows up on dusty roads, walking alongside us in our doubts and questions. And he shows up when we least expect him, in our grief and sorrow, wondering where he is and how we’re ever going to be able to move forward.

This is the only time in Scripture that Cleopas and his friend show up - we don’t know what happened to them after they ran back to Jerusalem to tell the disciples that they’d encountered Jesus. But we do know that the fire they felt burning in their hearts would spread through the stories, love, and care that the early Church showed in the same everyday moments.

And the Church has always been at her best when we remember that we encounter Jesus in our everyday lives, and we are called to be the hands and feet of Christ that others encounter in their everyday lives. Because some days we will be the people who need permission from a stranger to tell our stories of grief and sorrow and doubt and fear. And other days we will be the stranger, willing to walk alongside someone’s grief and doubts, not with all the answers that Jesus had, but with the same hands willing to hold it with them.

And as we walk together along the road of life, we will find Christ walking with us.