When You Suddenly See What Was Right In Front of Your Eyes!

Luke 24:13-32 (NLT) Read the full passage here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2024%3A13-32&version=NLT

30 As they sat down to eat, he took the bread and blessed it. Then he broke it and gave it to them.31 Suddenly, their eyes were opened, and they recognised him. And at that moment he disappeared!

32 They said to each other, “Didn’t our hearts burn within us as he talked with us on the road and explained the Scriptures to us?”

Cleopas and his companion are walking along the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus, about 7 miles.

They are discussing the subject that is on everyone’s lips…. Jesus. He’s been murdered, and now his body has vanished!

They sound so cynical and despondent. All their hopes and dreams died with Jesus and they just don’t understand what has happened.

Then suddenly Jesus is walking with them listening to their conversation and butting in. But they don’t know it’s Jesus. Why? Because God kept them from seeing what was obvious until the time was right.

We know from various places in the Bible that when we go to Heaven we will have new bodies that won’t look like the ones we currently have. Remember that Mary didn’t recognise him at first when she saw him in the garden until he spoke in John 20:15. But interestingly he must have looked human and resemble Jesus. 2 things we know about Jesus’ resurrection body – he could eat food, he could walk through walls and he could appear and disappear at will. All very exciting concepts for us when we think of what our heavenly bodies will be like!

Why did God keep them from knowing it was Jesus?

Maybe it was an issue of faith. Every subsequent generation has had to hear the Scriptures and choose to believe them by faith, and not because they have physically seen Jesus. This couple needed to have their faith restored by hearing the Word of God and making a decision to believe based on faith. The Holy Spirit is the one who enables us to understand and to believe.

The couple knew the Bible. They knew what it said about Jesus, but they hadn’t applied it to what was right in front of them.

‘We had hoped he was the Messiah who had come to rescue Israel’.

They knew what the Bible said but didn’t believe it or possibly agree with it! They wanted a Messiah to come in battle and overthrow the Roman stronghold. But that’s not our king. It was never the plan, and all the way through the Old Testament, it was prophesied what sort of King Jesus was coming as. A servant king, one who would ride on a donkey, not on a white horse; who would come in peace and not in war; a king who came to suffer and to die a criminals death.

And Jesus listening in said ‘you foolish men’ – or our northern equivalent - you muppets! You can’t project your own beliefs onto the Bible and make it fit. When we read with an open heart and mind, and we allow the truth of the scriptures to fill us, our hearts will burn with faith and with the fire of passion. Because the Word of God is truth, and the truth will set us free!

The men believed Jesus to have been a prophet and they had certain knowledge, but when their expectations failed, they became despondent and cynical. When Jesus opened up the Old Testament to them and showed them how all the prophesies about Jesus were fulfilled, it stirred their faith and gave them hope.

Oh how wonderful it would have been to have been able to listen in on that conversation. Hearing Jesus explain all the fulfilled prophecies about himself – straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak. It would have taken a long time to go through the scrolls and find out all this information for themselves. We of course have google and lots of people who have gone before us to do this type of research. So your homework today is to go and search the prophecies concerning Jesus in the Old Testament and how they were fulfilled.

Later on when they ‘realise’ that the man is Jesus, they realise that when he was speaking to them, their hearts burned again. Their faith was stirred again and the fire of faith started to burn once again.

Do we recognise Jesus in our every day lives, as he walks among us?

The Bible tell us that there is nowhere we can go from God’s presence. That means that wherever we are and whatever we are doing, Jesus can be there ear-wigging on our conversations.

I wonder what he’d encounter if he walked in on one of our everyday conversations? I hope He’d find me talking about Him and not about someone else! I’m not sure he’d be too pleased at some of the conversations I have! And He’d have more to say to me than ‘you muppet!’

It’s worth remembering that when Jesus left earth to go back to heaven, he left the Holy Spirit with us permanently. He lives in us and is present at every conversation and in everything we do. When we get over how scary that is, and as we think about the types of conversations we have, let’s look at the amazing positives – who better to explain the Bible to us, than the one who inspired it’s writing in the first place?! The Holy Spirit.

2 Peter 1:20

20 Above all, you must realize that no prophecy in Scripture ever came from the prophet’s own understanding,[a] 21 or from human initiative. No, those prophets were moved by the Holy Spirit, and they spoke from God.

But how often do we remember to ask Him to help us understand the passage we are reading, or to speak to us through the word?

He is better than any commentary because he makes the Bible come alive! To jump off the pages and speak right into our situation, right into where we are now. He helps us make sense of life and of the things going on.

How often are we in the place of these 2 people? We are talking to each other about how we don’t understand what is going on. Why are these things happening to us? Etc. etc.

And the Holy Spirit is saying you muppet (or words to that effect!) – if you read your Bible and actually believed it, you wouldn’t be confused right now. It would be perfectly obvious what is going on.

We get especially confused and despondent when things go wrong in our lives despite the many warnings including James 1 that says we will have many trials in this life. Rejoice!

The men believed Jesus to have been a prophet and they had certain knowledge, but when their expectations failed, they became despondent and cynical. When Jesus opened up the Old Testament to them and showed them how all the prophesies about Jesus were fulfilled, it stirred their faith, gave them hope and they suddenly saw what was right in front of them.

Why did they suddenly recognise Jesus?

God opened their physical eyes after their heart-eyes had been opened. So often that happens to us. The Scriptures suddenly make sense to us, and then also our circumstances also make sense…. Most people come to faith in the context of Christian worship i.e. proclamation, worship and the sacraments. Interesting that it was as Jesus broke the bread as he did at the last supper that they suddenly recognised him.

To finish, let’s just quickly re-visit some of the themes in this passage…

There were plenty of signs in the Old Testament pointing to exactly what would happen to Jesus. But not everyone picked up on them.

There are physical signs too in the world that we need to look out for. Cleopas and his friend (possibly wife) had both the spiritual signs in the Old Testament and the physical sign in front of them. They just needed to join the dots and put them both together.

I read a physical sign on Friday. It was on minced beef and it said USE BY 4th April. I was really annoyed because I only bought it on 4th April and hadn’t noticed and it was now 6th April. But I looked at it. It was still pink, smelt okay. So I used my experience as a cook to say, this meat is fine for consumption and used 2 packs of said mince to make Bolognaise.

The boys rejected the food because the meat was gristly, or their words ‘grim’. But I carried on and ate.

My decision to ignore the sign ‘USE BY’ came back to bite me at 1am when I started with food poisoning, and I had plenty of time to repent over the next 12 hours.

I will continue to ignore Best before dates unless the food is green and blue, but I shall from now pledge to adhere to USE BY dates.

Do we read and interpret the signs properly?

What signs are we choosing to ignore today? Maybe things going on in the world physically, like the plastic crisis, the gang warfare, the earth heating up

Perhaps it’s more politic stuff, maybe things in our own lives.

The Bible speaks into all of these things. We will only recognise this if we read the Bible regularly and ask the Holy Spirit to explain things to us. He’s the author – he knows what’s going on. When we watch the news and don’t understand, ask the Holy Spirit to point out the prophecies being fulfilled in our very time, the things that point to Jesus coming back again and taking us to be with him in the final resurrection.

Do we recognise Jesus?

I’ve been really poorly this weekend as I just explained. And in the middle of the night I felt rather lonely. I was crying to God to heal me and make me well. But I felt quite far removed from Him.

But then I remembered what I had been studying –  and I heard Jesus say ‘I am here with you’. This is both amazingly comforting and disconcerting when you are in the bathroom with food poisoning. But isn’t that just who our God is?

He gets alongside us at the best and worst moments of our lives. He walks with us through the mess and filth. This was Jesus who chose to give us his majesty and be born in a filthy smelly stable full of animal poo. No situation is out of bounds for our Jesus. No place too hard or too low for him to walk with us.

But even if we go wrong, he picks us up and points us back in the right direction.

One last quick observation, when things happen in our lives contrary to our expectations (like Cleopas not expecting Jesus to die), those are times when we are tempted to doubt our faith, doubt the Word of God and as a result, lose sight of Jesus. But just because we can’t see him doesn’t mean he isn’t there walking right next to us. We might just not recognise him.

Those are not the times to neglect the Word, but instead, those are the times to spend hours looking and that is where we will begin to recover our sight and see Jesus in every situation.