We turn to one of the most familiar parts of the New Testament: Luke 24, beginning at verse 13.
I think we must read it again.
And behold, two of them were going that very day to a village named Emmaus, which was threescore furlongs from Jerusalem.
And they communed with each other of all these things which had happened.
And it came to pass, while they communed and questioned together, that Jesus Himself drew near, and went with them.
But their eyes were holden that they should not know Him.
And He said unto them, What communications are these that ye have one with another, as ye walk?
And they stood still, looking sad.
And one of them, named Cleopas, answering said unto Him, Dost Thou alone sojourn in Jerusalem and knowest not the things which are come to pass there in these days?
And He said unto them, What things?
And they said unto Him, The things concerning Jesus of Nazareth, Who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people:
And how the chief priests and our rulers delivered Him up to be condemned to death, and crucified Him.
But we hoped that it was He Who should redeem Israel. Yea, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things came to pass.
Moreover, certain women of our company amazed us, having been early at the tomb;
And when they found not His body, they came, saying that they had also seen a vision of angels, who said that He was alive.
And certain of them that were with us went to the tomb, and found it even so as the women had said: but Him they saw not.
And He said unto them, O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken!
Behooved it not the Christ to suffer these things, and to enter into His glory?
And beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, He interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.
And they drew nigh unto the village whither they were going: and He made as though He would go further.
And they constrained Him, saying, Abide with us; for it is toward evening, and the day is now far spent. And He went in to abide with them.
And it came to pass, when He had sat down with them to meat, He took the bread and blessed it; and breaking it He gave to them.
And their eyes were opened, and they knew Him; and He vanished out of their sight.
And they said one to another, Was not our heart burning within us, while He spake to us in the way, while He opened to us the Scriptures?
And they rose up that very hour, and returned to Jerusalem, and found the eleven gathered together, and them that were with them.
There you see the story of a transfigured journey. There are many things in it, and of course the supreme thing is that of the resurrection, which embraces and covers everything. But I am not going to speak about that particularly this morning.
I have it on my heart to speak about this transfigured road.
The journey from Jerusalem—perhaps six and a half miles—was undoubtedly taken by these two in a spirit of complete bewilderment with their situation.
It proved to be a great turning point in their lives. But when they set out on this journey, no doubt they had come to feel that they had come to an end of everything.
All that had happened in the past had held elements of great hope and expectation. They had made a genuine, sincere committal of themselves to that hope, to that expectation.
True, there had been enough to take them completely out of their depth and to be very perplexing—perhaps to allow for questions at times, and some fears. It was all so much, so big. But by and large, it had stimulated a great hope.
Now that had all ended in a great disappointment, and things were apparently in ruins. All seemed to have ended in disillusion.
The only course seemed to be to get right away from the sphere of it all, to seek solitude in this country village, well away from the city.
And so these two decided to take that course: “Let us get away, right away from everything. Perhaps we will get a better perspective if we do. Let us get away.”
And we can imagine the dialogue on the journey—perhaps the longest six and a half miles ever travelled by two men.
One said, “Well, Cleopas, what do you think about it all? Have we made a great mistake? Have we been deceived? Have we been on a wrong road? It seems something like that has happened to us.”
The other said, “Well, brother, it does seem like that. It is true. But we cannot forget, can we? We cannot forget everything. We cannot just write everything off like that. Do you remember?” Then he would call to mind some of those wonderful times with the Master—His words and His works.
So they sought to get to the bottom of this mystery, to explain this great problem. And as they went on, we know the rest of the story.
Suddenly, they became conscious of another joining them on the road—a stranger, whose presence they had not been aware of until He drew up alongside and questioned them as to the subject of their conversation, which was evidently causing them a good deal of depression.
And they stood still and looked at Him. “Are You only a visitor in Jerusalem? Are You the only one who does not know what has been happening?”
He still drew them out. You know, it is one of the master strokes of our great Master to draw us out sometimes. It is a great thing to be drawn out and to have to explain your own trouble and problems. Take that as a lesson.
And so He drew them out until they had no more to say. Then He started to speak. There He took up the Scriptures with which they were so familiar and opened to them the Scriptures.
There was a new movement inside. The dying embers began to glow. A new ray of hope broke up in them. Some light was breaking; their hearts were warming.
Perhaps some sense of shame was creeping up inside—their foolishness.
Let us be quite sure about this: our Authorized Version is not correct. “O fools, and slow of heart”—Jesus did not say that. That is a word used on another occasion by Jesus: if anyone calls his brother a fool, he is in danger of hell-fire. That was not the word Jesus used.
It is the same word as Paul used for the Galatians: “O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you?” The Revised Version is correct: “O foolish men.” It was not hard and cruel and ununderstanding. That is the point we want to get at this morning: “O foolish men, slow of heart to believe.”
Well, they arrived at Emmaus eventually. The day was spent, and these men could not let Him go like that. “Come in; abide with us. The day is spent. It is dangerous to go on tonight, and we want more of You.”
So He went in and sat down to meat with them. And as they sat down to meat, He took the loaf, and broke it, and gave it to them. Their eyes were opened.
Now, whether it was His sovereign act in opening their eyes, or a sudden remembrance of what had happened before, let us not read into this what it will not bear. These were not of the twelve apostles. They had not been at the Lord’s Supper and seen Him break the loaf and give.
But undoubtedly they had been with Him at some supper—perhaps in the feeding of the thousands, when He took the loaf, broke it, and gave thanks. Probably on other occasions they had fed together. Something about this act was reminiscent; it reminded them.
Or, as I say, it may have been His act of withdrawing the veil. However, the point is: they knew Him, and He vanished out of their sight.
The return journey—what a transfigured road that was. Everything was changed from the natural to the spiritual.
They had gone in broad daylight, but it was dark. They returned in the night, and it was light. Yes, the whole situation was changed. This is the sum of it: from the natural to the spiritual. The natural day and night are just a parable.
Now, what transfigured that road? What was it that made that return journey so different from the outward journey?
There is no doubt that it was an outward journey, if you like—going out. Quite a lot is in that: “Let us get away. Let us get out. Let us go.” An outward journey, not planned by the Lord.
All outward journeys not in the Lord are bound to be very gloomy things, at least. What was it that made the difference in the two journeys? What will transform any such gloomy pathway that we may tread?
I am perfectly certain that those men never thought that at the end of that day they would be back where they were at the beginning. They would be going back again. I am sure that was never intended. But something happened that found them back again.
What was it?
Now, of course, leaving this great, all-embracing reality—that they had discovered that Jesus, after all, was alive—we have often, when we have read and meditated upon this chapter, found some other things here which I think lie right at the heart of this story and may be helpful to us.
First of all, they discovered that Jesus knew all about them and their trouble. And although they were very largely responsible for their situation, He had not given them up.
That is a simple beginning about a transformed journey. In the time of our perplexity, our bewilderment—yes, about failure—when our hearts are moving in the wrong direction, we realize that the Lord Jesus never abandons anyone who is sincerely, honestly, and truly perplexed with Him and His way.
He knows all about it. This may be a word for somebody: He knows all about it.
I am quite sure that these men were not doing this in a spirit of wilful abandonment of the Lord. It was simply that they could not understand, and they were reaching out for understanding. And they discovered that He understood and knew.
Let us take that comfort at the very beginning. He did not let them go because they were having a difficult and dark time. He never does.
Then again, they discovered that there was another side altogether to the whole situation—a side which they had never seen. And that always is.
If we saw all, we would be saved a lot. Many of our deflections are simply because we have only seen one side of the matter.
And if anything at all is true, what happened on this road to make the difference is this: the Lord Jesus showed them there was another side to this whole matter, to which they were blind.
Dear friends, we must always believe that about situations, however difficult and perplexing they may be, and whatever amount of evidence there may seem to be for our present course.
We must always remember that the Lord sees another side, and there is another side. And we must seek to find that other side. What does the Lord know about this? What does the Lord mean in this? There is something more in this than we can see, if we are the Lord’s children.
We, in our human limitations, see only one side of things. And if only we could see the other, we should be saved.
That changed everything for them. They discovered that there was another side to this whole matter, and the other side was the much more wonderful side—the side which showed all their side of it as very defective indeed.
They therefore discovered that there is a very real meaning to our deepest trouble which, when we see it, makes foolishness of the way we have been contemplating. “O foolish men.”
There is a hidden meaning in suffering, trials, and difficulties—a divine meaning. If only we could get our hand on that. If only the Lord would show us that.
It would make foolishness of this thing which we thought to be so overwhelmingly true, perhaps right where we were concerned.
They discovered that although they had an immense amount of Bible knowledge and truth and teaching—the Old Testament which they possessed, and the teaching the Lord Jesus had given them during those past months and years—they possessed a lot of truth.
But there was lacking in their apprehension of truth something which was vital to their very survival in the day of the ordeal. There is something to learn.
The great test came, not just to them, but to all that they had received in the past. The test that the cross at that time was, was whether they had got truth in the mind, in the head, or whether that truth was their very life.
These men discovered that they had very much, but there was something which needed the touch of the living hand—the hand of the risen Lord, the touch of the Spirit of life upon it—in order that all that they had should spring into life and sustain them.
What we need, dear friends, is that the truth we possess is living truth—not just truth as such, but that it is our very life. This is the after-history: it had all become alive.
But it only came alive through a very deep ordeal.
This whole story centres round that mighty word of His: “Behooved it not the Christ to suffer?”
In that, He gathers up, you see, all His discourse from the Old Testament, showing that the Christ must suffer. He must. The cross is essential to everything.
It was not until they themselves came right into a deep and terrible experience of the cross that the way was opened for all that they held in their minds to become their salvation.
It worked like this. Here they are: everything in devastation, a terribly deep experience. Through the very experience of the cross in their own hearts and lives, they were able to say, “Now I see. Now I see what I never saw before, in all that I knew. I had never seen it.”
“Behooved it not the Christ to suffer?” The cross is essential to our seeing. But the cross is not objective. The cross is not just historic. The cross has to come right into our experience and smash everything that is not true.
You see, there was a mixture about their position—no doubt about that. “We had trusted that it had been He Who should redeem Israel,” save Israel. But we know what was bound up with that hope, as we know from the Gospels themselves: a place in that kingdom, something to minister to their importance.
There was mixture, and the cross had to rid them of all the personal and false in their position. And it is good, first of all, taking everything away—everything away, the right and the wrong.
When the cross came in, they had to start all over again. But this time they were starting on clean ground, pure ground. “I see the meaning of the cross.”
So it was. That is the story: the necessity of the cross in our lives to get us onto true ground, safe ground; to explain to us our own problems and our own difficulties.
Our right understanding of that is really transforming and transfiguring things, is it not?
You see, it all comes back to this: this whole story. They had got an entirely wrong, or inadequate, apprehension of the meaning of the cross.
And when they saw it—how rightly He opened it to them, this suffering of Christ—the whole situation was changed. Everything was transfigured. But they saw it right when they themselves had gone out of the picture entirely, with all their interests.
They could go and preach the cross after this, and say, “In the cross I glory.” Whereas before, the cross felt anything but glory. What a change!
Now, I do not know why the Lord put it on my heart to say this, but it may be that some have decided on leaving the situation—leaving. You are going down this dismal road of bewilderment, perplexity, disappointment, you think, disillusion. It may be that you will be tempted at times to do that.
Read again the story. Look into His heart, I am saying.
Well, if it is an honest and sincere difficulty that you are in, the Lord Jesus has every sympathy with that. He will only stay away if you are rebellious, wilfully forsaking.
In the deepest perplexity, in this inability to understand, He is in full sympathy, and He will not give you up. He will follow you through. He will draw you out. He will require you to tell Him exactly what the trouble is.
Perhaps, as you do, you begin to see that it is not quite so solid as you thought it was. And then He will come back, and with a touch of His own hand will begin to show you that there is something more in it than you have seen—a deeper secret, a new view.
And in the disclosing of that secret, you receive. But you know this: your experience was, after all, what you have talked about so often—the cross, the cross, the cross.
You see, we can talk about this cross as a doctrine. We know all about identification with Christ as a teaching. But the Lord brings us into an absolutely devastating experience. That is what it is to discover reality, and that which will stand us in good stead in the day of the ordeal.