Where is the road to Emmaus?
Emmaus of Biblical times was 7 1/2 miles NW of Jerusalem, and I’m sure it was walked quite often. The picture above is a little further along that road toward the Sea of Galilee.
There are many debates over where Emmaus would actually be found today, but there is another interesting way that we can locate it. That would be by asking the questions, “What were these two doing walking along the road, what transpired there, and what did they lose or find?”
We’ve been talking recently about depression. If any two people might have felt depressed it would be these two. They had lost their visionary leader, the one that they had placed all their hope in. And they were now talking with a stranger about what had happened to them. They were returning home with their hearts broken and their thoughts confused. Nothing that had once made sense was making sense anymore.
This is a place we can all relate to. If not now, we can easily remember those places in our past, or they are coming along our path in the future. No one escapes the road to Emmaus, the confused walk home.
But what happens? The stranger is not a stranger. He is someone they’ve known all along but failed to recognize. Their vision is cleared and they see that the stranger is the same One that they had hoped in. They thought he was gone forever, but he has returned to dine with them. He opens their eyes again to the truth.
As T. S. Eliot once wrote: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
Where is your Emmaus? What are you searching for? What do you see now?
