Walk beside us risen Jesus…
On the Emmaus road of life
On the journey of confusion
On the road of questions
On the way of disappointment
When we do not understand.
Walk beside us, risen Jesus
On the Emmaus road of life
In the guise of the stranger
In the unfamiliar traveller
In the unexpected guest
When we feel almost overwhelmed.
Walk beside us, risen Jesus
On the Emmaus road of life
Give us insights beyond our knowing
Give us a glimpse of your will at work
Give us strength to keep on keeping on
When our hope is almost gone.
Amen.
Lord Jesus,
Just as You walked with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, walk with me on my journey today.
When I am confused, open my mind to understand. When I am weary, lift my spirit with Your presence. When I am doubtful, reveal Yourself in the breaking of the bread.
You are the Companion who listens when no one else does, the Teacher who explains truth when my heart is clouded, and the Savior who stays when the night falls.
Help me recognize You in the ordinary moments of life— in the stranger, the Scriptures, the Sacraments.
Let my heart burn with joy as You speak, and let my eyes be opened to Your love in every step.
Stay with me, Lord, for it is nearly evening. Shine Your light on my path, and guide me safely home to You. Amen.
I have been reminded this month that I’ve been leading worship in Methodist Churches for forty years. Forty years ago you wrote out your service by hand with a bottle of tippex next to you to correct your mistakes. You also took the whole serviceyourself - from a pulpit - and no one else helped you apart from an organist.
Maybe I’ve preached on this Emmaus Road post Easter story more than any other. The miracle is I find new things to say about it every year.
In this most wonderful of stories in Luke’s Gospel, we accompany two of Jesus’ disciples as they first walk with and then eat with the risen Jesus. It is an encounter that will change their lives forever. Their story is a wonderful example of how God reveals himself to us too.
The two disciples are walking, down-cast and sad. Maybe they just can’t cope with the grief of their other friends and just need space. Jesus, the one in whom they had placed so much hope is dead, killed at the hands of those they had thought he had come to overthrow.
Maybe they “just wanted to go home.” Have you ever said that when something has gone badly wrong, a holiday where the hotel was awful, a meal out that was inedible, being stuck in a long traffic jam… “I just want to go home.”
And so when Jesus comes alongside them they are in no place to recognise him, even though there are strange rumours circulating that his body is missing and angels have appeared to say he is alive.
Note what Jesus does first. He does not reveal himself in a blaze of glory. He does not ignore their experience or their feelings of sadness. Instead, he gets them to tell their story, and he listens.
How could this have happened? Had he been taken? What are we to do now? Where do we go from here? The two disciples have a while—seven miles—to roll these details over, to ruminate on this loss and wonder at these strange occurrences, as they trudge on to Emmaus. “Really’s?” and “what if’s” animate their footsteps amidst exhaustion and abandonment.
“But we had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel.” It’s a statement saturated with honesty and pain—a confession of sorts. This was the One who was to restore Israel, to lift up the lowly and fill the hungry with good things. This was the One for whom generations had longed, hope built upon hope for centuries. And this One finally had a face. Now, even after his death, that face was gone, vanished from view. Imagine the weight of grief. Imagine the intensity of loss. Imagine all that compounded by utter confusion.
It might not be all that hard to imagine, honestly. The Emmaus road is one likely familiar to many of us, this side of heaven. It’s a well-worn path, dotted with defeat and disappointment, marked by inevitable questions, and disbelief. Life seasons and circumstances often determine how steep or winding or rocky this road is, but many of us have probably trod it, whether in the past or in the present.
The beauty we experience week in and week out in the scriptures is that the living God meets us on this road. The living God comes alongside us unexpectedly in moments of loss and difficulty. The living God walks with us in times that tempt despair and despondency, whether we realize it or not. And this is precisely what Cleopas and his friend or his wife experience on the Emmaus road, as they encounter a stranger mid-step.
There can often be the temptation when people are sad or low to try and “cheer them up” without giving them the space or time to talk first. Jesus listens. He values their experience. He gets them to reflect on what they have experienced over the last few days in Jerusalem.
It is an important starting point for all of us in pastoral work.
Like in that well-known poem of footsteps in the sand, we can sometimes as we look back discover that those times when we felt we were walking alone, when there were only one set of footprints, not two, in the sand, were in fact those times when God was carrying us, not when he had left us.
As he did with the two on the road to Emmaus, Christ invites us to set aside time, maybe even just five minutes a day, to reflect on our day and discern his presence. As we do so, we will come to see him and experience him more and more in our daily lives.
And often pastoral care starts with a mess and a longing for help.
Of course, by the time they get home, about seven miles walk, a long and winding road, they don’t yet know who the stranger is who has walked with thembut they have been so captivated by him and it is getting late they plead with him to stay with them. They feed him dinner, and they recognise him in the breaking of the bread.
It’s amazing how many of these resurrection appearances revolve around food—and people gathered around food. Jesus even makes the disciples breakfast on the seashore in John’s gospel. As an old theology professor used to say to his students, “Jesus loved meals so much, he became one.”
I want to just think about three reactions these two have after seeing it was Jesus who’d walked and now broke bread with them.
First, they say “weren’t our hearts on fire as he talked with us on the road?”
What does it mean to have a burning heart? The Greek word Luke uses here (kaiō) means ‘to set fire to’ and is used here metaphorically of the human heart being set on fire for God. It means more than simply being ‘enlightened’.
It means being ‘set ablaze’ with understanding of, and enthusiasm for, God and the things of God. We are reminded of John Wesley’s testimony to his conversion on the 24 May 1738: ‘In the evening I went, very unwillingly, to a society in AldersgateStreet, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.’
John Wesley is reputed to have advised his fellow Methodists to ‘Light yourself on fire with passion, and people will come from miles to watch you burn!’
A Minister was roused from his sleep one night by the police with the news that his church had caught fire. Hurrying to the scene he found the fire brigade quickly bringing the fire under control. Apparently more serious damage had been averted by the prompt and zealous action of a man who lived just across from the church. He had spotted the fire, phoned the police and fire brigade, and also managed to put out a good proportion of the fire by the time the fire brigade arrived. Visiting the man a few days later, to thank him for his invaluable help and assistance, the Minister inquired as to why he had not seen the man in church before since he lived so close. ‘Well.’ the man replied, ‘the church has never been on fire before!’
Post Easter, recognising him, are our hearts on fire? Or has our fire gone out?
Then having trudged seven miles, they run seven miles back to see the others. Jesus disappears, but they don't linger in contemplation of their mystical experience. They get up. They go back to Jerusalem, right then. They find their community. Because recognition of Christ is not complete in isolation. It is completed in community.
This matters for us right now. We live in a culture that tells us our value comes from what we produce, or what we own, or what we can accumulate. We're taught that might is right. That power should have its way. That security comes through acquisition, through accomplishment, through ascending.
And Peter's letter to the early Christians speaks directly to it. You have been ransomed from the futile ways of your culture, Peter says. Not by silver or gold. Not by playing the game of power and accumulation better than anyone else. But by the death of Christ. By an encounter with a way of being human that stands in radical opposition to the world's logic.
This is life. Not loyalty to the powers of the world, but loyalty to the Christ who walks the dusty road with us, who breaks bread with us, who gathers us into community. Like the disciples, we need to learn that salvation doesn't come through wealth and power; it comes through the vulnerability and self-giving love. Love above all else.
We're called to be that love-shaped community, practising a way of life that stands against the logic of the world. We're called to be a community that builds the alternative together, and as we carry the things of God along the dusty roads of this world, aspiring to something greater, we'll find the risen Christ with us.
Listening. Teaching. Interpreting the scriptures, and making sense of our lives. In weeks like this one in the news, we can get bogged down and hopeless. We have lost the prophetic imagination to speak out of this mess and muddle of that hope and that promise.
We really need a language that knows where we have been and where we might get. We have to acknowledge the sheer
improbability of the idea that we might, with a little effort, be different and better than we are. Then, to hope as we must, we must accept that we need to be rescued.
And that is what the two travellers learned on the Emmaus Road.
And this story in 2026 for us? I wonder what I said about it in 1986?
Well I’ll say this this year…
I think it summarises the Christian life. In fact, it summarises what we do every week and what we’re doing this Sunday.
Our calling is to proclaim the empty tomb with joy. But, like the travellers on the Emmaus road, we’ve fled with fear from the place of new life. Insteadwe’ve ploughed on in precisely the wrong direction. God, as always, takes the initiative and draws near, but we fail to recognise Jesus even when he’s staring us in the face. Jesus asks what things are burdening us and others, and hears our intercessions and prayers. The Word himself opens the words of scripture as we hear them read and preached. In sacraments like the breaking of bread, we glimpse God’s abundance and he nourishes the part of us that is for ever. We cry to the Lord when it seems darkness is closing in, and he tarries with us. Finally, our hearts burn with the fire of his Spirit, and we repent and change course.
Fear to joy; blindness to sight; unheard to understood; ignorance to enlightenment; despair to inspiration; hungry to filled with good things; disunity to community; lost to found. We need not put our hands in his wounds to believe: these things are the marks of the risen Lord, in whose company we walk, in these days of Easter, and forever.
This afternoon at Sawley using the old hymn book we will sing these words, surely our prayer for us today:
Perchance we have not always wist
Who has been with us by the way;
Amid day’s uproar we have missed
Some word that Thou hast had to say,
In silent night, O Saviour dear,
We would not fail Thy voice to hear.
Day is far spent, and night is nigh;
Stay with us, Saviour, through the night;
Talk with us, touch us tenderly,
Lead us to peace, to rest, to light;
Dispel our darkness with Thy face,
Radiant with resurrection grace.
Alleluia.
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