Based on Luke 24:13-35
I’ve sat in hospital waiting rooms with families packing up the things they brought with them to the ICU. The empty coffee cups, the phone chargers, the extra change of clothes they never used. And at some point, almost always quietly, almost always to no one in particular, someone in that family says it. “We had hoped…” And then they go to the car.
There is a phrase in that experience and in today’s Bible story that I can’t get away from this week.
That phrase is a simple verb. But it carries more weight than almost anything else in this passage. Two disciples are walking away from Jerusalem… away from the empty tomb, away from the chaos of Easter morning, away from the story they can’t make sense of. A stranger falls in beside them and asks what they’re talking about. And Cleopas stops walking. Just stops. Stands there, bewildered that anyone could be in or around Jerusalem and not know what has just happened. And then he says it.
We had hoped.
We had hoped. Past tense. In Greek, (ɛ̌ːl.píz.do.men)[1]. It can also be translated as we expected, or we believed. We had hoped. The action of hoping had started, and it carried on for a good long while, and then, somewhere between the arrest and the cross and the sealed tomb, it ran out. They had hoped that Jesus was the one to redeem Israel. They had staked everything on it. And now here they are, shuffling down a dusty road, doing what grieving people do: trying to walk it off.
I want to reflect on that verb we had hoped before we rush past it toward the happy ending. Because here’s what I know about you, and about the people sitting in the seats around you right now: some of you walked in here today carrying a “we had hoped.” A marriage you believed God was in. A doctors visit that came back wrong. A career that you invested in and believed would last through your retirement. A child you raised in faith who walked away from it. A prayer you’ve prayed so many times the words have gone smooth like river stones, and heaven still feels quiet. You had hoped.
The hoping didn’t start small… it was real, sustained, the kind of hope that carries you through years. And then something happened, and now you’re walking away from Jerusalem, trying to figure out what to do with the wreckage of what didn’t come true.
Luke doesn’t rush past this moment. He doesn’t wave it away. He gives us Cleopas standing in the road, speaking a phrase that every grieving person recognizes on contact. We had hoped. You’ve said it. Maybe you’ve said it this week.
But let’s go back to the story. So, who are these two people on the road to Emmaus?
We know the name of one of them, Cleopas. That’s it. He shows up here and nowhere else in the New Testament. He’s not one of the Twelve. He’s a disciple from the wider circle, one of hundreds of people who had followed Jesus, believed in him, built their lives around the idea that something was finally, actually happening in the history of Israel. The other person with him… we don’t even get a name. Some scholars have suggested it might be his wife (Mrs. Cleopas, maybe?). We don’t know.
What we do know is that they are on a seven-mile walk from Jerusalem to a village called Emmaus. And as they walk, they are doing something the Greek makes clearer than our English translations: they are not just talking. They are examining the evidence together. They are turning the facts over, looking at them from every angle, trying to reason their way to some kind of understanding. These are not superstitious, simple-minded people who believed because they didn’t know better. These are people wrestling hard with the facts in front of them.
The gospel of Luke is full of this. Mary debates the angel. Jesus questions the teachers in the Temple. The disciples on this road are thinking people in a crisis of faith, and Jesus doesn’t rebuke them for thinking. He walks with them in it.
I think this is important because a lot of people have been told, sometimes by the church itself, that doubt is the opposite of faith, that questions are a sign of weak belief, that a real Christian just trusts. But here is the risen Jesus, walking seven miles with two people who are auditing the evidence and coming up short, and he doesn’t leave them. He joins them. He engages every question they have. He takes their crisis seriously.
There is something deeply pastoral about the way Luke tells this. Jesus honors the conversation. He takes the long road with them, not the short one.
Here’s another detail worth reflecting on. When Jesus joins them on the road, they don’t know who he is. Luke tells us their eyes were “kept from recognizing him”. Luke doesn’t fully explain it. Maybe their grief was so total that they couldn’t see past it. Maybe the risen body of Jesus was different enough that recognition required more than a glance. Maybe God, in some strange mercy, wanted them to come to faith through the conversation itself before the reveal.
Did you notice this: they describe Jesus to Jesus. They give him a summary of his own life, his own death, their own hope and disappointment, and they don’t know who they’re talking to. It’s an ironic moment. The very person they’re grieving is the one walking beside them. The one they had hoped in is listening to them explain why they had stopped hoping.
Cleopas even calls him a stranger — uses the Greek word paroikos,[2] which means something closer to a foreigner, a migrant, an outsider.[3] The risen Christ appears to them as the other, the one who comes from somewhere else. And what’s interesting is: they don’t turn him away. Despite their grief, despite the fact that they have no idea who this person is, they invite him in. They say, “Stay with us. It’s getting late.” That hospitality, offered in the middle of their own devastation, is what changes everything.
And so they sit down to eat. Jesus takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to them.
I imagine the words are almost identical to the words at the Last Supper. Luke wants you to hear that echo. He wants you to feel the resonance between that upper room table and this ordinary roadside dinner table. Jesus is doing the most Jesus thing he ever does: it is feeding his friends at a table.
Robert Karris, a scholar who spent his career in Luke’s Gospel, wrote that in Luke, Jesus is either going to a meal, at a meal, or coming from a meal.[4] That’s not an exaggeration. Eating in Luke is a theological act. Jesus is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard… which is to say, he ate with everybody, broke every social boundary at the table, welcomed people who had no business being at the table together. And here, in this house in Emmaus, he does it again.
And that’s when their eyes open. Not during the Scripture lesson on the road, as rich as that was. Not when he explained Moses and the prophets. It’s the bread. It’s the breaking. It’s the ordinary, intimate, physical act of sharing a meal. It’s building relationships.
I think Luke is telling us something here that is easy to miss in a culture that has made worship primarily intellectual. The resurrection is not just a theological proposition you reason your way into. It is something you encounter, in the Word, yes, but also in the waters of baptism, the bread, the cup, the touch of another person’s hand, the gathered company of regular people who are also carrying their own imperfect-tense verbs. Jesus becomes known in the breaking of bread.
This is why the table carries significance. This is why we come back every week. Not just to hear, but to receive. Not just to think, but to be fed.
Now here’s the thing I want to be careful about, because it would be too easy to set up their disappointment as a neat spiritual problem with a clean answer.
Cleopas and his companion had hoped that Jesus would redeem Israel. They meant it literally, politically, concretely. They wanted Rome gone, out of power. They wanted the kingdom (and authority) of Israel restored. They wanted the suffering of their people to be over. And Jesus didn’t do that, not in the way they expected. The professor who wrote one of the commentaries I read this week says he sometimes tells his seminary students: “If Jesus was the Messiah, he wasn’t very good at it.”[5] Which is deliberately provocative, but it points at something important. Jesus confounded every category people had for what a Messiah was supposed to do.
And the risen Jesus, walking that road, doesn’t deny their disappointment. He doesn’t tell them they were wrong to hope for what they hoped for. He reframes it. He puts their story inside a larger story… a story in which suffering and glory are not opposites, in which crucifixion is not the end of God’s action in the world but a move within it. The Messiah had to suffer these things before entering his glory. That’s a hard concept. It doesn’t make the pain smaller. But it insists that the pain is not the last word.
That is the work of the church when someone is carrying pain. You don’t deny the trauma. You don’t rush to the silver lining. You walk the road with them. You help them, slowly, carefully, begin to see their story inside the larger story of what God has been doing all along. That takes time. It takes presence. It takes bread at a table together.
The story ends pretty quickly after that. As soon as their eyes are opened, Jesus is gone. And these two people, who were walking away from Jerusalem in grief, now turn around and walk back. Seven miles, in the dark, because they cannot keep this to themselves. They get to Jerusalem and find the eleven disciples already gathered, already saying it: “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon.” And Cleopas and his companion add their own testimony: he was made known to us in the breaking of the bread.
There is something instructive about that. The church, from its first days, has been a community gathered around a testimony, a story that we tell. People who had their own encounters with the risen Christ, who recognized him in the breaking of bread, who turned around and went back to tell someone else.
You are here today because somewhere in the chain of that testimony, someone told someone who told someone who eventually told you. And whatever your “we had hoped” is, whatever imperfect-tense grief you walked in with, you are invited to this same table where he has been making himself known for two thousand years.
We had hoped.
Maybe some of us still do. Maybe today is the day the bread gets broken and something shifts. Maybe it takes longer. But the road to Emmaus tells us this: he comes alongside people who are walking away. He takes the long road. He stays for dinner.
And he is known in the breaking of the bread. Amen.
[1]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%A0%CE%BB%CF%80%CE%AF%CE%B6%CE%BF%CE%BC%CE%B5%CE%BD
[2] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-luke-2413-35-11
[3] https://www.billmounce.com/greek-dictionary/paroikeo
[4] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-luke-2413-35-9
[5] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-luke-2413-35-9
Written by: Rev. Dave Wasson
Dove Sermons 
Leave a comment