As we walk through the milestone moments of Holy Week, trying once more to realize these events in real time and with the wisdom of hindsight, we see so many connections the friends of Jesus must have missed at the time.
This year my attention focused on the days after the resurrection, the ways Jesus visited His followers to make them (and us) certain that, indeed, He was alive and to bring them a strong hope that He would be with them to the end of measured time.
The more I reread the accounts of these days as told by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and of the walk Jesus took with the two on the road to Emmaus, the more convinced I am that the two were most likely a married couple, both of whom were very close to Jesus. Luke’s account names one of them Cleopus, a name scholars say had more than one spelling. Like us after a life-changing event (think 9/11 or the assassination of John Kennedy or Martin Luther King) these two were going over and over the details of Jesus’s crucifixion and the events leading up to it.
While they are intent on their discussion, Jesus joins them on the road. They didn’t see Him coming; He was suddenly just there. They noticed Him when He asked what they were talking about. Cleopus said, ”How could you have missed what the whole area is talking about—the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth who many believe was the Messiah?”
Jesus enters the discussion, and as the two recall each event of the last several days, Jesus begins connecting the dots for them from the writings of the prophets and the Psalms and the things the two tell Him that Jesus has said over the time they had been with Him. The two were so moved by what Jesus was connecting for them that it was evidently an ah-ha moment for them both.
Who was this other person? I believe it was “the wife of Clopus” (Cleopus), the “other Mary” referred to as being with the women at the tomb the morning of the resurrection. (Matt. 28:1) In Luke’s account at the tomb were Mary Magdalene, Johanna, Mary the mother of James “with the others” who then ran to tell the disciples that Jesus was alive.
Weren’t Cleopas and his wife Mary two who would have known the details of the story from different perspectives? It was certainly “Mary the wife of Cleopas” who stood with Jesus’s mother, His mother’s sister, and Mary Magdalene at the foot of the cross. It was they who heard the exchange between Jesus and John when Jesus asked Mary to look to John as if he were her son and John to treat Mary as he would his own mother.
When the two and Jesus came to the fork in the Emmaus road, Jesus seemed to be going on when the two turned toward their home. They begged him not to leave them, but to come home with them for supper and, since it was toward evening, spend the night.
The conversation must have been so rich after that. How their “hearts burned within them” as it does when someone opens our eyes to some brand-new insight. How deep the revelations of the last few hours with Him had been!
But then this guest that they had invited to eat with them, spend the night with them, stood at their table and like he was the host and they were the guests, took the bread and broke it. In that moment a sense of déjà vu came over them. They had seen this before, this breaking of the bread with these hands. They suddenly recognized Him for who He was. And just like He had appeared on the road, he slipped away from them and was gone.
What was the conversation after that? Did they recall the time Judas (not Iscariot) had asked Jesus when he was going to reveal Himself to the world at large so he could get a bigger following without risking so much? And Jesus’s answer that he would reveal Himself only to those who loved Him. Love first; get revelations after? And how these two had loved Him! Did the revelations of this night come because they had loved Him so? One thing was certain—He was alive and being with Him made them more alive than they’d ever been.
There would be no easy way of loving this Jesus. It would demand everything. There would be no playing it safe. It might be dangerous. But it would also be magnificent like these last few hours had been. Whatever the cost, they would follow Him.
