Opening Our Eyes to Jesus Incognito

The captain of the ship looked into the dark night and saw faint lights in the distance. Immediately he told his signalman to send a message: “Alter your course 10 degrees south.” Promptly a return message was received: “Alter your course 10 degrees north.” The captain was angered; his command had been ignored. So he sent a second message: “Alter your course 10 degrees south—I am the captain!” Soon another message was received: “Alter your course 10 degrees north—I am seaman third class Jones.” Immediately the captain sent a third message, knowing the fear it would evoke: “Alter your course 10 degrees south—I am a battleship.” Then the reply came: “Alter your course 10 degrees north—I am a lighthouse.”

The captain from the illustration I have just shared was suffering from impaired vision. The dark night had blinded him to the lighthouse that laid before him. It remained hidden, incognito from him, even though he was on a collision course with it, heading straight for it. It took seaman third class Jones three times to open the captain’s eyes so that he could see the lighthouse that had until then remained undiscovered to him.

Today’s Gospel lesson records the narrative of two disciples who eyes were also in need of being opened to what or whom, though hidden, was right in front of them. The story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus is one of, if not the most, dramatic resurrection stories in all of the New Testament. It is found only in the Gospel of Luke though there is a brief reference to it in Mark’s account. Luke says that this occurrence took place on that very day of the first Easter morning. Interestingly, the city of Emmaus has never been positively identified. In fact, at least four modern towns have been considered as possible cites for the ancient location of Emmaus.

According to Luke’s account, two disciples are making the journey from Jerusalem to this unknown place called Emmaus. One of them is identified as Cleopas, who is sometimes acknowledged as Clopas, the father of Simeon who followed James the brother of Jesus as the leader of the Jerusalem church.

As they walk along discussing the recent events that have taken place in Jerusalem, they are joined by the risen Jesus, but they do not recognize Him. We are told that their eyes were kept from identifying Him. What does this mean? Some have suggested that some miracle of blinding occurred to them; however, I would instead contend that what it might suggest is that a special opening of the eyes is necessary for observing the risen Christ. We can see this in the way that although all see an empty tomb, the risen Jesus is not visible to everyone.

There is some evidence to back up the notion of the inward character of this blindness. For even when the two disciples stand still they do not know the identity of the other pilgrim, who we know to be Jesus. When Jesus acts as if He is ignorant of the recent events that have taken place Cleopas is shocked. While his response is open to slightly different translations, the meaning is apparent: the event of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ is widely known throughout Jerusalem. Where has this stranger been?

To answer Jesus’ lack of information the two disciples tell the main parts of the story of Jesus. It is clear that they had accepted Him as a prophet. The chief priests and rules of Jerusalem had Jesus put to death. The disciples had hoped that He was the Messiah but their hopes had now been dashed, shattered, and obliterated. Their reference to the 3rd day is a hint to apparent knowledge of Jesus’ prediction of His resurrection. To be sure, women were unable to find Jesus’ body and claimed that they had seen a vision, while others had tested the validity of their hypothesis. Still, for all the proof of an empty tomb no one had seen the risen Christ.

In certain respects it may be easy for us to relate to the situation described on this first Easter Sunday. Here we are, Easter is only a week old, and yet for many of us the warm fuzzy feelings of the Empty Tomb have already worn off. We proclaim “Christ is risen,” but the lack of impact it has made upon our daily lives may cause us to question, “Is He risen indeed?” Or we may have heard from others who caught a glimpse of the empty tomb and yet we have personally been unable to see the risen Christ. Like the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, the risen Jesus could be right in our midst and still we remain blinded to His presence. How can we open our eyes and see the risen Christ, the Jesus who is right beside us but remains hidden, incognito? The two disciples on their way to Emmaus provide a picture of how our eyes too can be opened.

One way that these two disciples opened their eyes to the incognito Jesus in their midst was through the reading and relearning of Scripture. You see, like the Jews of Jesus’ day, these two disciples thought that they knew how the story was going to go. They had preconceived notions of what Messiah would look like. However, God had something different, something far greater, prepared. They did not understand the design and works of God. They were slow of heart, unready to believe what the prophets had already spoken. And so Jesus explained to them what was said in the Scriptures concerning Himself. Of course, it would have been nice if Luke had written down what Jesus had said to those two disciples on the road to Emmaus. What we do know is that Jesus criticized their lack of faith, using the entirety of the Old Testament to prove that the Christ should suffer and then enter into His glory. The specific texts that make these points are not mentioned, but Luke clearly believes that the total witness of Moses and all the prophets is that the Messiah’s role includes a suffering that will lead to ultimate victory.

Like those two disciples on the road to Emmaus, we may think we know how the story should go. We might have preconceived ideas as to how God should operate. If we are to avoid such pitfalls, we need to relearn the story as well, letting Jesus interpret the Scriptures for us. This helps us to open our eyes to new ways of hearing the story.

Hearing the story in a new way allows us to open our eyes and see that Jesus has been forced to explain Himself, who He is, and what He is doing from the very beginning. This is attested to by the similarities between how Luke’s story ends and how it began. Today we have heard the story of two disciples on the road to Emmaus. But this is not the first time we have heard the tale of two people going away from Jerusalem and running back again. Remember the story in Luke 2 where Mary and Joseph lose sight of Jesus. They discover that He is not there with them. They, like the two on the road to Emmaus, have a moment of sorrow and grief, head back to Jerusalem, and then when they find him in the temple he says, “Didn’t you know I must be about my Father’s business?”

The closer we examine it, the more we see how the story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus is strikingly similar to Mary and Joseph’s voyage. It consists of two people on a journey who have lost the Jesus they have known. When they do encounter Jesus they are surprised as to how it takes place. He explains to them that this is how it had to be. For the two disciples on the road to Emmaus Jesus opened the Scriptures to them and elaborated upon how it was necessary that the Messiah should suffer those things. It was almost as if He was saying again, “Didn’t you know that I must be about my Father’s business?”

The second mode of unveiling for these disciples occurs in the breaking of the bread. Jesus is unveiled and manifested in the breaking of the bread. When they arrive at the home of the travelers, Jesus is invited to share in their hospitality. All of a sudden the stranger assumes the role of the host. Taking bread, Jesus blesses it and breaks it, and the disciples eyes were opened. The breaking of the bread is reminiscent of the feeding of the 5,000 from Luke 9:16 and the Last Supper from Luke 22:19.

Luke does not tell us these stories to remind us of something miraculous that happened long ago in a land far, far away; instead, Luke attempts to persuade his readers that just as Jesus was revealed to those two disciples on the road to Emmaus, this is a pattern in which we can now live and move and have our own being. The miracle of seeing the risen Christ can occur even today in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. Of course this is not to suggest that Christ’s reality is to be found only there or that the fellowship of the church somehow creates the resurrection faith. It is simply observed that in this event of the church’s worship, in the breaking of the bread, the risen Christ is made known (v. 35). This is why we in the United Methodist Church practice open Communion because Mr. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, believed that taking Communion could be a converting ordinance. From reading stories like the one of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, Wesley came to understand that in the breaking of the bread people who do not know the saving love of Jesus Christ can have their eyes opened to God’s love for them.

In fact, we see this pattern of the importance of the teaching of the Scriptures and the breaking of the bread throughout Scripture. In Acts 2, the early church devoted themselves to the apostles teachings and the breaking of the bread. Those two practices are intertwined. Even in this story, when the two disciples exclaim, “Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked to us on the road?” they confess that their experience of the risen Christ through the breaking of the bread illuminates their whole past, including their reading of Scripture. The Scriptures that had once been so unclear are now opened through the risen Christ and the breaking of the bread. Likewise, the Scriptures attest to the importance of practices like Holy Communion, reminding us that Christ invited us to do this and remember Him.

The third way of opening our eyes to the Jesus incognito occurs when we recognize that is through the learning of the Scriptures and the breaking of the bread that we are made ready to help others open their eyes to the Jesus incognito in their lives. After Jesus opened the Scriptures to them and was revealed to them in the breaking of the bread, the two disciples ran back and said, “The Lord is risen indeed.” When the pilgrims returned to Jerusalem to witness they found out that the eleven had already heard the good news. The report that the Lord had appeared to Simon confirmed that their account of the Resurrection is true. Jesus then appeared in the Upper Room and commissioned them to go into all the world with the message of repentance and forgiveness of sins.

It is through hearing the word of God together and knowing the Lord in the breaking of the bread that we are energized for the mission out into the world. It is through means of grace like searching the Scriptures and the Lord’s Supper that we receive God’s grace and are empowered to share the good news of Easter hope. As we say in our Holy Communion liturgy, “Pour out your Holy Spirit on us gathered here and on these gifts of bread and wine. Make them be for us the body and blood of Christ, that we might be for the world the body of Christ, redeemed by His blood.” Through practices like Scripture reading and partaking in Holy Communion, we are transformed into people who go out into the world as the body of Christ, telling others that Jesus, though incognito, is ready to be seen by them as well.

The story of the resurrected Jesus is not a simple one. His resurrected body defies logic. He walks through walls and eats fish…what is up with that? The Christ who is at first invisible, who then appears at places removed in distance, who appears again and vanishes, is hardly an ordinary person. Back then everyone seemed to be able to recognize the historical fact of the empty tomb, but for many their eyes remained closed to the Jesus incognito standing right before them.

Still, this incognito Jesus comes to us in surprising ways if we are merely willing to open our eyes like the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. Certain means of grace and Christian practices help us to remove those scales from our eyes. Opening our eyes to Him is possible through things like retelling the story of Scripture and breaking the bread. This is how we are to live on our journey as his disciples, to hear again the story of Scripture, to bring our little stories, our troubled worlds into the still moment of the Lord telling the story His way, and then to come with hearts burning to the Lord’s table. So, do you have such a story on your heart today? Has your vision been clouded, causing you to already lose sight of the Easter message from a week ago? If so, join the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. Like them we can with Jesus read the Scriptures, break the bread, and be empowered for the mission of telling others about the risen Christ. Open your eyes…Jesus is here! Amen.