What’s important about these two disciples on the road to Emmaus, is that when you look closely, they are heading in the wrong direction. They are on the road out of town, going back home. Everything that happened to them, everything that drew them into Jerusalem, has all ended in a great letdown. There was going to be a revolution, and the whole world would be different. But, nothing worked out the way everyone thought. It all ended in Jesus being victimized by the powerful, and then confusion and disappointment and friends scattered to the four winds. They did hear unconfirmed reports that Jesus is missing, maybe risen from the dead. But whatever they heard, it wasn’t that convincing, it was too hard to hang onto, after all, if he rose from the dead, wouldn’t it be obvious? So they’re headed out of there back to someplace safer. Back to everyday life. They say some of the saddest words we say in life, they say We were hoping. We were hoping for something new, something amazing, something life-changing, something that would carry us along through its own momentum. We were hoping, but it just didn’t work out.
And even St. Peter, who is speaking so confidently in that first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, he did the same thing. He looked into the empty tomb and heard the testimony of the women who spoke to the angels, but flip ahead a page in that gospel where that happens, where is he? He’s back in the countryside fishing, like someone who has no idea where to go in the middle of an overwhelming sense of disappointment, except to back to the office. It was all too much of a letdown after the life they had been living so intensely for two years. They had all been hoping, and these rumors of the resurrection weren’t enough to keep their hope going.
Disappointed hopes are hard to talk about with other people and maybe we don’t even think about them very much, because they have become so much a part of ourselves. It’s hard to talk about all the things we wish had happened, or that we wish were true. It’s not just the resurrection. It’s all the dreams we’ve had of the way life should be, but where it hasn’t turned out that way. Ever so gradually, that loss of hope, whatever it might be about, sends us into a way of insulating ourselves from future disappointment. We won’t get our hopes up again, we think, because it’s just too hard. Maybe you have been hurt by people you thought would never hurt you. Maybe you thought the church would or should be more or better than it is, and yes, you’re right, it should be. Maybe you thought you yourself would turn out to be a better person, or do something more courageous or risky with your life, maybe you once hoped that Jesus would be more real to you and close to you than he seems. And as a result, maybe you’ve done the equivalent of heading back to Emmaus. You heard that there maybe was a resurrection, but it’s hard to get your hopes up about something that seems so far away.
The question in today’s gospel really is, What’s our normal life supposed to be like after the greatest thing that ever happened? How is it supposed to change us? What do we do about our discouragement or disbelief? And the answer is, the risen Christ does change everything, but none of it happens in the way we expect, just like the resurrection didn’t happen in the way these disciples expected. Just like them, Christ is walking alongside us and our eyes sometimes don’t work when they look for him. The risen Christ in the gospel isn’t someone it’s always easy to recognize, and in our life, too, his presence takes some getting used to. He doesn’t overwhelm us with his offer of companionship on the road, but the relationship we’re offered is one that is just as real and close as the one these disciples suddenly have with this stranger. We can have moments like these disciples where the pieces of what they have been hearing in the scriptures suddenly fit together, they stop being words. Instead of being words, we see the bread broken into pieces on this table, we see an embrace offered to a stranger, we see God’s love in our life and realize it has been there all along. The pieces fit together. Our eyes are opened, and maybe if we work at it, they stay open.
It’s easy to lose heart about what we’re called to do in life, whatever it has been for you. But maybe the reason we’ve lowered our expectations about life is because without realizing it we’ve lowered our expectations about God. We don’t expect much from God, we expect too little in terms of what a relationship with God might be like, we expect too little in terms of how much support and love we can feel from God each day, keeping us on the road, we expect too little in terms of the inspiration that might turn us around and send us marching towards Jerusalem instead of away from it. We don’t leave ourselves open to seeing God immediately next to us, pointing us in the right direction, which is always back towards Jerusalem, where there’s work to be done. God wants to explain things to us, if we’ll listen to the scriptures again and ask God to show us that his love has already changed everything. These disciples talked about all their hope in the past tense. It turned out they were wrong.