25 Then he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! 26 Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” 27 Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. [Luke 24:25-27, NRSV]
The Walk to Emmaus, by Lelio Orsi, 1570.
Nurtured in the Jewish tradition, the two disciples on the road to Emmaus are used to a vision of the Jewish Messiah appearing triumphantly as a military liberator of Israel. As J.C. Rye puts it in his volume on Luke in the Crossway Classic Commentaries series:
- A temporal redemption of the Jews by a conqueror appears to have been the redemption which they had looked for. A spiritual redemption by a sacrificial death was an idea which their minds could not take in.
Their idea of redemption was more politically than spiritually oriented. Now, completely let down by Jesus’ crucifixion, they are feeling dispirited, sad, dejected, and perhaps even angry with God for failing to side with their cause. That’s their story. That story tells of Jesus as a victim, a shocking passive recipient of violence and condemnation done to him by the chief priests. “Mighty in deed and word” (v.19) he neither returned violence for violence nor even defended himself. He quietly absorbed all the abuse and violence. They could not understand why. They failed to realize that he was an active agent of his own death, who willingly accepted and endured extreme violence and humiliation committed against him. He did not rebel. His attitude was positive, even when the circumstances were extremely negative. He had only the good of all people in his heart even as his persecutors were torturing him to death. Calling him a criminal and blasphemer deserving to die was absurd; but he faced the absurdity with an attitude of “positive non-acceptance” (Gabriel Marcel), serenely absorbing what was unfairly dished out to him. In all this, Jesus only reveals one face of God, the face of love. But a face of love always has two facets – that of suffering (in Jerusalem and on the hill of Calvary) and that of glory (on the mountain of Transfiguration, right after Peter having confessed him as the Messiah and he having prophesied his suffering and death). Christians must ever hold the two facets together.
- “Passion” from the Latin “passio” means to suffer, to bear, to endure. It is related also to patience. So our Lenten reflection on the Lord’s Passion (his suffering) ought to focus on not only what he did, but also, and perhaps even more, on what, out of love, he allowed to be done to him. In turn, we may be reminded to ask what, for the good of all, do we “allow” to be done to us this Lent without rebelling, or worse, intentionally plotting and causing hurt in retaliation? What am I willing to silently bear and endure?
The stranger thus responds by telling the story very differently from the one they have been accustomed to hearing, repeating and living all their lives. N.T. Wright offers a helpful line of analysis of this different story in The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is. We gratefully adopt his analysis on two themes – YHWH’s unfailing presence and Jesus’ redemptive suffering.
1. The Unfailing Presence of YHWH
On the first theme, Luke tells us the stranger chides them a little, calling them “foolish men”. He intends to tell them what the prophets of old had actually said but which they are “slow of heart to believe”, all because they, like the rest of the Israelite population, have wanted to hear a different narrative – one filled with active violence. They have accepted wholeheartedly the part on victorious salvation, but they have at the same time kept at bay the part on the necessary suffering of the Messiah. So now, once again, “beginning with Moses and all the prophets,” he will take them through the historical precedents to first demonstrate the unfailing presence of YHWH in all their times of suffering as the constant theme and pattern in those texts to which the whole Israelite nation had hitherto been blind.
- Israel suffered in Egypt to a breaking point, crying to YHWH for liberation, and God intervened and brought redemption.
- In critical suffering from their enemies, when Israel cried to the Lord God for help, God raised up Judges who acted in military leadership to rescue the people and establish justice.
- When the Assyrians swept through the country and held Jerusalem in siege, YHWH came to deliver them.
- Like pillar of cloud and fire in the wilderness, YHWH would act to rescue the people from enemy oppression, leading them with light and truth.
- Time and again, through the Babylonian capture to the Roman occupation, prophets had pointed into the gloom and declared that it would be through the darkness of Israel’s suffering that redemption would come.
- The Servant of YHWH would be a suffering servant, horribly abused among men (Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12) but would be rewarded in the end.
2. Redemption through Suffering
Thus, secondly, even though in ways that are not easy to comprehend, the saving purposes of YHWH first for Israel, and from there for the rest of the world, would be carried out through the most intense suffering. Suffering has become predictably necessary. Through the suffering and death of Jesus, Christians are to understand that what pleased God was to save humanity not with the power of this world, but with the weakness of the cross.
The Risen Christ’s remark “Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” (Luke 24:26) is the key Luke provides for understanding Jesus’ destiny. At the same time, it is the sentence par excellence for comprehending our own fate, for just as the Messiah must suffer, so too will those who follow him (see Mark 8:34, 10:39). On that understanding, Anselm Grün writes:
- It was God’s will, which we cannot question, that the Messiah should suffer in order to enter into his glory. And that is our way, too. Only through tribulations do we attain true life, the glory that God has prepared for us, in the form that God has devised for us. It is good that we have been disillusioned, that the images that we have made of ourselves have been shattered. Only in this way do we attain God’s glory. Only in this way can we become the image that God has made of us. [Jesus, the Image of Humanity, p.108]
And yet, the fact that suffering was a necessary part of redemptive work in the historical precedents of Israel was not unique to Israel. Apart from the ancient Jewish (religious) culture, this concept of glory through suffering marked a pattern well accepted in other ancient cultures as well. In China, for example, there is a saying, ascribed to Mencius (372-289 B.C.), that “before the heavens appointed someone to a great mission, his intentions would be tested to the limit, his body evacuated of all strengths, and his energies completely emptied.” In other words, he would be put through immense suffering to strengthen his resolve, so as to make sure he would emerge victorious on the other side.
Forged through the crucible of intense suffering, Israel would emerge the other side when exile was finally over and done with, when sins were at last definitively forgiven historically in the free and absolute surrender of the human will by Jesus of Nazareth to the kingdom-vision of the heavenly Father, when the covenant was renewed in the full obedience of the Son, and when the kingdom of God was definitively inaugurated. This, after all, was what Israel’s true narrative had always been saying, what the prophets had always been elaborating. Certainly, it is true that Israel’s narrative was working towards a climax. Equally certain, however, the story line was never about bits and pieces of victory laps after Israel had beaten up her enemies and then going round boasting and declaring its unassailable power and might. Rather, the story of Israel had always been about the creator God, Israel’s covenant God, bringing to reality His saving purposes for the world through His servant Israel. Israel’s servanthood, captured in the title “the Suffering Servant” is well described in the Book of Isaiah, where the four well-recognised “Songs of the Suffering Servant” appear in Isaiah 42:1–4, 49:1–6, 50:4–7, and 52:13 – 53:12.
And so, to really break open the true and constant message of the Scriptures about the Messiah, a message to which the two disciples, like others, have been “foolishly blind”, the stranger begins with Moses and all the prophets, to interpret to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning the Messiah. This is emphatically no cherry-picking style of proof-texting, but a complete and wholesome story-telling. The stranger patiently goes through the entire narrative, the complete story-line. In doing so, we can clearly imagine, the stranger uses almost the entire time on the seven-mile journey to Emmaus to:
- take them through the whole gamut of Israelite prayers and hope;
- point out the role of Israel as the bearer of God’s promises for the world;
- highlight the role of the remnant as the bearer of Israel’s destiny;
- come to the true king of Israel upon whom even the task of the remnant must finally depend;
- explain how this true king has to be the servant for the servant-people;
- emphasize how this servant-king has done for Israel and the world what Israel and the world could not do for themselves; and
- thus demonstrate why it was necessary this Messiah must suffer.
To this two-point analysis, other themes may, given the space, time and interest, be added for reflection. These other themes may include, among others, love, prophecy-fulfillment, non-violence, and the Messiah’s active free will in entering into passion and death for the mission of human redemption.
3. Human Redemption in Prophetic-Fulfillment, Love and Non-Violence
Through the stranger’s explanation, Saint Luke the Evangelist “proves” a key theme in the Gospel, namely, the theme of fulfillment of ancient prophecy on the Messiah who is not a triumphant military leader, but a Suffering-Servant. The necessity of suffering was made clear and interpreted as the fulfillment of prophecy. Twice in the concluding chapter of his Gospel, the evangelist uses the Greek word dei – it is necessary (Luke 24:26; 24:44). In the New Testament, this word often denotes the “divine necessary”, as in Jesus going into the Samaritan village (he did not have to, ordinarily and, as a Jew would even avoid) to meet the woman at the well (John 4) but he went because of the work of salvation. Dei is used to stress that the plans of God had to be fulfilled. The law, the prophets and the psalms had to come to fulfillment. We therefore see all the four Gospels binding themselves to the Jewish Scriptures. In the Emmaus story, Luke alludes to the risen Jesus giving details and drawing the connections for the benefit of the disciples. He demonstrates how the Scriptures are fulfilled in him, above all in his suffering and death.
Insisting on loving to the very end, Jesus kept to the principle of non-violence. In a violent world, suffering would be his lot. But he refused to meet violence with violence. He would be altogether non-violent. His triumph and glory would not be achieved by strength and power, but through failure: “The Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised” (Luke 9:21-22). In all this, pain and suffering would always necessarily be part of the path. The glory of the Messiah inevitably entails suffering – “Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer many things…?” It had to be so, because this is the only way to bring God’s love to a recalcitrant humanity without compromising either God’s love or human freedom.
Jesus lived and died for a cause, the establishment of the kingdom or reign of God on earth as in heaven, and his followers are empowered to carry on his mission and spread his message. Disciples did not have to see his death as a “penal victimization” but as what Elizabeth A. Johnson calls a “heartbreaking empowerment.” Jesus on the cross witnesses to a quality of life which is the true life for all – a noble and beautiful life in obedience to God’s values for the world. Triumph, disciples then understood, came through “failure”; you do not have to violently “win” in order to win. The resurrection faith of the early disciples, these two on the road to Emmaus included, no longer saw Calvary as a catastrophe. Instead, the cross is now the healing symbol of Jesus’ self-emptying, self-giving, self-transcending work and has become a source of joy, peace and liberation for them. The prayerful suffering and death of Jesus has transformed them. In the end, love wins. So William Bausch cites an anonymous poet in Storytelling the Word (p.223):
They walked the highway, defeated, alone.
A stranger joined them and lifted the stone.
He unfolded the scriptures, what prophets had said.
They shared life together, the cup and the bread.
Then they knew him, the Stranger, the man who was dead.
He gave them the answer when love broke bread.
Copyright © Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh, March 2021. All rights reserved.
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