When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. 31 Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. 32 They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” [Luke 24:28-32, NRSV]
Friend of the Humble (Supper at Emmaus), by Leon Augustine Lhermitte,1892.
“All things begin from the heart,” you can hear the wise old Buddhist monk says to his young students at a temple up on the mountain. All human affairs emerge from human hearts. Spiritual formation is formation of the heart. The Emmaus story reveals that the resurrection must be first an experience of the heart. The Emmaus story slips by you as just another story in the Gospels without the power with which it is invested, unless the Risen Christ grips your heart.
“Why were the disciples’ hearts burning within them?” was a question often asked about the Emmaus episode.
The Emotional Dimension
The Greek terms Luke uses for “hearts burning” are “kardia kaiomenē” – a present passive participle tense. In Thomas Rosica’s view, this points to a gradual warming of the disciples’ hearts as Jesus spoke to them on the road. This gradualness underlines the “slow of hearts” (bradeis tē kardia) that best describes the hearts of the two disciples and ours that are at times “veiled, blinded, terrified, heavy, destroyed…” As a result, Rosica suggests that “the journey motif of this passage is not only a matter of the distance between Jerusalem and Emmaus but also of the painful and gradual journey of words that must descend from the head to the heart; of a coming to faith.”
In his TPI New Testament volume on Saint Luke, C.F. Evans brings attention to Luke’s silence on the effect of the miraculous disappearance of the risen Lord at the breaking of the bread. Instead, what Luke offers is a record of the effect of the disciples’ recognition of the risen Lord. And even there, that effect is the reflection that their hearts had been burning “while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures”. Of this, Evans expounds:
- Luke uses the double clause to make the statement emphatic.
- Luke brings together the two motifs of the story – (i) recognition, and (ii) scriptural interpretation – and in his usual fashion by using the same word in different senses. The eyes that had been “closed” did not prevent them from understanding what Jesus was explaining in scriptural interpretation. They only prevented them from recognizing who it was that was instructing them on the true meaning of the scriptures. But at the breaking of the bread, they were miraculously “opened” (dianoigein, v.31) to see who “he” had been.
- The result is that they are moved to recall, not how he had opened (dianoigein, v.32) the scriptures, which they had understood, but the burning intelligence that had accompanied the understanding.
- “Burn” in a metaphorical sense is found only here in the NT, and scholars are not certain to what it refers. The “burning of the heart” possibly denotes, as it does elsewhere in Psalm 39 and Jeremiah 20, an inner turmoil and distress which cannot be contained.
- Evans opts for taking “heart” used by Luke here to have the Semitic sense of “mind”, so that the burning is meant by Luke to point to a mind set on fire by understanding.
- Evans also locates the difficulties about the meaning and the relevance of the word “burn” as having caused the adoption of variant words in Latin-translated manuscripts such as: covered, blinded, obtuse, destroyed, weighed down.
Likewise, Luke Timothy Johnson in his Sacra Pagina volume on The Gospel of Luke particularly notes that in some Latin manuscripts, “burning” has been changed to “veiled” or “blinded”. He does not, however, think the changes are good in any way, for they miss the psychological point of the recollection. Rather, he thinks the emotion of love is appropriate here, just as “burning” is sometimes so associated in Greek literature.
Stressing the emotional dimension as well, Darrel L. Bock in his IVP New Testament Commentary series on Luke suggests that the disciples’ words on burning heart “point to how emotional [Jesus’ biblical] exposition had been for them, like a message being sown into their soul.”
In light of these and other similar comments, Joseph A. Fitzmyer’s brief remark in his famous 2-volumn work on The Gospel According to Luke in The Anchor Bible series creates a bit of a problem. That is because Fitzmyer calls the “burning hearts” in Luke’s narrative which “sums up the reaction of the disciples, when they realize the full import of [Jesus’] catechesis and his actions” a “rhetorical exclamation”. Fitzmyer’s choice of the term “exclamation” helpfully offers the necessary accent to the burning hearts reality. However, his use of the adjective “rhetorical” seems open to two readings and may confuse. If by rhetorical he means to accentuate Luke’s literary skills which find their finest expression here, his remark will be well accepted. But, if all that he means is that the descriptive “burning hearts” terminology is mere rhetoric, a kind of metaphoric gloss that has no real inner substance, then his remark contradicts the other scholars’ and may be seen as somewhat insipid and unhelpful.
On this score, it may be helpful to underscore three elements in the disciples’ action which seem clearly to evince far more than mere rhetoric. First, upon recognising the risen Lord, they rose without eating their supper. Second, even though by then it was well into the evening, they at once made the return trip back to Jerusalem from where they had just come. And third, on arriving Jerusalem and finding the Eleven together with the other followers, they gave witness to what they had (presumably) run seven miles to tell, of “what happened on the road” with the Lord, and “how he was known to them at the breaking of the bread” (24:35). Their exhilarating excitement was palpable. While it was not a medical condition of “pyrosis” or “acid reflux”, their “hearts burning” was certainly no mere rhetoric. It was an experience that could not be denied. In passing, we may note that the returning duo, together with the faithful who remained in Jerusalem, were engaged in an excited mutual witnessing and that was how faith was built up in the faith community. Their hearts gripped in heightened excitement, do you think anyone of them slept a wink that night?
A Personal Experience
The element of exhilarating human experience speaks intimately to me.
- One night many years ago, in the quiet of the wee hours, I was deeply absorbed in meditating on the Emmaus story when I came to that part where the Risen Lord revealed himself to the two disciples at the breaking of the bread and then forthwith “vanished out of their sight.” Saint Luke said the two disciples got up and returned at once to Jerusalem. Their spirit was lifted. Their hearts were burning. It was madly exhilarating. They dropped their supper and got up at once. They dropped their supper! They did not eat. They hurried back to the city from where they had just come. It was night time. But they did not give a second thought to their empty-belly or the seven-mile journey in the darkness of the night. They had seen the Lord! “He is risen!” “He is alive!” They were no longer hopeless! They had to tell the rest! It was extraordinary power, such power which they could scarcely suppress, even if they had wanted to. It was power that brought fire to the hearts, fire that warmed hearts and rekindled faith, lifting it to a level that surpassed even their original zeal. Like the tongues of fire that would come at Pentecost, the power was burning their hearts like never before. They must go and tell the rest, to call one and all to die to the old purposes and fading hearts and to rise in the new purposes of the promise of forgiveness and hope. So they ran and ran, for seven miles, all the way back to Jerusalem again. The truth came across to me like a thunderbolt. In that instant, I knew it in my heart: “It is true! It is true! Yes, the Lord is risen! I have seen the Lord!” My heart was racing. My excitement could not be contained. I could not sleep. I could not stop. I had to get going. From the study room, I started to pace up and down the sitting room, waiting for daybreak to tell everybody that I too had seen the Risen Lord! It is true! It is true! I, too, must tell everyone!
Luke’s “heart-burning” features a time-lag, however. He says that the two disciples only remembered their hearts were burning on the road after they have recognized the risen Lord at the breaking of the bread and the Lord having disappeared. In the next post, we shall turn to different angles of approaching this time-lag, including the angles of faith, Christ’s different mode of presence post-resurrection, and the nature of revelation as a process.
Copyright © Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh, May 2021. All rights reserved.
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