In this three-part series, we will consider two of Jesus’ followers who had such strong preconceived notions about the Messiah that they failed to recognize the resurrected Christ when he was staring them in the face. In this series, we will consider Luke 24 to learn what kind of encounter with Jesus should satisfy us, the political significance of the resurrection, and what it looks like as we get to know Jesus better.

Don’t you hate it when someone’s preconceived ideas about you are mistaken? My husband knows all about this. He passed six feet in height at the age of twelve, and though he was awkward and nerdy, more interested in books and videogames than sports, adults still frequently asked him about basketball. This poor young man, towering over his parents’ friends, found himself explaining over and over, “But I’m not good at basketball. I don’t even like it.”

These people meant no harm; they just didn’t know him. And that is not the kind of relationship we want to have with Jesus. Unlike the adults in my 12-year-old husband’s life, charging up to him with their well-meant but misguided expectations, we want to know what Jesus is about—his job, his interests, what gets him excited. And all these things are tied into his mission as Messiah.

In Luke 24, we find two followers of Jesus who have such strong preconceived notions about the Messiah that they fail to recognize him when he’s staring them in the face. To begin, our two disciples¹ are walking on the road:

Luke 24:13-16. That very day two of them were going to a village named Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and they were talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing together, Jesus himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were kept from recognizing him.

The first verse in this section should give us the sense that these two are jumping ship. Jesus has recently died, and just a few verses before, a group of Jesus’ female disciples had gone to his tomb to anoint his body with spices and oils. When they ran back to the other disciples, telling of visions of angels and a Jesus who had risen from the dead, the text says that “these words seemed to them [the rest of the disciples] an idle tale, and they did not believe them” (24:11).

In the face of enormous stress, the group of Jesus’ followers starts to crack and split. The women encountered angels, they believe he was miraculously raised from the dead, but the rest are not convinced. And why would they be? They just witnessed one of the most terrifying and demoralizing fates that could befall a Jew in the Roman world: execution through public torture. Crucifixion.

And it happened to the most wonderful man they had ever known. In the face of the dramatic and terrifying conclusion to Jesus’ exciting week in Jerusalem, when he went from triumphant entry into the city while God’s people shouted praise, to confrontations with the religious authorities, to an abrupt capture and public, horrific execution, what group of people could withstand discouragement?

These disciples are going home. And it’s here, in their confusion and defeat, that the risen Jesus walks up to them. The text implies to us that God made them unable to recognize Jesus with the words “their eyes were kept from recognizing him” (24:16). But who would possibly expect Jesus to show up on a walk, looking like a normal guy, just days after his public execution?

The normalcy of this scene, by the way, marks the authenticity of the Gospel of Luke, unlike another version of the events: the Apocryphal Gospel of Peter. This book is a later Gospel account written by an unknown author and not accepted in the New Testament canon. That is, even ancient Bible readers believed someone had made it up.

In it, the account of Jesus’s resurrection reads like a Marvel comic. It just so happens that there’s a “great multitude” who come to see the sealed up grave (Why? Who knows?), and in front of this enormous crowd, there is “a great voice in the heaven.” Le grand final comes when Jesus exits the tomb:

36-37. And they saw the heavens opened and two men come down from thence with great light and approach the tomb. And the stone which had been laid at the door rolled of itself away by the side, and the tomb was opened and both the young men entered.

39b-41. …they beheld again three men coming out of the tomb and the two were supporting the one, and a cross following them. And the heads of the two indeed reached up to the heaven, but that of him that was led by their hands rose above the heavens.²

In front of the enormous crowd, the stone rolls itself to the side. BAM! Three men exit the tomb—so enormous that their heads reach to the sky! But Jesus? Jesus stands higher than the clouds. WHOA!

Now there is a resurrection story that feels right. It sits satisfyingly in the human soul, with a messianic reappearance worthy of a demigod.

Who would possibly expect what happened instead? That Jesus’ followers, depressed and confused, would encounter him on a long walk home, looking like a normal guy? That he wouldn’t even reveal his identity to them or show them his new abilities?

No. Way.

One of the ways that we know that the four canonical Gospels are true is that the Gospels tell an improbably simple story, unlike the apocryphal Gospel of Peter, which reads like the sensationalist demigod literature of the era.

For most of us, our first encounter with Jesus is just like this. While some individuals are miraculously healed or saved out of extraordinary distress as the catalyst for their faith in Christ (praise God for that!), most of us come to faith like this: we meet someone who talks to us about God. Like these two disciples, we are not hit over the head with an extraordinary miracle or shocked by a voice from heaven; to us, Jesus looks like a normal person or a normal book or a normal situation. It is only after we have met him that we realize how extraordinary he is.

We make a mistake when we hold out for a miracle to convince us into our faith. In this text, we see two disciples who—wherever their heart is right now—are willing to listen to a man, a simple, unassuming, normal guy they met on the road and who wants to talk to them about the Scriptures.

He will change their lives forever.

Are you having a road-to-Emmaus encounter with Jesus right now? Is there someone in your life, some problem you are facing, some question that keeps coming to your mind, that is urging you to draw nearer to God? Don’t pass it up because you think that only miracles count.

Listen to the words of the normal-sized, unassuming, living Lord Jesus and allow him to teach you as you walk your road with him.

How have you recently encountered God in a way that felt ordinary?

1. These two are not part of the Twelve Apostles, but I am using the term in the sense of “a personal follower of Jesus during his life,” (see the Oxford English Dictionary). In that sense, they certainly qualify.[↩]
2. This excerpt is quoted from Walter R. Cassels, The Gospel According to Peter: A Study (London: Longmans, Green, And Co., 1894). https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37494/37494-h/37494-h.html.[↩]