Devotion: On the Road
On the Road
Please review the scripture from the weekend: Luke 24:13-35
There’s no reason to believe the story of the road to Emmaus is a parable or metaphor. Based on how it’s written, it’s an accounting of an event that really happened after Jesus’ resurrection. Despite that, it does make a pretty good metaphor for how often we forget what we know about Christ and fail to see Him in our lives when we’re suffering. The two travelers’ failure to recognize Jesus in the flesh seems bizarre, but if we reflect, we regularly miss His obvious presence in our lives as well.
The failure of Cleopas and the other follower to recognize Jesus can at least somewhat be attributed to their extreme grief of seeing Him put to violent death only three days before. Such immense pain has a way of clouding our eyes to what’s really in front of us. Still, it does seem odd that at no point in their walk did they recognize Him for who He was. But we should cut them some slack because while Jesus may not appear to us in the flesh, as Christians, we know that He regularly shows up in our lives in some obvious ways, and we can be just as unseeing as they were. We get so caught up in our struggles and only recognize our own feelings, and forget to see how Jesus is with us through those struggles.
It’s interesting that only after Jesus had physically gone from them that the two women realize their hearts were “burning within” them the whole time. How relatable that is. When a moment has left us and we have time to reflect, it’s much easier to see Jesus’ presence in that time. It becomes clear as day and we may wonder how we missed it at that moment. Let us learn from these experiences, and also from the story of the road to Emmaus, and look outside ourselves to find Christ’s presence in our lives; amid the hard times and not only after the fact.
Holy Father,
Open our eyes to see You when all we want to do is focus on our own feelings. Remind us of what we know to be true–that You are always present in our lives, even when we’re so caught up in our pain to recognize it.
Amen.
Written by Preston Thiemann
Preston Thiemann and his wife, Rachel, live here in Lincoln. He is the Web Content Coordinator for the ASEM Marketing team at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where he’s worked since April 2015. At Sheridan, he also plays guitar with the Praise Band and is active in Sheridan’s 20s & 30s group called Second Quarter.
In his spare time, he enjoys reading, watching movies and spending time with friends.