“They related the things that had happened on the road, and how he became known to them in the breaking of the bread” (Luke 24:35).

Hello. I’m Luke. My name’s not in that story about the Emmaus Road, but I’m the guy who wrote it down—wrote the whole book, in fact. It’s fifty years since Jesus went back to the Father, and I wrote so people could know the truth about what happened.

Luke’s an old Greek name, and I’m a Greek. I didn’t grow up in Greece but in Syria—in Antioch, a center of Greek culture and influence, a wonderful cosmopolitan city on the Orontes River, not far from where it empties into the Mediterranean Sea. My folks grew up there, too; they’re well-educated, but not religious. They didn’t believe in the old Greek gods any longer, and the new religions were socially marginal. I went to the best schools there, and speak and write Greek as my mother tongue.

That’s the me of fifty years ago: a non-religious Greek born and raised in Syria. You’d call me a pagan, and you’re wondering how I how I happened to get mixed up in what was going on in Jerusalem, 300 miles south, a place of religious fanaticism and a city where the elders would die rather than submit to Greek culture. Well, I’m a doctor by profession, a man of science, an observer of the human condition physical and spiritual alike. I’ve seen a lot of suffering in my practice, and I’ve relieved a lot of it, too, but there are always some conditions that you can’t do anything for.

That’s when I began to pay attention to rumours of a healer in Palestine—a Jew, of course, but from Nazareth in the north, and not from that holy hotbed Jerusalem. There’ve been Jews in Antioch since it was founded, and I had people in my practice with relatives in Palestine. I kept hearing stories about this Jesus. They said he was healing quite impossible cases—paralysis, leprosy, blindness—even, so they said, death. Eventually I went down there on a study break, just to find out what he knew that I didn’t.

I had a lot of trouble finding him, the gadabout, but I finally caught up with him. He was coming down from some kind of retreat in northern Galilee. He had a dozen unlikely fellows with him, people he was trying to train in his ideas and methods. It turned out he was doing more speaking than healing. Y’know what? I hadn’t listened to him five minutes before I knew I’d have to come back and learn more. He had a quiet confidence that won me right over, and he spoke directly and simply.

The crowds were thick and diverse, and nobody noticed me even though I was a Gentile. But the strange thing was, I felt, actually, that he did... that he knew I was there, and cared. He talked about God as familiarly as if they’d grown up in the same family, and when he did, my heart warmed with a rising faith. Jesus made me want to love his God and to be a truly good person. Nothing in my family or education had ever done that to me.

I won’t bore you with the details, but eventually, I put my practice on hold for six months, just in order to study this man and his methods. I thought, if I could just learn the compassion he showed, if I could acquire his insight into people, I might be able to learn the secret of his healing power as well. Think of what it would mean to the world, to be able to go from place to place and restore pathetic and miserable people to physical health. I became obsessed, and, during the last month or two of his life, I was never far away from him.

That’s when I became acquainted with Cleopas. He was related to Joseph, Jesus’ late father, and had a home in the south, in Emmaus, near Jerusalem on the main road to the coast. But when Joseph died, he’d come up north to Galilee to help look after Jesus’ mother, Mary. Cleopas explained Jewishness to me—it’s a different world, I can tell you that—and helped me feel a part of Jesus’ group. That inner warmth I spoke of grew into a flame of hope and even devotion.

As I became more and more a part of the group, I began to worry that Jesus was getting paranoid, because he started to talk about going south to Jerusalem, being arrested by the authorities, and put to death. I didn’t think that needed to happen, particularly if he would concentrate more on his healing, but he became very insistent on the point about his death. And he also began to drop hints about rising from the dead, which I didn’t understand very well. You have to remember that doctors see a lot of dead people, and we know that they stay dead.

But he did eventually go to Jerusalem. The Twelve went with him, and most of our group went along, too. We stayed outside the city in Bethany and went in every day. The first time—it was Sunday, the first day of the week—was very exciting, because Jesus rode a donkey and the crowds hailed him.

But we weren’t prepared for the hostility of the religious establishment towards him, still less for what actually happened. Imagine our shock on Thursday night when one of the Twelve betrayed him to the high priests. They arrested him and turned him over to Rome, clamoring for his execution.

It was all so sudden—we’d been there all of five days!—so unjust, so drastic, and so frightening. There was a sham midnight trial; there were early morning hearings on Friday. You can’t believe it could ever happen to someone you know. The cruelty and horror of that afternoon left everyone numb with loss and fear. The women of the group actually stayed at the execution until it was over, but even I did not have the stomach for that.

Well, Jesus’ body was in the tomb before the Jewish Sabbath started at sundown on Friday. We didn’t go back out to Bethany: Jews don’t travel on the Sabbath, you know. As usual, I sat in on their household service, but no one had any heart for prayers. His love and faith had captured us all. He was so young, so gifted, so compelling, and now dead, and his vision of a better world, under God, dead with him. Our fear and confusion were palpable.

But on Saturday, my mind began to clear. I saw what a fool I’d been, to shut down my lucrative practice in Antioch to follow this charismatic Palestinian who talked about God as our father, loved little children, but didn’t have the political sense to win the favour of the powerful people of his own race. I made up my mind to forget it all and head back to Antioch. Cleopas was upset, too, although he was Jewish and religious, but he told me privately that it was clear Jesus was not, after all, the Coming One they had looked for over the centuries. He said that if I was going back north, I could crash with him the first night, and we agreed to leave the group the next morning.

That’s when things took a bizarre turn. While Cleopas and I were packing up, three of the women took spices out to the tomb; it’s a burial custom of theirs. We actually told them not to go, because the tomb was sealed and blocked by a huge stone, but they wouldn’t listen to reason. Then, before Cleopas and I could get on the road, they were back, saying that the tomb was open and empty and that they had seen a vision of two men who told them Jesus was risen from the dead.

This led to a huge row, because most of us didn’t believe them. My old scientific training rose to the surface, and I just could not hold my tongue. I called their story “nonsense;” I told them the dead stay dead; I hinted that anything to the contrary was female hysteria. Peter was a little more sympathetic and went out to the cemetery to see for himself; he came back shaking his head. He didn’t actually say he believed the women’s story, but he did say that what they said was true: The tomb was empty.

That’s when I really lost it. I’m too ashamed to tell you the things I said to Peter, and Cleopas and I stomped out. I had a long ways to go and no time to waste with claptrap like that. During the long walk out to Emmaus, we never stopped talking, even arguing. He said I’d been too hard on the women, and I said, “Think of the fees I’ve lost gadding about with this little healer. And another thing,” I told him, “The rising-from-the-dead bit never did make any sense to me, and it didn’t to the Twelve, either, because once I asked Levi about it, and his eyes just glazed over.” I hadn’t felt so hostile and so since I was a sophomore in college.

Anyway, all of a sudden, there was this stranger there with us, walking with us and asking what we were talking about. We stopped and stared at him, and Cleopas finally said, “You must be the only person in Jerusalem who doesn’t know what happened this weekend.” He said, “What happened?”

Cleopas told him. He spilled everything: about Jesus, the healing and our hopes, then the arrest and the execution, the fear and disappointment, the disillusionment, and the blow-up with the women who believed—he even told him that.

He was quiet for awhile, and we just walked along; then he said, “Why are you so slow to believe what the prophets have said? The Messiah had to suffer in order to enter into his glory.” Then he began to quote scripture—these religious Jews have phenomenal memories for the Bible. In place after place in their Bible, he showed how the words pointed to One who was to come, and he argued that Jesus fulfilled those hopes.

His voice was comforting, and his face seemed vaguely familiar, but we kept pretty quiet. I didn’t know the Bible that well, but I could tell that Cleopas had heard those words many times. And as the stranger spoke, I felt that strange warmth beginning to rise in my heart once more.

This went on for a couple of hours, and we finally got to Cleopas’ place. The stranger acted like he’d go on, but we tried to get him to stop over with us. “It’s almost dark,” we said. “Stay with us.” And he finally did come in. Actually, I think it was a set-up: He really wanted that invitation.

When we sat down at the table, a funny thing happened: He suddenly began to act like he was the host and we were the guests. He picked up the bread, made a prayer, broke it up, and began to give it to us.

I stared at him, and my head began to swim. He handed me a piece of bread, but I couldn’t move. It was his hands! They were scarred, as if spikes had been driven through them.

In a flash, I knew who it was, and just as fast, he was gone.

We were stunned and sat there like stones. Finally, Cleopas said, “Was all that a vision? Have we gone over the edge, too?” and I pointed to the plate and said, “Somebody had to break that bread,” and we burst out laughing—laughing and crying—and packing up our duffel to head straight back to Jerusalem.

It was really late when we got there, but they were all still up, and the mood was very different than when we left. They said, “The Lord has risen. He appeared to Peter.” Then we told them the things that had happened to us on the road and how he became known to us in the breaking of the bread.

That’s only part of the story, and you can read my whole book for the rest, but it’s enough to let you know how we all became convinced that he had truly risen: The tomb was empty—any kid could walk out there and see that—and we had seen him, alive: our teacher and master.

I realize now that I didn’t recognize Jesus on the road because I had turned away from the love and loyalty he generated in my heart and from the hope the Bible teaches. God doesn’t give us all truth in advance but lets us know it gradually, as we give ourselves to him. But I had quit—given up on Jesus—stomped out and slammed the door. In the coldness of my heart that day, it became impossible for me to recognize some things. It was an act of wonderful grace that Jesus didn’t let me go—he pursued me; he insinuated himself back into my life. Praise God that he did!

And he’ll do the same for you. That’s one of the reasons I wrote my book. Even now, he’s at your side, unrecognized and waiting to listen, teach, and comfort. Even now, he’s angling for an invitation. Let him hear you say what Cleopas and I said late that Sunday afternoon: “Stay with us.” He’ll be known to you in the breaking of the bread.

Thanks be to God for his Word.