"And [Jesus] said to them, 'What kind of conversation is this that you have with one another?' And they stood still, looking sad." (Luke 24:17)
When prayers are "unanswered," when expectations seem illusory, when life is just not working out the way you had hoped, even from when you were a child, "And they stood still, looking sad", is all there is, that is, if one takes eyes off Jesus Christ.
The two on the Emmaus Road were like everyone else, e.g., the future "apostles" in hiding, Mary, who thought the Risen Christ was, "the gardener," Thomas, who had to see everything which only faith can see. Sadness was all around in those hours from Gethsemane to Jesus' Body in the tomb, right up to, "the first day of the week." This was not supposed to be the way it would end. As the two later said to Jesus, "But we were hoping that it was He who was going to redeem Israel...."
"O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken!" was Jesus' response to their downtrodden state. I posted a statement yesterday that I stopped underlining in my Bibles decades ago. I said that perhaps the reason was that I thought it was an "insult" to the Lord God, viz., selecting passages which, yes, blessed me, but I think there could be something for all of us in the statement, "If you want to know what God is saying to you, read what you haven't underlined."
Maybe we could say of the Followers of Jesus, even from the beginning of their sojourn with Jesus, that they were only reading what they had "underlined." The "Word" for you and me, indeed the Twenty-First Century Church is, "....believe in all that the Prophets have spoken."
Father, in Jesus' Name, I believe/receive. Amen.
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When Peter, an 18 year old Norwegian, "heard the call to evangelize China, on that day he not only emptied his wallet into the collection plate, but included a small note with the words, 'and my life.'"
Hebrews 12:2
Hebrews 12:2
