Luke 24: 13 - 35 The Road to Emmas

In his book The Searchers Joseph Loconte writes at the end of his introduction Two Friends On A Quest:
"Menachem Mendel, a rabbi in the nineteenth century put it this way: 'For the believer there are no questions, and for the unbeliever there are no answers.'

That claim, however, doesn't ring true for most of us. Life has a way of forcing painful questions upon us, whether we welcome them or not. And the human heart has a way of keeping alive in us the longing for answers. To extinguish this hope, either through neglect or cold rationality, would seem to diminish what it to be human. The road to Emmas, after all, is a road all of us find ourselves on - eventually. It is the path of every pilgrim who tries to make sense of the wilderness of the world around him.

'As I watched, there awoke in me an immense curiosity,' writes Perry. I was onto something.' " (1)

Further along in The Searchers, in chapter seven after Joseph Loconte has explained that during and after the Age of Enlightenment many people viewed religion as, "...the friend of ignorance..." But he goes on to say, "... authentic belief is the culmination of a process involving both the heart and the mind." (2) And two pages later he says, "Yet the description of belief on the road to Emma's - a pattern seen often in the Bible - suggests just the opposite. Christian faith, it turns out, involves the mind as well as the heart; reason as well as intuition." (3) And if we are to believe the gospel writers, we are told in Luke 2:52 that Jesus grew in wisdom and favor with God and man. If it was necessary for Jesus to grow how much more necessary is it for us to grow as well?

Yet there needs to be more to our faith than wisdom for, as the author of Luke says in his telling of the journey to Emmas, He took bread, gave thanks,broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him. The author of The Searchers goes on to say, "Perhaps this is how the natural world is opened up to the supernatural. The homely experience of offering thanks to God and breaking bread together with Jesus helps to remove what ever obstacle was keeping these men from realizing who he was." (4) Indeed, and it can be no less true for us; as we take the bread and the wine we open ourselves to that experience of communion with Jesus that is not explainable in the ordinary, everyday way we make sense of things. The writer of Hebrews understood this when he wrote, "Faith makes us sure of what we hope for and gives us proof of what we cannot see." (5)

(1) The Searchers page XXIV
(2) Page 155
(3) Page 157
(4) Pages 156 - 157
(5) Hebrews 11:1 cev