In fairness we do not know why they felt the need to journey to Emmaus, but we know that when people die, ordinary routines are suspended.  The prosaic duties of life wait until the appetite for living slowly reasserts itself again.  And there are conventions surrounding bereavement to be attended to, especially in Judaism.  This point, albeit provisionally, in one direction: the two disciples had given up and wanted out.  This was no Sunday afternoon stroll.  This was the first day of the working week for the Jewish population.  They were returning to business as usual.  As Jesus draws alongside them, he hears a diminishing echo of the good news.  Theirs is a narrative of crushed hope and decline.  They speak in the past tense about the greatest breaking news story in world history with no sense of its imperative.  Jesus had died.  How typical to raise your hopes and then see them dashed.

Jesus may be the Great Shepherd, but here he behaves more like a sheepdog, trotting round his sheep, steering them inexorably to their intended destination: the very place they had come from.  It is the attention to detail that strikes you.  He had just accomplished an act of cosmic significance, but rather than performing a dance of triumph on the roof of the Temple, he joins a downcast couple on a solitary ramble out of the city, affording them by some distance the most privileged Bible study in human affairs.  They were mourners beginning the slow, painful steps of re-integration into normal life.  They ended their day in personal possession of a story that would be told and re-told until the end of time.  For this privilege they paid with a personal rebuke too, for Jesus calls them foolish for giving up hope so quickly and in the face of emerging evidence to the contrary.

There is encouragement for us that Jesus walks, unobserved, through the banal and well-worn rituals of daily life.  These two had given up hope on the first day of the working week.  That sounds like a familiar story to me, into which Jesus steps today.  Perhaps the specific challenge to us is to resist the same downbeat narrative of decline we heard at Emmaus.  We have become perhaps too blasé and indisciplined in the way we enshrine our story of faith today, tolerating pessimism and defeat because we also do not have the eyes to see we are foolishly telling these stories to the risen Jesus himself. 

We have been given new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.  This is cause for joyful celebration and irrepressible hope.  And in fairness to those hapless residents of Emmaus, we’ve had a lot longer than they to get used to a dead man walking again.