For a while, I have been processing the picture of the two men from Emmaus returning to Jerusalem. You can read the account in Luke 24.[1] Our home church has worked through the passage from its beginning, where Jesus joined two men heading away from Jerusalem to Emmaus, to its end, where the two men were suddenly compelled to rush back to Jerusalem (where they would have been already if they had believed in the resurrection!).
A major part of the picture for us is how the men were only leaving Jerusalem on that day and time because they had given Jesus the third day to show that he really was alive, and he didn’t show up. At least to them. They concluded that he must still be dead, and so they headed home in deep grief.
The rest of the picture is the amazing way Jesus attached to them in what they were going through while laying the foundation that would not only get them back to Jerusalem where he could reveal his resurrection to all the disciples, but to be the church he was building throughout all the rest of time.
I sometimes hear Christians refer to God’s call to return to something and lament that they’ve never been there, so how can they return to it. Perhaps you know that feeling when the Bible seems to call us to go back to something, but we can’t recall ever being there in the first place.
For example, many church folks know they do not have the first-love we read about in Revelation 2.[2] They don’t recall falling away from first-love, so how do they “remember therefore from where you have fallen”? They can see that the church is called to “repent, and do the works you did at first,” but don’t believe they ever had those kinds of first-love good works, so how do they return to them?
In the same line of thinking, if we don’t see ourselves as ever having been in Jerusalem at all, how do we return there? If we have never known Jesus in the power of his resurrection, how do we learn any lessons from these men returning to where Jesus’ resurrection was being so clearly revealed?
The way I’m looking at Jesus’ ministry to the two men is as a call to people whose heritage goes back to Jerusalem and a first-love relationship with him. It is like a blind man who may have been blind since birth, but he wants his sight restored because he knows his eyes were made to see. Or like the people who were born during the exile and had never lived in Israel, but they have heard the stories of who they were as Abraham’s descendants, and that they were citizens of Israel, and so they could see themselves as a people who want to return to their homeland even though they had never lived there.
In the same way, the church Jesus is building began in Jerusalem. It is where Jesus died, where he was buried, where he rose from the dead, and where the Holy Spirit came upon the church. The life of the kingdom that began in Jerusalem is our heritage. The two men going back to Jerusalem do not set the example that we have to do the same in a literal way. No child of God is lacking anything of our salvation because we have never been to Israel.
Rather, the example of the two men is in relation to disciples of Jesus who have never lived with a personal attachment to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Many church folks have inner places in them that still feel more dead than alive. They very much resemble two men who were only heading down that road because they believed Jesus was dead. And then, suddenly, they attach to him as alive, and they want to get back to everything he was doing in his people.
Many Christians feel like exiles, cut off from that real Christianity we read about in God’s word. We feel cut off from a people who are filled with the Spirit and worshipping God in spirit and in truth. But then we discover that Jesus is showing us what his word has told us all along. He is showing us that he is alive, and we have the opportunity to return to a kingdom-life that is filled with the Spirit as surely as what we read about the early church.
What is fascinating to me right now is that, in the whole encounter with the two men, Jesus didn’t tell them what to do. When he reproved them, he never said it was because they were on the wrong road heading in the wrong direction. What was wrong with them was their foolishness of mind and slowness of heart to believe what is written. He left them to process for themselves what they wanted to do with the discovery that they were only doing what they were doing because their minds were believing wrong things and their hearts were pumping those wrong beliefs through their souls. That’s it.
Why did they suddenly get up and go back to Jerusalem when Jesus didn’t tell them to do that? Because he had made them so aware that they weren’t just wrong, but that the right thing was waiting for them, that they simply couldn’t stay where they were. They had to go back.
This is another example of how the Beatitudinal Valley works.[3] He led them to see the poverty of spirit within them as they believed that he was dead. He let them mourn his death while he was with them fully alive because he wanted them to feel where their own self-made beliefs were taking them. He took over the situation with his talk of the Scriptures so that they could become fully aware that they were not the ones who would fix their situation. And then he kept awakening in them a hunger and thirst for righteousness that first wanted him to stay with them, and then absolutely had to go back to Jerusalem where the good news of great joy was giving them the Savior who was justifying them from their sin and leading them into the righteousness of faith.
God’s children are now living between two Jerusalems. The first Jerusalem has given us the kingdom of God. It has given us our salvation, and a Spirit-filled church that we can return to with all our hearts. What we read in the Scriptures of the church that began and spread out from Jerusalem is the church we can be part of today wherever we are.
And in the spirit of that first Jerusalem we await the day of Jesus’ coming when he will create a new heavens and a new earth, and the new Jerusalem will be our home forever. As John had the joy of seeing in his vision:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”[4]
The church that arose from Jerusalem is a church that Jesus is with in the presence of his Holy Spirit. It gives us everything we need to live in hope of the new Jerusalem where we will live with him face to face. The encouragement of two men returning to Jerusalem from Emmaus is that we would embrace the life of Jesus’ resurrection and join with Jesus’ church to become everything he intended us to be, both now and forevermore.
© 2020 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8
Email: in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.)
[1] You can read it here:
Luke 24:1-53, or on biblegateway at: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+24&version=ESV
[2] Revelation 2:1-7
[3] I have shared on this
many times as an application of the Beatitudes of Matthew 5:1-12.
[4] Revelation 21:1-4
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