He Was Walking With Them the Whole Way

The corridor has a window halfway down that looks out at the back of the building and a bit of sky, and at four o'clock in the afternoon in October the light comes in and lies along the floor in a long strip, and he has walked through that strip a hundred times.

Wednesdays. He has done Wednesdays for years now. Two hours, the ward and a half they let him do, a cart with the tea urn if Marjorie is on.

And he is honest with himself about what happens on those two hours, which is: very little. He talks to people about the weather and the football and whether their daughter is coming. He holds a hand sometimes. Once, years ago, somebody asked him to pray and he did and it was the best day of his life and he has thought about it more than is probably healthy.

Mostly he makes tea and says ordinary things and goes home.

He would not stop. But somewhere in the last while a sentence has settled in him and it has weight now: I am making up the numbers here. Somebody has to be the man with the tea. It might as well be him. And that is not bitter, it is just how he has come to see it, and it has quietly taken the life out of a thing he used to love.

Friend, walk down as far as the window with me. Because there is a seven mile walk in Luke's Gospel and I want you to notice how long the company lasted before anybody knew what it was.

Seven miles of not knowing

Two men leaving Jerusalem on the Sunday afternoon, going home, talking about the worst weekend of their lives. A third man joins them on the road and asks what they are talking about.

They walk. He teaches them out of the Scriptures the whole way. They get to the village, they press Him to stay, He sits down at the table, He takes the bread and breaks it.

And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight.Luke 24:31

Now count the miles.

Seven miles of walking. A whole conversation. An entire exposition of the prophets, delivered personally. And they did not know who it was for one single step of it. The recognition arrives at the very end, in a house, over bread.

You are being accompanied on a road where the recognition comes late, and it came late for them too without making the company any less real. That is not a comforting reading of Emmaus; Luke 24:31 places the opening of their eyes at the end of the walk and not the start, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a road out of Jerusalem and lays it along a hospital corridor with the light on the floor. The presence was not less present for going unnoticed.

Now the second half, and it is aimed straight at the sentence you have been carrying.

Making up the numbers. I want you to look at that phrase properly, because it is a claim about significance and it is being made by somebody who cannot see most of the evidence.

Those two men, walking, would have told you that afternoon that nothing was happening. They were going home. It was over. A stranger had joined them and was asking questions and they were, frankly, explaining the situation to him.

They were in the middle of the single most extraordinary conversation in the history of the world and they did not know it.

You have no way of measuring what is happening on that ward, and the men who were closest to it in that Gospel could not measure it either. 1 Corinthians 4:5 says judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a rest rather than a rebuke for a man carrying a tea urn on a Wednesday. Your read of your own significance is not evidence. It is a guess made from inside.

What they said afterward, and when they felt it

One more thing, and it is the detail that undoes me every time.

After He vanishes, the two of them look at each other and say the line: Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures? (Luke 24:32).

Past tense. Their hearts had been burning during the walk. Something in them had known, at the level of the chest, for seven miles, while their heads had no idea. And they only identify what it was afterward, looking back.

So the feeling was not absent on the road. It was unrecognized on the road. Those are very different conditions, and one of them is much more hopeful than the other.

You are carrying something in you that has been responding all along, and its naming often comes long after its arriving. Luke 24:32 puts the burning during the walk and the recognizing after it, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the burning and the naming both, in His own order and not in ours. What you cannot currently identify is not therefore absent.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than talk about the football.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed anybody plants. Not the significance of what you can see yourself doing on a Wednesday. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.