Luke 24: Stay With Us on the Road to Emmaus

Introduction

Samuel Salmeron, pastor of the Église Évangélique de Réveil Genève, opens his message with a memory from the road. Just a few months ago, he lived in the countryside outside Paris. On Tuesday nights, coming home from the prayer meeting, sometimes alone, he faced a twenty-five-minute drive in the dark through the forests. His wife worried that he would get home safely. Sometimes the headlights of an oncoming car dazzled him so much that he could no longer see his surroundings and was no longer sure he was staying on the road.

"I believe that in our circumstances, it's a bit the same." Moments of doubt, sadness or trial come like those headlights and dazzle us, to the point that we can no longer see what is around us. Maybe we can't even see anymore that God is still present.

It is with this image that he reads Luke 24:13-33, the account of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, and he titles his message "Stay with us." His point comes down to one sentence: it is not enough to walk beside Jesus, you have to truly meet him. He develops it around three verbs: go down, stay, run.

Message outline

1. Two men blinded by their circumstances

The context depends on the point of view. From Jesus' side, we are after the resurrection. From the two disciples' side, we are simply after the crucifixion: "Jesus is dead and it's defeat. Jesus is dead and it's sadness. Jesus is dead, and doubt sets in."
Luke writes in a very structured way, and the account has a symmetry. First, the two men are in sadness and discouragement: even though Jesus speaks to them, they don't recognize him. At the center, there is a meal and a moment of revelation. Then everything that was blocked is unblocked and joy arrives.
This structure brings out the essential point: "it's not just walking beside Jesus, it's truly meeting him." We can't be content with walking beside Jesus; he has to enter our lives for everything to change.

2. Going down, when hope is leaving

These two men are not among the twelve. They are leaving Jerusalem for Emmaus. In the Bible, Jerusalem represents the place of God's presence, the place of the temple. "When we leave Jerusalem, often it's because things aren't going well."
It is 60 stadia from Jerusalem to Emmaus, about 11 kilometers (about 7 miles). When you walk while talking, you don't walk fast, on roads that are neither paved nor straight. They walked for hours, and the subject of their conversation was sadness and disappointment.
Jesus takes an interest in people who are downcast. He joins them and asks what they are talking about. When a difficult situation presses on us, it feels like it sums up everything, and we don't understand why someone would interrupt us: "Are you the only one today who doesn't know what happened?"
The exchange is paradoxical: the one asking the question is the best informed of all. But Jesus lets the two men express their pain, their doubts, their disappointments.
They had seen this man do great things: feed a hungry crowd, come calmly to a friend who had been dead for several days (John 11), heal for free people who perhaps later cried out "crucify him." And three days earlier, they saw him on a cross like a criminal, abandoned by everyone.
"Disappointment makes them blind to the reality of the one who is speaking to them." This is the sentence the pastor leaves with the congregation: "If disappointment can bury your hope, it cannot bury the risen one." Your negative emotions, your sufferings and your sadness do not cancel what God is able to do.

3. When Jesus comes to shake us

Jesus keeps walking with them for those 11 kilometers, then says things that are hard to hear: "Foolish men, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken!" (Luke 24:25).
The pastor smiles: he could have given his sermon that title, but "Stay with us" is gentler.
"Sometimes Jesus has to come and shake us." Without that, we stay in our blindness, in our ignorance, in our tunnel, shut in.
Then, beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, Jesus explains to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself (Luke 24:27).

4. Staying, when evening approaches

In verse 28, Jesus acts as though he were going farther. The pastor sees this as an initiative to set something off in these men, to dig deep into their hearts and reveal their determination: "What do you want?"
First there is hospitality, natural in that culture: night is coming, and you don't let someone continue on the road at night, it's too dangerous.
Then come the words that trigger everything: "Stay with us, for it is almost evening, and the day is almost over." Jesus is on the threshold, and the invitation brings him into the house. When Jesus enters a house, usually something happens.
Saying to Jesus "Stay with us" is saying: "We need your presence."
Around the table, Jesus takes the bread, gives thanks, breaks it and gives it to them. The text doesn't say exactly what they saw: marks on his hands, as will be the case later in other circumstances (John 20:27), or simply the memory of that gesture. Their eyes are opened, they recognize him, and he vanishes. "It's worthy of a movie."

5. In an instant, everything falls into place

Jesus' presence changes everything in an instant: there is no more sadness, no more doubt. "Hope rises from the dead."
A single gesture lines up all the pieces of information in the story. The women had said the tomb was empty. Some had gone there and confirmed it. Perhaps they had filed it in a logical box (someone must have moved the body) or judged those testimonies unreliable.
So he is more than a prophet, more than a liberator of the country: what man has conquered death? This is what he had announced: he had to die and come back on the third day. That means everything he taught is true.
"You need Jesus' presence in your life." The pastor invites everyone to say it in the first person: "Stay with me. It's easy to say us." Come into my life, don't stay on the threshold, open my eyes, even if my eyes are weighed down by the circumstances I'm going through.

6. Running, when the heart is burning

Jesus' presence has a consequence. The two men don't stay to finish the meal quietly: "We can't keep this to ourselves."
They had perhaps walked five or six hours with Jesus, and night had fallen. No one walks 11 kilometers back in the dark just to pass on a piece of information, you would wait until the next day. But their hearts are too stirred, and they set out again for Jerusalem, leaving the place that had been, all day, a place of despair.
The pastor invites us to measure what this means for a Jew raised on the teaching of the prophets and the hope of the Messiah: three years of hope, then the conviction that he had been wrong, then the reality that he is indeed risen. Everything his parents and grandparents taught him, all the scrolls on which he learned to read Hebrew, perhaps Isaiah 53, suddenly make sense.
"I can tell you it didn't take them six hours to get back." They arrive sweating, joyful, and say to one another: "Wasn't our heart burning within us, while he spoke to us along the way, and while he opened the Scriptures to us?"
"Meeting Jesus can't leave us unchanged." His presence in our house should stir us to a good kind of excitement: running to announce it, to say that the women were right, that Peter really saw the empty tomb, that it is a strong, powerful and final reality.

7. Two challenges for the week

An individual challenge: find a quiet time, tonight or tomorrow morning, to set yourself apart. Examine your life and see what makes you blind to the reality of God. "Do you still believe today that God can change things?" Take stock and say to Jesus: "Stay with me. Come into my difficulty, into my sadness, into my doubt." He will answer your prayer.
A challenge turned toward others, this week or this month: "Run to someone." It's an image, he adds with a laugh, the idea is not to frighten people. Invite someone to your table, have a coffee with a person who needs to hear what you have understood, and tell them in your own words what God has done in your life.
This sums up the mission of making disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19): "We only pass on what we have received. But first, experience the reality of grace."
To the weary Christian, who has grown so used to his sufferings that his doubt has become his definition, he says: tell Jesus, in the secret of your room, "Stay with me." You won't see him with your physical eyes, "but I assure you, because I believe it, he will be present."
The message leads into communion, to be received not out of habit but as a moment of faith: a remembrance not only of the crucifixion, but of the resurrection. "Don't look at the cross as if it were a defeat. Realize that the tomb is empty."

Key takeaways

Walking beside Jesus is not enough: you have to truly meet him and let him into your life.
Disappointment can bury your hope, but it cannot bury the risen one.
Sometimes Jesus comes to shake us to bring us out of our blindness and our tunnel.
"Stay with me" is a personal prayer: it moves Jesus from the threshold into the house.
A burning heart doesn't keep the news to itself: it runs to share it.

Personal application

Which "oncoming headlights" are dazzling you right now, to the point of making you forget that God is still present?
Are you content to walk beside Jesus, or have you truly invited him into your circumstances?
When will you take that quiet time to take stock of your life and say to Jesus: "Stay with me"?
Whom could you invite to your table or for a coffee this week, to tell them what Jesus has done in your life?

Verses cited

Frequently asked questions

Why don't the disciples on the road to Emmaus recognize Jesus?

According to Samuel Salmeron, they are blinded by their circumstances. For them, Jesus is dead and it's defeat. Disappointment makes them blind to the reality of the one walking beside them. But if disappointment can bury your hope, it cannot bury the risen one.

Why does Jesus act as though he is going farther in verse 28?

The preacher sees this as an initiative from Jesus to dig deep into the two men's hearts and reveal their determination. Their invitation, "Stay with us," expresses a reality: we need your presence. Jesus then enters the house, and when Jesus enters a house, something happens.

What do the disciples do after recognizing Jesus?

They head back to Jerusalem that very evening, even though night has fallen and they have just walked about 11 kilometers. Their hearts are too stirred to wait until the next day. Samuel Salmeron draws a challenge from this: run to someone, invite them to your table and tell them what Jesus has done in your life.