Cleopas and the Stranger on the Road to Emmaus

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Two men are walking along a road in the late afternoon, and they are having the sort of conversation that does not go anywhere. One of them says, I still cannot believe it. The other says, nor can I. The first one says, but I saw it with my own eyes. The second one says, and so did I. And then they both go quiet for about forty steps, and then one of them says, I still cannot believe it.

They have been doing this since lunchtime.

And then a third man comes up behind them on the road, quite quietly, and falls into step, and says something that nobody could have expected, which is a very ordinary question. What are you talking about?

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let us start where the road starts.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story comes from the Gospel according to Luke, chapter twenty-four, which Christians of both traditions read as Scripture, and we will tell it as it is told there. A few small things, the weather, the dust on the road, the jokes, and what two tired men might have said about their dinner, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will say at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let us begin in Jerusalem, on a Sunday morning, very early.

It is the third day since the worst Friday anyone in that city could remember. We will not go through the Friday tonight. It is the saddest day in the Gospel, and this is a bedtime story, and what matters for us is only that it has happened, and that the people who loved Jesus are in pieces.

Think of what that is like. For a few years they had followed a teacher around the country. They had walked miles behind him, and eaten whatever was going, and slept in other people's barns. They had watched him heal the blind and quiet the storms and say things that nobody had ever said. And somewhere along the way, a lot of them had begun to hope, quite seriously, that this was the one. The one God had promised to send. And then, in a few terrible hours, he was taken away from them, and it was over.

So on this Sunday, the friends of Jesus are hiding, more or less, in a house in the city, with the doors shut. They do not know what to do next. They do not know whether the people who took Jesus will come for them too. Some of them are sitting on the floor. Some are staring at the wall. Someone is in the kitchen, making tea, because somebody has to.

And the strangest thing happens that morning. The women who went out at dawn to the tomb, to do the last kind thing they could for him, come back with a story that nobody believes. They say the stone was rolled away. They say the body was not there. They say there were two men in shining clothes, who said, why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, he has risen.

And Luke tells us, in one of his very honest sentences, that to the apostles these words seemed like nonsense, and they did not believe the women.

Peter did get up, and run to the tomb, and stoop down, and see the linen cloths lying by themselves. And he went home, Luke says, amazed at what had happened. Amazed, you notice. Not delighted. Not yet. Still trying to take it in.

That is the morning. And now it is nearly midday, and the house in Jerusalem is full of people who do not know what to think. And two of them, who have had about enough of it, decide to leave.

We do not know very much about these two, but we know a little, and we know one name.

The Gospel tells us that one of them was called Cleopas. That is all it says about him. It does not say whether he was young or old, tall or short, married or single, a fisherman or a farmer. The name is a Greek one, a short form of a longer name that means something like, of a famous father. It was the kind of name you might have if your family lived in a part of the world where Greek was spoken in the market and Aramaic at home, which was how most of the country lived.

The other one is not named at all. Luke gives us his name for the first, and then for the second says only, another of them. Tradition has guessed, over the centuries. Some have said it was Cleopas's wife. Some have said it was Luke himself, which would explain why he knows the story so well. Some have said it was some other disciple whose name has not come down to us. I will say it plainly, since this is a bedtime story and honesty is the best sort of pillow: nobody knows. And I find that rather lovely, in a way. It means that anybody who has ever walked a road, sad and confused and talking in circles, could be the other one.

Both of them, Luke says, were disciples. They are not among the Eleven, the inner group, the apostles. They are part of the wider circle, the many friends and followers who had travelled with Jesus, or had listened to him, or had been healed by him, or had just come to believe. And they live, or are going, to a village called Emmaus.

Now, where was Emmaus?

Luke says it was about sixty stadia from Jerusalem. A stadion was an old Greek measure of distance, about a hundred and eighty metres, or a little under two hundred yards, depending on whose figures you use. Sixty of them make about seven miles. That is two or two and a half hours of steady walking, which sounds right for a road a person might take in an afternoon and still reach before dark.

I should tell you that a few of the old copies of the Gospel give a different number. One of the early manuscripts says a hundred and sixty stadia, which would be about eighteen miles. That is quite a different afternoon. Most scholars prefer sixty, and we shall go with sixty, but it is the sort of thing that I like to mention, because it reminds us that the Gospel came to us by way of a great many careful people copying it by hand, and that they were very honest about what was in front of them.

And as to where the village actually was, nobody is quite sure. There are several places in the hills west of Jerusalem that have, over the centuries, been proposed. One is about seven miles out, which suits the sixty stadia. One is nearer, one is much farther. Pilgrims have gone to all of them. We shall call that a tradition, or rather a handful of them, and say that the Gospel only says it was a village, about seven miles from the city, and that is all we are told.

So there it is. Seven miles, an afternoon, two friends, and a road going out of Jerusalem toward the west, with the sun behind them.

What does a road like that look like?

I have been told, by people who have walked such roads, that it would have been a dry, stony track, wide enough for a donkey, winding down between low walls and terraces. There are olive trees, grey-green and twisted. There are fields of barley, in the spring, coming up thin and golden. There are goats on the hillside with a boy who is meant to be watching them and is watching the road instead. The air smells of dust and wild thyme and warm stone. And every so often a farmer on a donkey comes the other way, and says shalom, and the two of them say it back, a little too brightly, because their hearts are not in it.

I like to think the weather was mild. Luke does not say. It is the time of the Passover, in the spring, and it is likely that the days were warm and the evenings cool. Let us say there was a small breeze. Let us say a lark was somewhere overhead, going on and on about nothing, as larks do. It does not matter, but it is nice to have a lark.

And Cleopas and his friend are walking along it with their heads down.

Luke says they were talking with each other about all these things that had happened. And I do not think he means they were having a pleasant chat. I think he means they were going over it, and over it, and over it. The way you do after a funeral, when you cannot stop saying the same things. Do you remember when he said this? Do you remember when he did that? How could it have gone so wrong? What did we miss?

And Luke uses a lovely verb. He says they were talking and discussing, and the second word is an old one that means, to search things out together, almost to argue them out. They are not just sad. They are working at it, like two people with a knot in a rope.

And then, Luke says, while they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself drew near and went with them.

Jesus himself. That is the way Luke puts it, as if he cannot quite contain his own astonishment. He just came up behind them, and began to walk along.

And here is the strange thing, the thing that makes this story what it is. Luke tells us that their eyes were kept from recognising him.

Now, I want to be careful here, because it is a delicate line, and the Gospel is very short on it. It does not say that he was disguised. It does not say that he was a different man. It says their eyes were kept, as if by a hand laid over them, so that they did not know him. Mark, in his short ending, says that he appeared in another form to two of them as they were walking into the country, and that may be the same event. So he is truly there, and truly himself, and for a while they simply cannot see who he is.

You can think about why. Perhaps because they were not expecting him. Perhaps because he wanted to teach them something first, and a person who is overwhelmed with joy does not always listen very well. Perhaps because the Lord is gentle, and does not like to take people by surprise when they are already tired. The Gospel does not say, and I will not guess further. I will only say that it happens, and that it is, I think, one of the kindest things in Scripture. They are walking along, miserable, and he does not leap out and say, boo, it is me. He walks beside them, and lets them be miserable, and asks them about it.

And what he says, first of all, is this.

What are these words that you are exchanging with each other as you walk?

That is the question. What are you talking about?

I think it is worth stopping on, for a moment. He knows, of course. He is the one it all happened to. But he asks, because he is the kind of person who asks. He did that in the Gospels, over and over, with the blind man, with the woman at the well, with the people at the pool. What do you want me to do for you? Where is your husband? Do you want to be healed? He does not assume. He gives you the chance to say it, in your own words, out loud, to someone who will listen. It is a very good thing to be asked, when you are sad.

And Luke says, and I like this sentence, that they stood still, looking sad.

They stopped dead in the road. Two men with long faces, standing in the dust.

It is Cleopas who speaks. Of course it is; he is the one with the name.

And what he says is the funniest sentence in the whole story, and I do not think he means it to be funny at all. He says, are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?

Think about that. He is saying, in effect, where have you been? Have you been living under a rock? Everyone in this city knows. It has been the only thing anyone has talked about for three days. And here is a man who seems to have come in from the country without a notion.

And the one he is saying it to is the one it is all about.

I find that hard to read without smiling, a little, and then without a lump in the throat. Cleopas does not know. He is being, with great sincerity, a bit superior to the Lord of the world. And the Lord, who could have said anything at all, says only:

What things?

Two words. What things? And he lets him tell it.

And Cleopas tells it. And listen to how he tells it, because he gives, in a few sentences, as good a summary of the whole of the Gospel as you could ask for.

The things about Jesus of Nazareth, he says, who was a prophet, mighty in deed and word before God and all the people. How our chief priests and rulers handed him over to be condemned to death, and crucified him.

And then comes the line that I think about more than any other in this story. He says, we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.

We had hoped.

Not, we hope. Not, we are hoping still. We had hoped. It is in the past tense, already folded up and put away. It is the saddest verb in the whole chapter. If you have ever lost something you wanted very much, you will know the sound of it. We had hoped. It means, we really had, and it did not work out, and we are trying to be grown up about it.

He goes on. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things happened. And some women of our group amazed us. They were at the tomb early this morning, and when they did not find his body, they came back and said they had even seen a vision of angels, who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb, and found it just as the women had said, but him they did not see.

Look at that last bit. But him they did not see. Cleopas has the whole thing in front of him. The empty tomb. The women's report. The angels. Everything has been handed to him on a plate. And he walks away. Because the one thing he wants most, to see Jesus with his own eyes, has not happened yet, and he does not know how to make sense of all the other things without it.

I think that is very human. I think most of us would have done exactly the same. We do not mind being told wonderful things. What we want is the person.

And now the stranger speaks. And what he says is not gentle, exactly, but it is warm, and it is quite funny, if you hear it in the right voice.

O foolish ones, he says, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.

Some translations make this sound harsh. I do not think it is. I think it sounds like a friend, a teacher, who has been waiting for you to catch up, and says it with a smile in his voice. Foolish ones, slow of heart. The words are not cruel. They are the words you say to someone you love who is standing right next to the answer and cannot see it.

And then he asks them something that turns the whole afternoon upside down.

Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?

Think what that is. They have just said, we had hoped it was him, but they killed him, so it must have been a mistake. And the stranger says, no. This was not the mistake. This was the plan. This was always how it had to go.

And then, Luke says, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.

Beginning with Moses. All the prophets. All the Scriptures. Here we have the most remarkable Bible study in all of history, given on foot, along a seven-mile road, by the one the whole book is about. And Luke, who in every other part of his Gospel gives us pages of what Jesus said, gives us here not one line of it.

Not one verse. Not one example. Nothing.

I have always found that maddening, and I have always found it wonderful. It is as if Luke is saying, you have to take my word for it, it was extraordinary. Or perhaps he is saying, you will have to go and read it for yourself. Which, as it happens, is what the Church has been doing for two thousand years. We know a little of what he might have said. We can guess at Moses, and the lamb at the first Passover, and the rock in the desert that gave water. We can guess at the suffering servant in Isaiah, who was pierced for our transgressions. We can guess at the psalms, that begin in agony and end in praise. But I will say it as clearly as I can: they are guesses. Luke gives no list, and I will not invent one.

What I can tell you is the effect. They walked, and he talked, and for seven miles the dust and the sorrow and the long afternoon fell away, and they heard the whole old story of God and his people read to them, with a new key.

You know, I would like to have been on that road. Not as one of the two, perhaps; more as a third, standing quietly at the back, a little way behind, with a stick. Just to hear it. Just to hear the voice go on, up and down with the hills, saying here, and here, and here. And then pointing out how it had all been, all along, a single story.

I think that is what the two of them felt. Because of what they say later. But we shall come to it.

The sun is getting low now. The shadows are long across the road, and a pleasant evening cool is coming up out of the ground. And they come, Luke says, to the village to which they were going.

Emmaus. A few houses, a well, a courtyard, a lamp or two beginning to be lit.

And the stranger, who has walked all this way with them, makes as if to go farther. Luke says it quite simply. He appeared to be going on.

Now, why would he do that? It is another place where I want to say, carefully, that Luke does not explain. Some of the old writers said that the Lord was testing them. Others said that he never forces himself on anyone, and that he will go on unless he is asked in. I think that second reading is rather lovely. The Lord walks with you as far as you are going, and then he waits to be invited.

And they do invite him. Luke says that they urged him strongly. The word means they pressed him, almost pulled at his sleeve. They say, stay with us, for it is toward evening, and the day is now far spent.

Stay with us. That is a short and perfect prayer. It has been prayed ever since by people who have no idea they are praying. It is the prayer of the lonely, the old, the frightened, the tired. Stay with us, the day is nearly done.

I think it is possible that they did not fully know what they were asking. They just liked him. They did not want to see him go off alone into the dark. It was a kindness, nothing more. But it is the kindness he was waiting for. And Luke, with his very quiet economy, says: so he went in to stay with them.

Now I would like you to picture the room.

It is not a grand place. I imagine a plain house with a low ceiling and a floor of beaten earth, a few cushions, a low table, a clay lamp that gives off a small yellow light. Someone has put out bread, and some olives, and perhaps a little cheese, and a jug of wine and water. It is a very ordinary supper. It is the kind of supper that, at that hour, has been eaten in that country a million times.

They sit down to table. The two disciples, and the stranger, who is now their guest.

And here is where something very small happens, which is the heart of the whole story.

Luke says: when he was at table with them, he took the bread, and blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to them.

He took. He blessed. He broke. He gave.

Four verbs. If you have been to a Catholic Mass or an Orthodox Divine Liturgy, you will have heard them before. You will have heard them said over the bread in a very particular place. You will also have heard them, if you read your Gospels, at the Last Supper on Thursday night, when Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to his friends. And again, before that, when he took five loaves on a hillside and fed five thousand. They are the same four actions, in the same order, in the same hands.

And that is the moment. It does not say that he said anything special. It does not say that there was a flash of light or a sound of trumpets. It says, simply, that the stranger took the bread and blessed and broke it. And Luke goes on: and their eyes were opened, and they recognised him.

I would like you to sit in that for a second. All afternoon they had been looking at his face, in the daylight, and not known. And now, in a dim room, by a small lamp, he takes a piece of bread and breaks it, in the way he always did, with the same movement of the hands, and they know.

Perhaps it was the gesture itself. Perhaps it was the way he held the bread. Perhaps the hand that had been laid over their eyes was lifted. We cannot say. All we can say is that it happened at the breaking of the bread, and Luke wants us to notice it, because he comes back to it at the end of the story.

And then, in a sentence so short you could miss it, he says: and he vanished from their sight.

That is all. He is there, and then he is not there. Not a word of goodbye. Not a farewell. The chair is empty and the bread is on the table, and two men are sitting there with their mouths open.

I do not know how long they sat there. Luke does not say. I imagine a moment of absolute silence. And then, I think, a very human thing. They looked at each other. And one of them said, in a rather shaky voice, something that has become famous.

Luke says: they said to each other, were not our hearts burning within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?

Were not our hearts burning.

Do you see what has happened? In the minute they recognised him, they looked back over the afternoon, and they remembered something they had not noticed at the time. All through that seven-mile talk, something had been going on inside them. A warmth. A kind of slow fire. They had not named it. They had been too busy being sad. But it had been there, quietly, all along.

I think that is one of the truest things in the Gospel. Very often we do not know that we have been in the presence of something good until we look back. It is only afterwards, when the day is over, that we say, ah. That was it. That was what that feeling was.

And now they cannot sit still. Remember how tired they were. Remember that they had walked seven miles, that it was nearly dark, that they had been up since before dawn, that they had a supper in front of them. And Luke says that they rose that same hour, at once, and returned to Jerusalem.

Seven miles, back the way they came. In the dark.

I want to be clear about this, because it is easy to read past it. They had just persuaded a stranger to stay because the day was far spent. They had, I would think, been planning on a good meal and a mat to sleep on. And then the moment they know who he is, they get up and leave. They leave the dinner on the table. They leave the bread half eaten. The road that was too long and too sad to bear that afternoon, they now run along in the dusk, with joy in their legs.

I wonder if the innkeeper, or whoever owned the house, ever worked out what had happened to his two guests. I like to think there was a worried person in the doorway, with a lamp, calling after them down the road. Excuse me! You have not finished your supper! And two men, going away into the dusk, shouting back over their shoulders, no, no, we have to go, he is alive!

And so they reach the house in Jerusalem, late at night, out of breath. And the door is shut, you will remember, for fear. They knock. And somebody lets them in.

And before either of them can say a word, the people in the room say it first.

Luke tells us that they found the Eleven and those with them gathered together. And these said: the Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon.

Simon. That is Simon Peter. So Peter, who had run to the tomb that morning and gone home amazed, has seen him. We are not told where, or when, or what was said. Luke gives us this in a single sentence, and then leaves it, and I think that is quite right. It is a thing between the two of them.

And then the two from Emmaus tell their story. They tell what had happened on the road, and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread.

Now, think about that room. In the morning it was full of fear and doubt. By night it has changed. People are saying, he is alive, and he has been seen, and then more people are saying, we have seen him too, and the whole company is turning, in a few hours, from a funeral into something else. And they are all talking over one another, Peter and the women and the two from Emmaus, each telling their part, and each being listened to.

And the Gospel tells us what comes next, as they were still speaking. But that is another night, and I will leave it where Luke has left it, in the middle of a sentence, in a crowded room, with the lamps burning.

It is time to slow down now. The lamps are low.

Let us say a little about what became of Cleopas, and about what has been remembered.

We know very little. After this one story, he vanishes from the Gospels, as quietly as the stranger did from the table. The Gospel of John, in the account of the crucifixion, names a woman called Mary, the wife of Clopas, standing by the cross. The name is spelled a little differently, and there is no sure way to say it is the same man, and I will not claim it. Some old writers have said so, and some have said otherwise, and it is one of those things that the sources do not settle.

The Orthodox Church honours Saint Cleopas as an apostle, one of the Seventy whom Jesus sent out, according to Luke's tenth chapter, in pairs, to the towns he meant to visit. The Orthodox keep his day on the thirtieth of October. Later tradition says he went on to preach and was martyred, but the details come from late sources and are not firm, and we shall leave them quietly where they lie. In the Catholic Church the Gospel of the road to Emmaus is read in the Easter season, on the third Sunday of Easter in one year of the cycle and on the evening of Easter Monday, and many Catholics know Cleopas chiefly by this one beautiful story.

What has been remembered, above all, is the shape of it. The way a sad walk became a fire. The way a stranger became a friend, and a supper became a Eucharist. There is a very old Christian habit of reading the story in just that way. Notice that it has two halves: first the word, the Scriptures opened on the road, and then the bread, broken at the table. The Church says that is the shape of her prayer too, on a Sunday morning, in a church somewhere, with the readings first and the bread after. Many writers have pointed this out, in both East and West. We offer it as a reading, as a way of hearing the story that the Church has loved, and not as something Luke says in so many words.

And the road itself has been walked by pilgrims for centuries. There are three or four villages that have been called Emmaus, and in each there is a church or the ruins of one, and in each place the tradition is old and sincere. We cannot say which, if any, is right. The Gospel says only: a village, about seven miles. But I think it is no accident that the Gospel leaves it a little vague. It means that there is no one place where you must go to meet him on the road. It might be anywhere. It might be yours.

Some notes for the curious. The whole story we have told comes from the Gospel according to Luke, chapter twenty-four, verses thirteen to thirty-five, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture. The morning, with the women at the tomb and the report of Peter, is in the first twelve verses of the same chapter, and the evening in the room in Jerusalem continues in verses thirty-six to forty-nine. What the two disciples say, what the stranger asks, the words about foolish ones and slow of heart, the sentence about Moses and the prophets, the urging to stay, the four verbs over the bread, the vanishing, the burning hearts and the return to Jerusalem, all follow the text. The weather, the lark, the olives, the dust, the meal on the table and the worried person with the lamp, the jokes, and every guess about what Cleopas or his friend felt on the way, are ours.

Three things are worth being careful about. First, the Gospel gives one name, Cleopas, and calls the other disciple only, another. Everything said about who he was, a wife or Luke himself, is a tradition or a guess, and we have said so. Second, the distance. Most copies say sixty stadia, about seven miles, and a few old copies say a hundred and sixty. We have told it with sixty and named the other. The place called Emmaus is not settled, and the several villages that claim it are traditions. Third, the content of the lesson on the road. Luke gives no verses, and we have given none. When we mentioned the lamb, the rock, the servant and the psalms, we said they were guesses, because they are: they are the kinds of passages that the Church has always read as pointing to him, but we do not claim that he used them on that afternoon.

I should also say that I have not described what the risen Lord looked like, or what his body was like, or how he vanished. Luke does not, and I think the Church is wise to be modest here. We can tell what is written, and we can wonder, but we should not pretend to know more.

Cleopas is honoured as a saint in the Orthodox Church, and the story of the road is Scripture for Catholics and Orthodox alike. The Lord who walks beside people on the road is the Lord both traditions worship, and we have said so as plainly as the Gospel does.

That's the story of Cleopas and the road to Emmaus for tonight. The Orthodox Church remembers Saint Cleopas on the thirtieth of October, and the Gospel of the road is read at Easter in both traditions. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

And here is a blessing. May you be met, tonight, on whatever road you are walking, by someone who asks you what you are talking about, and listens to the answer. May your sorrows be allowed to be told. May the old words of Scripture and the old songs of your people come back to you at the right time, and burn a little. May you have the sense, when the day is far spent, to say to the one who walks beside you, stay with us. May there be bread on your table, and someone to break it with. And may you recognise, in the ordinary suppers and the plain kindnesses of your life, the face that was there all along. May the Lord of the road go with you, tonight and always.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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