April 19, 2026
The Divine Stranger on the Road
Luke 24:13-35
This is the season of Easter and we are telling resurrection stories. You may have noticed something about these stories. Every one of them is unresolved. They all end in motion — someone running, or someone puzzled, someone sent, someone commissioned to go and tell.
None of them says: and so they lived, at peace, fully understanding everything.
They are open stories. And I think they are open on purpose — because every one of them has a place for a modern follower of Jesus.
Today’s story is one of the best, and we are invited to see ourselves in it. The road is where we wrestle with our most desperate hopes, and is the very road where the risen Savior finds us and gives us a new hope better than we imagined.
It is the afternoon of the first Easter Day. Two disciples are leaving Jerusalem. These two are not running — they are walking. It is the measured, heavy movement of people who have nowhere urgent to be, because the urgent thing has ended.
One of them is named Cleopas. The other one — Luke doesn’t say. One named, one not. You might wonder why Luke bothered to mention a second person at all, if he wasn’t going to name them. But the unnamed one is the point. The unnamed person beside Cleopas is Luke’s literary invitation. It is an open invitation. The name might be yours.
They are talking as they walk. Or rather, they are doing what we do when something terrible has happened and we can’t stop turning it over. The words here for their conversation carry the sound of combat more than communion. One word gives us our English homiletics — meaning preaching — which is ironic, since they are preaching at each other and getting nowhere. Another comes from the world of rhetoric: antiballette, words placed against words, a concussive exchange. Rat-a-tat-tat. A third — syzetein — means heated, emotional, unresolved.
We know that kind of conversation. It is not really a conversation. It is the compulsive working-out of something that will not resolve. We are not talking to understand. WE are talking because the silence is worse, and because if we can just find the right angle, the right framing, maybe it will finally make sense.
What they were working over was this: they had believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the one who would redeem Israel. Set things right. Restore what had been broken. They had invested their deepest hope in him. Their hope had a specific shape, and it was cosmic. It was political, national, theological. And three days before that hope was publicly executed on a Roman cross.
We had been hoping. The imperfect tense in Greek means it was not a hope they held once and let go. It was a hope that had been continuous and active, slow burning underneath all of their suffering. And now their hope was in the tomb with Jesus.
They had heard the reports from the women that morning of an empty tomb, the vision of angels, the word that he was alive. But they didn’t know what to do with the good news.
Because it didn’t fit the shape of their grief.
So they were walking away.
We are not so different. Many of us live with accumulated grief. It is personal and collective, private and public. Many in this room have walked through illness, or loss; some are walking through it now. We have suffered things that broke us open, disoriented our world, and left us changed in mind and spirit.
Beyond our personal griefs, we carry collective and public grief. Institutions we trusted are fraying or failing. Leaders — both political and religious — who were supposed to hold things together have let us down, or worse… they have used the very language of faith to justify things that are a betrayal of the gospel.
Many of us, inside the church and outside it, in this congregation, carry a particular kind of grief about the misuse of religious faith and wonder whether Jesus is actually involved in the kinds of things they see. Not just disappointment in a person, but disorientation about whether the things they believed in were ever what they thought they were.
Cleopas and his companion were carrying grief like that. Their grief and disorientation was deep: national, historical, and deeply personal. They had been failed not so much by Rome but by their own religious leaders — the chief priests and leaders who handed Jesus over. That kind of betrayal will rock your soul.
Then a stranger appears.
He comes alongside them quietly. No announcement, no entrance. He simply catches up to them. The text says he was going with them — a continuous verb, suggesting he had been there a while before they noticed. He asks what they are discussing.
They stop and stand there, looking sad. And Cleopas says something that would almost be funny if you weren’t so inside the grief of it: Are you the only person in Jerusalem who doesn’t know what has happened?
The word Cleopas uses for “stranger” is paroikos — a migrant, a foreigner, someone from away. He has pegged the risen Christ as an outsider. You couldn’t write better irony. The one around whom all of these events happened is being asked if he’s been out of the loop. And Jesus doesn’t correct him. He just asks: What things?
So they tell him. Everything. The arrest, the trial, the crucifixion. The broken hope. The women’s confusing report. They tell this stranger the raw, unguarded truth of what they had believed and how badly it had failed. This was a politically risky conversation — to confess that you had hoped this executed man would rescue Israel was not far from confessing sedition. They say it anyway.
And the divine stranger listens. He does not rush to correct them. He does not bright-side them. He asks them to tell it, and he walks with them while they do.
Before he preaches a sermon. Before he breaks the bread. Jesus listens.
Then he speaks. And what he offers is not a refutation of their grief but a reframing of their story.
He doesn’t say: you were wrong to hope. He says: you were reading the right story through the wrong lens. They thought the suffering of the Messiah meant the story was wrong. So beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he shows them that Jesus’ suffering was not the end of God’s promise. It was the shape of its fulfillment. The wilderness life of humanity was ending — not the way they expected, but in a way deeper than they had imagined.
When they hear the story of God’s promise, something happens in them that they cannot yet name. A fire is kindled.
They arrive at the village. Jesus acts as if he will go on. And they press him — urgently, the text says, almost desperately: Stay with us. It is nearly evening. The day is almost over. There is something in them that does not want this stranger to leave. Whether they could have explained why, I don’t know. But they insist.
He comes in. They sit at the table. And then Jesus does the most Jesus-thing of all: he takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, gives it. Four gestures.
The same four gestures at the feeding of five thousand. The same four gestures in the upper room on the night he was betrayed. Luke is not being subtle. Wherever these four gestures appear, he is saying: here. Right here. Look. This is Jesus.
Their eyes open. They recognize him.
And he vanishes. Unresolved. Unfinished.
I have been in rehearsal this week for the Mozart Requiem, which the Asheville symphony and symphony chorus performed twice yesterday. It was Mozart’s last work. He began it and died before it was finished, completing only about a third. His student, Franz Süssmayr, received the sketches — he had been with Mozart and knew the music — and he carried it to completion.
Resurrection stories work like that. Luke writes this one with one named disciple and one unnamed, with Cleopas and a companion, because the resurrection news has always needed someone to receive it and carry it forward.
These stories are not closed accounts of things that happened to other people long ago. They are open, written for you to put your name in.
The two disciples run back to Jerusalem. They find the others already saying: The Lord has risen indeed. And then they add their own testimony — what happened on the road, how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread. That is the pattern. Encounter becomes testimony, testimony becomes community, community becomes the next generation of good-news tellers. We are somewhere in that chain.
It seems to me that many of us are not carrying a crushed hope so much as a carefully managed life. We live on the other side of exhaustion from a pandemic whose effects are still with us, and a hurricane whose reminders are still all around us.
We live with daily headline fatigue, and a public life that has grown so loud and relentless and disorienting that pulling back from it feels like the only way to stay sane.
So if we have enough privilege to be able to do it, many of us have made a quiet, mostly unconscious decision: to stay in motion, to manage what is in front of us, and to leave the deeper hopes and fears alone.
It is not despair exactly. It is something more like a controlled withdrawal from the possibility of being devastated again.
But the divine stranger comes alongside the walking, not the arriving. The road is wide enough for the devastated and the distracted both.
Were not our hearts burning within us?
They ask each other this question looking back. The fire was kindled on the road. They just could not name it when it happened.
This is always true about the life of faith. We do not recognize the presence of the God-with-us while we are in it. Mostly, we only know looking back. Something was happening in a conversation that we took for granted. A community held us up when we had no strength and brought us back to life. A stranger passed our way and left a blessing. An encounter around a table was transformative in a way we didn’t expect. We received hope, not the hope we had been carrying, but a different one. Wider. Deeper. Better.
Augustine, writing about this story sixteen centuries ago, found the paradox of it almost too good to leave alone. The teacher was walking with them along the way, he wrote, and he himself was the way.
The road where our hopes have died. That is where Christ comes. He asks what we are carrying. He helps us read God’s promises differently. He sits with us and breaks bread. And then, before we can hold on to him, he sends us back — back to a community that is shaped by his love, back to a community with a calling to words and deep the living and cosmic hope of the Savior who has risen to eternal life and new creation.
That road has been walked before. It is being walked right now. If you turn and look, you may find the Divine Stranger is walking beside you.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina