See your story through Jesus’ lens — Luke 24:13–35

Now that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem. They were talking with each other about everything that had happened. As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them; but they were kept from recognizing him.

He asked them, “What are you discussing together as you walk along?”

They stood still, their faces downcast. One of them, named Cleopas, asked him, “Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?”

“What things?” he asked.

“About Jesus of Nazareth,” they replied. “He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people. The chief priests and our rulers handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him; but we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel. And what is more, it is the third day since all this took place. In addition, some of our women amazed us. They went to the tomb early this morning but didn’t find his body. They came and told us that they had seen a vision of angels, who said he was alive. Then some of our companions went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but they did not see Jesus.”

He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

As they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus continued on as if he were going farther. But they urged him strongly, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them.

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. They asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”

They got up and returned at once to Jerusalem. There they found the Eleven and those with them, assembled together and saying, “It is true! The Lord has risen and has appeared to Simon.” Then the two told what had happened on the way, and how Jesus was recognized by them when he broke the bread. Luke 24:13–35

See your story through Jesus’ lens.

Hope is the belief that the future will be better than the present. By that definition, in the village of Bambali in Senegal, on the westernmost tip of Africa, there wasn’t a great amount of hope. It’s a small village, about 2000 people, and most people’s lives are spent scraping together enough to feed themselves and their families. They don’t have the time or the resources to spend on trying to make their future better than their present. And even that small amount of hope evaporated for one of the young boys in the village one day, a boy named Sadio Mané. Sadio was out playing soccer in a break from working in the farm field when a friend came running. “Your father has passed away.” Sadio thought he was joking. His father had only had a stomach ache. But the friend was serious, because there no hospital the stomachache had grown worse and worse until it took the boy’s father’s life. He was seven years old.

His family’s life became that much more difficult, that much more full of hunger and tiredness and anxiety about how they could survive. But they survived day after day, month after month, and Sadio still found time to play soccer, though he would often play with grapefruits or rocks because actual soccer balls were a luxury. And he was turning out to be pretty good at soccer, in fact. He had a hope that against all odds he would make it to the big professional leagues in Europe, make a bunch of money, and be able to improve his and his village’s future. Everyone thought he was crazy. They forbade him from trying to go to Dakar, the capital, to try out. But his hope could not be quenched. So at age 15, he ran away to Dakar, borrowed shoes that were far too big because he did not have his own to try out for a club, and made the team. But after about a year, his hopes were dashed again. His family finally found him in Dakar and demanded that he return home, to focus on his present, to continue to work on the farm.

That’s the danger of hope, isn’t it? That our hopes, that our visions of a better future, will be dashed. Will fall flat. And when you have a few run-ins with this, with getting your hopes up and up, with thinking that if this can happen in my life, things will be so much better, and then when this doesn’t come about, it can be devastating. You can get jaded, you can get negative, it can drive you to depression.

And often times, it’s those closest to us that are the greatest danger of dashing our hopes. Because the people who are closest to us are the ones we expect to help us, to treat us well, to support us. We rely on the people closest to us the most, and so they have the biggest opportunity to let us down, whether they mean to or not. Look at Sadio’s story. Even as a boy, his hope in his father was dashed when his father passed away. Not the father’s fault, but dashed hope nonetheless. And then, when he was off chasing his hope of becoming a professional soccer player, who was it who dashed that hope? His family members. Those closest to him, those that he relied on.

On Easter Sunday a couple weeks ago, we said that we should place our hope in Jesus. Because Jesus will never fail us, we said. Because he’s risen and lives so that we too can live forever, we said. Keep him as your closest relationship, as the headline of your story, we said. But what happens when Jesus seems to fail us? Some of you here today have experienced this already, and if you haven’t yet, you will. When you pray and pray and pray to Jesus and your storyline goes down instead of up. When you strive so hard to stay closer to Jesus than anyone else in your life, and you only suffer more for it. When you put all your hope in Jesus for a better future and instead he seems to leave you worse off than before.

What should you do? Become jaded about your faith? Lower your expectations, your hopes for what Jesus might do for you? Develop a side story, well I’ll put most of my hope and focus in Jesus, but apparently I can’t put it all there because it doesn’t seem to be working?

This morning we’ll find the answer. We’ll dive into one of the greatest hope-giving moments in history. We’ll look into the story of these two disciples from Emmaus, and we’ll study how Jesus, as something of the director of their story, slows them down to interpret their story from his perspective to restore their hope. And we’ll see how he does the same for you. However much hope you currently feel about your present and future today, Jesus encourages you to find so much more by seeing your story through his lens.

It’s Easter Sunday. These two disciples are walking back home from celebrating the Passover in Jerusalem. And they are in quite the malaise. Jesus comes up and, hiding himself, innocently asks what they’re talking about as they walk. This stops them in their tracks—are you the only one in Jerusalem who has not heard what’s been going on? Everyone was talking about it. Jesus of Nazareth, the man who was supposed to be the Messiah, to redeem his people from their cruel Roman overlords, died. The disciples were absolutely dejected.

See, like every Jewish person at the time, they had been looking for an earthly Messiah you might say. Someone who would come and establish his kingdom in this world. And sometimes this interpretation gets belittled, like how could they be so silly to think that the Messiah would bring an earthly kingdom. But really, there’s plenty reason for this interpretation, for them putting their hope in the Messiah to establish a kingdom on this earth. Here’s just a few passages: Isaiah 9, For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder. Jeremiah 23, Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely. Jesus himself said in Luke 4, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed. Couldn’t you read those passages, about a Messiah who takes the government on his shoulders, who is a wise and just king, who helps the poor, the captives, the blind, the oppressed, and conclude that the Messiah will rule an earthly kingdom?

So, the disciples had put their hope in Jesus to be this Messiah, and he had died. He had apparently failed. They had seen themselves as a part of Jesus’ story, they had kept him close, and then that storyline had come to an abrupt halt when he was crucified.

You probably figured I would come back to Sadio’s story. We wouldn’t know Sadio’s story if he had simply given up on his hope of making it to the big leagues. His hope had been dashed again and again—first by the death of his father, then by his family forcing him home when he was finally chasing his dream in Dakar. But Sadio didn’t give up. He doubled down. A year later he convinced his family to let him return to the city. He kept betting on himself, kept training, kept pushing forward when everything in his life told him to stop hoping.

And at this point in the story, every instinct in us is saying: This is what hope looks like: Don’t give up. Push harder. Make it work. Fight through suffering, because if you endure long enough, things will turn around. And that way of thinking feels so natural to us that it almost goes unquestioned. But that instinct is exactly what makes the Emmaus disciples so confused. Because that’s the kind of story they thought they were in too.

They thought Jesus was the one who would push through resistance, overcome suffering, defeat their enemies, and establish his kingdom. His growing popularity, his miracles, his authority—it all felt like momentum. And then came the cross. From their perspective, through their lens, it looked like the story had gone completely off the rails.

Back to Sadio. His persistence paid off. Scouts eventually noticed him. He rose through the professional ranks, moving from club to club, contract to contract, until he became one of the best soccer players in the world. Today, he earns tens of millions of euros a year. And he’s used that money to rebuild his village—to build homes for his family, a school with laptops and internet access, a fuel station, and even a hospital so that children wouldn’t lose their fathers the way he did.

We love stories like that. Stories where suffering leads to success. Where endurance pays off. Where hope looks justified in hindsight. But there’s the danger. If we start to think that Jesus’ story works like Sadio Mané’s story—things go wrong, you push harder, and eventually hope pays off in a better future—then we will completely misread Scripture. We’ll start to believe that the problem on Good Friday was that things got worse instead of better, rather than that everything was unfolding exactly as it had to. If we read Jesus’ story like a comeback story, we will start living like Sadio wannabes—risking everything, betting on ourselves, assuming that if we just believe and push hard enough, God will eventually reward us with the future we’ve imagined.

But Jesus tells a different kind of story. When he meets the Emmaus disciples, he doesn’t say, “Don’t worry, I bounced back.” He says, Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory? Not despite suffering. Not after suffering. But because of suffering.

There’s a key word in what Jesus says—have. Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory. It was necessary, it was an unavoidable part of his story and mission, that Jesus died. No, Jesus’ death was as victorious a moment as his resurrection. And Jesus points out to the disciples that they should’ve known this! Because yes, there are all those passages that point to Jesus being a ruler. But there are also passages like these: Psalm 22: All who see me mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads.  “He trusts in the Lord,” they say, “let the Lord rescue him. Let him deliver him, since he delights in him.” Isaiah 53: He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities. Zechariah 12: They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child.

Hope did not come despite Jesus’ suffering, but because of his suffering. It was necessary for Jesus to suffer, and because of that, we have hope. Because of Jesus’ death occurring just as he prophesied, because in his death he paid the price for your sins to be set right with God, we have hope. We have hope that no matter what levels of suffering enter into our lives, because of Jesus you will always be able to say that your future will always be better than your present because your story is on his storyline—your death is a part of your living forever with him.

But that’s your future. What about your present? Do we just have to endure the suffering and death that comes into our lives, gaining nothing from it other than this escapist “Well someday it’ll be over?” Doesn’t seem like it. You read passages like Psalm 50: Call upon me in the day of trouble, I will deliver you. Or James 5: The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. Or Matthew 7: Ask, and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you. What about when you call upon God and he doesn’t deliver you from what you’re going through? What about when your prayers seem to be the furthest thing from powerful and effective? What about when you ask and seek and knock and God’s door, and it seems like there’s no answer? Is Jesus, your closest relationship, letting you down the most?

Absolutely not. He invites you to slow down and see your story through his lens once again. He did the same thing for the Emmaus disciples. They had all the facts they needed. They had all God’s Word in the Old Testament. They knew that Jesus was powerful in his words and miracles, that he was from God. They knew that he died and the women had reported he was risen again. They should’ve connected the dots, but they didn’t. They only saw the story through their clouded lens.

When suffering comes into your life, it threatens to cloud your lens too. It threatens to be the only thing you can think about and focus on. Jesus slows you down and opens the Scriptures to you. He shows you passages like Matthew 16: whoever would follow me must take up their cross and deny themselves and follow me. Or 1 Peter 4: Dear friends, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.  Or from our first reading from today: live out your time as foreigners here in reverent fear. When suffering comes, it is not like Jesus has lost control over our lives. It’s not like your storyline has hit a snag and Jesus will bounce you back. It is not like your suffering is useless other than pointing you to eternity. Jesus says to expect suffering, because suffering is when God does his best work. He is able to use those sufferings to bring you even closer to him. To further align your storyline with his.

When you interpret the Bible through Jesus’ lens, you see that suffering, wherever it comes from, is not a sign that you’re on the wrong path. It’s a sign that you’re on the right one. And Jesus reinterprets all those passages about him helping you when you pray. You may call upon him and it may seem like it “doesn’t work,” but this is the difference Jesus makes for you in suffering: when you understand that Jesus has your eternal storyline in view and not just the next few months of your life, you can be confident that whatever you are going through is what is absolutely best for your eternal relationship with him. Because he rose, you will rise, and because you will live eternally, you know that your hope is not based on fulfilling a given hope during this life. He gives you hope that your future will be better than your present, not in spite of the hard times of life, but because of them. Maybe you’ll be able to look back and see it in a year, or ten years, or maybe it won’t be clear to you until heaven, but at some point, Jesus will say to you, see how you had to suffer these things before you entered glory? And you will see exactly what he means. You will look through his lens and see sure enough, he was walking along with you the whole time.