Video for April 23rd, 2026
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video.
As we continue through the Easter season, reading different accounts of the resurrection each week in Church, I’m struck by their differences. If different witnesses in a court case all repeat the same thing, the usual conclusion is that some from of collusion has gone on. Different perspectives on the same event add credibility. This is what we find in the resurrection accounts. They are very hard to harmonise completely. Who saw Jesus first; when they saw him; where they saw him all vary in subtle ways. A momentous event like the resurrection, completely unanticipated as it was, resulted in shock and confusion. Luke’s account in Chapter 24 uniquely travels with a pair of disciples on the sad road back to their home village on the third day after the crucifixion. Dr. Paula Gooder gives some fascinating insights into who they might be. Cleopas is the only named person. He is likely to be the same person as Clopas named in John 19:25 whose wife Mary was one of the few who stuck with Jesus at the foot of the cross. In Luke’s account there is an escalation in the two disciples’ conversation that we miss in English. In v. 14 they talked, Greek homileo (omilhw), from where we get the word homily. It simply means to converse. In verse 15, they conversed and discussed, Greek suseto (sushtw), which is a bit stronger – debate or argue. In v. 17 Jesus appears and asks them what they were discussing, but the Greek word is antiballo (antiballw), which is literally, ‘throw against a wall’, which means a really heated argument. Jesus appears just as they are having a real domestic, which causes Dr. Gooder to ask whether it might actually have been Clopas and his wife Mary. The fact that only Cleopas is named would be unsurprising in a patriarchal culture. We miss the tone of Cleopas’ first remarks to Jesus, but I suspect there is a real edge to his, “are you the only one in Jerusalem who hasn’t heard about these things”. Impoliteness would characterise a reply in the heat of the moment. It says they were kept from recognising Jesus, which seems surprising, given Mary was there when he died three days previously, but the fact that they weren’t expecting it and that the meeting was out of context may explain it without attributing a divine fog. I can remember at the end of twelve years as a parish priest seeing people approaching me and couldn’t remember whether I had baptised their children, married them or buried their parents. I knew it must have been one of them. It needed a conversation to recall which.
Their description of events to Jesus, perhaps after they had calmed down, reveals something of their deep sadness. There is nothing more depressing than the phrase, ‘we had hoped’. Dashed hopes make you angry. Perhaps Cleopas was blaming Mary for leading him on a spiritual wild goose chase. Like many of the disciples their primary hope was that Jesus would turn out to be a leader to liberate them from the Romans, not from sin. They’d heard much of Jesus remarks through that lens. Perhaps they’d written off his explicit warnings that he would be killed and rise again. Prophets are eccentric; they say stuff like that; you can ignore it. Those of us in pastoral ministry try to help people in these circumstances all the time. We had hoped – the chemo would work this time; that the item I’d looked forward to buying for some time would fill the existential void; that those lottery numbers would have come up to cure my financial ills; that this relationship would have worked unlike the previous ones I’d self-sabotaged. You could insert you own.
As Jesus raises his hands to give thanks for the bread, revealing the nail marks, the scales fall from their eyes. Weren’t our hearts burning on the road they say breathlessly as they run back to Jerusalem to tell their friends? The resurrection reveals to them that ‘we had hoped’ has been nailed to the cross as well. This was not a spiritualist con, but someone who has come back from the grave with the authority to tell us how to prepare for it and live in the now in the light of resurrection reality. God is working his purposes out towards a good future that nothing can now thwart. No religious fanatic in Tehran, or narcissist in the White House, or deranged nationalist in Moscow can do it. Evil will not have the last word.
This story deals with ‘we had hoped’ forever and replaces it with a hope that no circumstances can ultimately undermine. All flowing out of a possible marital argument. In the light of the resurrection, I’m sure Cleopas and Mary made up! They met with the best marriage counsellor ever.
+Richard