The Third Sunday of Easter

Most of us know the Emmaus road more than we’d like to admit. It’s the road we walk when some news has broken our hearts. The road we take when the future we counted on has collapsed. The road where we replay everything we thought God was going to do… and wonder why it didn’t happen.

So, when Luke says two disciples were walking away from Jerusalem, we understand. They weren’t just traveling. They were grieving. And it is on that road — the road of disappointment and disorientation — that the risen Christ comes alongside them.

If we have ever felt as if we had lost our way in life, if we have ever experienced profound sadness and dejection, if we have ever wondered when we would see the light at the end of the tunnel, then this Gospel story is for us.

Perhaps a good summation of our human condition is offered by best-selling author, Anne Lamott, who says that “we are an Easter people living in a Good Friday world.” That’s surely describes the disciples making their way along the road to Emmaus and it surely describes life in 2026.

Our own journey on the road to our Emmaus place is not unlike these two travelers. We all know what it is like to be absorbed by a sense of darkness, to lose someone we love, to have our dreams shattered, to mourn the death of something in which we had invested great energy and hope.

We know what it is like to be overwhelmed by unhappiness and to feel totally abandoned—even by God. That kind of desolation and anguish can be blinding and paralyzing. That’s the scene we enter in the Gospel today.

It is significant that in this Easter story hearing all the things Jesus was revealing about himself through Moses and all the prophets did not seem to alter the cheerless mood of the disciples nor lessen their confusion and doubt. Nor did it help them recognize the risen Christ.

Neither did their conversation on their walk for the seven miles from Jerusalem to Emmaus—a considerable amount of time to be engaged with the risen Jesus. What was it that turned the tables? What made the difference? If not by hearing, then what?

I think the answer is twofold: it was in the seeing—the recognition of Jesus who broke bread with them many times before, especially on the night before he died, just three days earlier—and it was in the sharing of that bread at a meal that their eyes became wide open and they were able to perceive that a new day had dawned, there would be light again, death was not the final word anymore. Jesus had been raised.

The road to Emmaus is a model of the way that revelation happens for us and how and where and when we experience light in the midst of our darkness, how we embrace life in spite of the fear of death, how we receive the gift of hope in the face of despair. The world brings us so many Good Friday moments every day both across the nation and the world and in the deep hurting in the lives of those right in our backyard.

What we learn from this Easter story is that what God most wants for us when we are walking our own path to Emmaus—carrying our sadness, our anxiety, our sense of loss—is not to be in isolation but in the company of those who will walk with us. Jesus is most real to us when we share the good things of creation—both the bread of life and the bread of heaven —with each other in our common humanness.

In the old holiday movie, "It's a Wonderful Life.” Burt the cop brings Uncle Billy home, through the snow storm. And the Bailey living room is filled with friends, there to help George in his time of need. Harry offers a toast - "to my big brother George, the richest man in town."

Right there, in those words, in that moment, we know the truth of that word in our guts. George is the richest man in town - not in money - but because of his many friends, whose lives he has touched, and who have touched his.

And like the travelers on that road on the first Easter evening, we also know that in our lives. Your lives—my life—is enriched not by money but by those who love and care for us, especially in the snowstorms of our lives.

When we hear something that is true and right, we feel it deep down - there is a kind of bodily resonance that occurs. We even respond with the words, "that really moved me."

Luke refers to this as heart burn: "Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?"

Easter isn’t just an event; it’s a way God keeps showing up in the middle of our ordinary, exhausted, everyday lives. And Emmaus teaches us that Christ is often closest when we feel most alone.

The disciples’ hearts burned… and then their feet moved. They ran back into the very place they had been running from. Because resurrection doesn’t just comfort us — it sends us. It sends us back into the world with courage, with clarity, with a story worth telling.

So may your heart burn with the presence of the risen Christ, and may your feet carry you into the places where hope is needed, where justice is waiting, and where God is already at work, opening eyes and setting tables of welcome.