He Kept Coming Back

That same afternoon, while Jerusalem was still full of arguing, two of his followers gave up on the city and started walking home. They were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles out. One of them was named Cleopas. They walked the way people walk when something terrible has happened — slowly, going over it, saying the same things again in a different order and getting nowhere. And while they were talking, a man caught up with them on the road and walked along with them. It was Jesus. They did not know him. Something held their eyes, and they looked straight at him and saw a stranger. “What is this you are throwing back and forth at each other as you walk?” They stopped dead in the road, with their faces down. “Are you the only person staying in Jerusalem who does not know what has happened there these last few days?” “What things?” “The things about Jesus of Nazareth. He was a prophet, strong in what he did and in what he said, in front of God and in front of everybody. And our own chief priests and rulers handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him. But we were hoping — we were hoping he was the one who was going to set Israel free. And on top of everything else, this is the third day since it happened. And then some of the women in our own group gave us a shock. They were at the tomb early this morning, and they did not find his body, and they came back saying they had seen messengers who told them he is alive. So some of the men went out to the tomb and found it exactly the way the women said. But him they did not see.”

“You foolish men. How slow your hearts are to trust everything the prophets said. Did the Christ not have to suffer all this, and then go into his glory?” And then, walking along that dusty road with the two of them, he started at the beginning — at Moses — and went right through the prophets, and everywhere in the writings where the story was about him, he stopped and showed them. It was the longest seven miles either of them ever walked, and afterward neither of them could remember being tired.

They came to the village. He acted as though he were going farther on down the road, and they would not have it. They took hold of him. “Stay with us. It is nearly evening, and the day is almost gone.” So he went in to stay with them. And when they were at the table he took the bread — the guest took the bread, which is not what a guest does — and he thanked God for it, and broke it, and handed it to them. And their eyes came open, and they knew him. And he was not there. The bread was in their hands and the place at the table was empty. The two of them sat and looked at each other. “Were our hearts not burning inside us the whole way, while he talked to us on the road, while he was opening up the writings to us?”

They did not wait for morning. They did not wait for supper. They got up that same hour and went back out into the dark and walked the seven miles to Jerusalem all over again. They found the eleven and everybody with them, gathered together in one room — and before the two of them could get a word out, the room told them: “It is true! The Lord has really been raised, and Simon has seen him!” And then the two told their part: the stranger on the road, and Moses and the prophets, and how they knew him the moment he broke the bread.

They were still standing there saying it when he was in the room with them. The doors were shut and bolted, because they were afraid of the men who had killed him. Nobody heard anybody come in. He was simply standing in the middle of them. “Peace be with you.” They were terrified. They thought they were looking at a ghost. “Why are you troubled? Why are these doubts coming up in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself. Touch me and see — a ghost does not have flesh and bones, and you can see that I have.” He held out his hands to them and showed them his feet, and showed them his side. And they still could not take it in, because they were too happy to believe it, and they stood there wondering. So he asked them a very ordinary question. “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of grilled fish. He took it and ate it while they watched him. “Peace be with you. As the Father sent me, I am sending you.” And he breathed on them. “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anybody’s sins, they are forgiven. If you hold on to anybody’s, they are held on to.”

One of them was not in the room that night. Thomas, the one they called the Twin, was somewhere else, and when he came back they all told him at once. “We have seen the Lord!” “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger into the mark, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.” Eight days went by. They were inside again, and this time Thomas was with them, and the doors were shut again. And again he was there in the middle of them. “Peace be with you.” Then he turned to Thomas, and he did not tell him off, and he did not go over what Thomas had said. He offered him exactly what he had asked for. “Put your finger here. Look at my hands. Put out your hand and lay it in my side. Stop being a man who will not trust. Be one who does.” “My Lord and my God.” “You have trusted because you have seen me. Happy are the ones who have not seen, and have trusted.”

After that they went up to Galilee, the way they had been told, back to the lake where most of them had grown up. Seven of them were together one evening on the shore: Simon Peter, Thomas the Twin, Nathanael from Cana, the two sons of Zebedee, and two more. “I am going fishing,” said Peter, and the rest of them said, “We are coming with you.” They got into the boat and worked all night, and caught nothing at all — not one fish, the whole night through. Early in the morning, with the light just coming, there was somebody standing on the shore. They were about a hundred yards out and they did not know who it was. “Children — you have not caught anything, have you?” “No.” “Throw the net out on the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they threw it out on the right side. And then they could not pull it in. Seven grown fishermen leaning on the ropes, and the net would not come up. And the follower Jesus loved said quietly to Peter: “It is the Lord.” Peter did not wait for the boat. He pulled his coat around him and belted it and went straight over the side into the water. The others came in the little boat, dragging the net full of fish behind them, because they were not far from land.

When they got out onto the sand there was a fire of coals burning, with fish already laid on it, and bread. The last fire of coals Peter had stood beside had been in the high priest’s courtyard. “Bring some of the fish you have just caught.” So Peter went and hauled the net up onto the beach himself: a hundred and fifty-three big fish in it, and the net had not torn anywhere. “Come and have breakfast.” Not one of them dared to ask him who he was. They knew. He came and took the bread and gave it to them, and the fish the same way, and they sat and ate it on the sand with the sun coming up over the water.

When breakfast was over he said, in front of all of them: “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these do?” “Yes, Lord. You know that I love you.” “Feed my lambs.” Then a second time: “Simon son of John, do you love me?” “Yes, Lord. You know that I love you.” “Take care of my sheep.” Then a third time: “Simon son of John, do you love me?” It hurt Peter that he asked him three times. “Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you.” “Feed my sheep. Amen, amen, I tell you: when you were young you belted your own coat around you and went wherever you wanted. When you are old you will hold out your hands, and somebody else will belt you and take you where you do not want to go.” He said that about the kind of death Peter would die and how it would bring God glory. And then he said the two words he had said to him at the beginning, on this same beach, when Peter was still a fisherman mending nets: “Follow me.” Peter turned around and saw the follower Jesus loved coming along behind them. “Lord — what about him?” “If I want him to stay until I come, what is that to you? You follow me.”

There was a mountain in Galilee where he had told the eleven to meet him, and they went up it, and he came to them there. They bowed down in front of him. Some of them were still not sure. And he said: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. So go, and make followers of all the nations — immerse them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to keep everything I have commanded you. And look: I am with you every day, to the end of the age.”

For forty days he kept coming to them like that, and eating with them, and talking to them about the kingdom of God, until there was no room left anywhere in any of them for the idea that he was dead. Then, in Jerusalem, at a meal, he told them what to do next. “Everything written about me in the law of Moses and in the prophets and in the psalms had to come true. This is what is written: that the Christ would suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and that a change of heart and the forgiveness of sins would be announced in his name to all the nations, starting from Jerusalem. You are the witnesses of these things. Do not leave Jerusalem. Wait for what my Father promised — the thing you heard me tell you. John immersed people in water; in a few days from now you will be immersed in the Holy Spirit.” They still had one question left, and it was the old one. “Lord, is this the time? Are you giving the kingdom back to Israel now?” “It is not for you to know the times and the dates that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will be given power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and out to the end of the earth.”

Then he took them out of the city, up the Mount of Olives, as far as Bethany. And he lifted up his hands over them and blessed them. And while he was still blessing them, with his hands still up, he was lifted away from them, and a cloud came underneath him and took him out of their sight. They stood on that hilltop with their heads back, staring up into the sky, and they went on staring long after there was nothing to see. And two men in white were standing beside them. “Men of Galilee — why are you standing here looking up into the sky?”