Luke’s Gospel is the only one that preserves one of the most interesting stories of Jesus with disciples other than the twelve: the account of Cleopas (and his unnamed friend). Only a week earlier, these two were likely among fellow disciples joyfully entering Jerusalem while Jesus rode in on a colt in the midst of a multitude of Passover pilgrims shouting, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” Now, with bowed shoulders, crushed hopes, and despondent faces, they walked alone on the road to Emmaus. As they conversed together, they reflected on the life of Jesus—how he did the work the chief priests failed to do by banishing merchants from the temple, how he courageously taught the crowds, how he prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem and that same temple, and how they ate the Passover meal with him, their long-awaited messiah. But they also spoke of his death—how he was arrested and subjected to the profound injustice of a mock trial, how the religious leaders in Jerusalem handed him over to the Roman authorities who humiliated him by crucifying him as a criminal. They pondered how all their messianic hopes had been dashed and buried in a tomb with the body of their beloved Jesus.
As these two men sorrowfully reflected on the week that began with joy and anticipation, someone whom they did not recognize joined them. Their unrecognized guest inquired, “What is this discussion you are having with each other as you walk along?” The question puzzled the two men, stopping them in their tracks.
Cleopas wondered, “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?”
Their fellow traveler asked, “What things?”
The two grieving men recounted how they set their hope upon Jesus of Nazareth—a man approved by God, whose deeds and words testified that he was the Messiah who would redeem Israel—but those hopes had been dashed three days ago when he was handed over by Jerusalem’s religious authorities to be crucified by the Romans and laid in a garden tomb. They recounted how some women reported that after visiting his tomb early that very morning, angels told them that Jesus was alive. Meanwhile, when others went to the tomb, they found it empty and did not see him.
Their yet unrecognized fellow traveler responded, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” Then, he began to expound all the Scriptures concerning the Messiah, beginning with the five books of Moses and proceeding to the Prophets. With this summary, Luke tantalizes those of us who might wish for at least a brief transcript of that exposition of the Old Testament. But instead, in keeping with the pattern of God’s revelation, Luke imitates our Lord by concealing the details of Jesus’s exposition while the Messiah reveals himself.
The Instructive Role of Luke 24:13–35: Errors to Avoid
Luke’s account is richly instructive, as it replicates for us, his readers, how the resurrected Jesus himself taught those who could not recognize him. We, who likewise “believe him though we have not seen him” (cf. 1 Peter 1:8–9), need to ask, “Why does Jesus not show himself plainly to the two disciples?” Instead, he keeps them from recognizing him until after he expounds how the Scriptures prophesy that the Messiah had to suffer and die before being glorified! If we do not carefully reflect on this, we open ourselves up to some harmful errors concerning how the New Testament writers appealed to the Old Testament to prove the legitimacy of their belief that the crucified and risen Jesus is the promised Messiah.
One error is the notion that the memories of Jesus’s earliest followers had concerning him defined the Messiah’s mission and became the source of their “radical reinterpretation” of the Old Testament. In this view, Jesus’s disciples even discarded the contexts of Old Testament passages, if necessary, as they altered their meanings, creatively using them to support their newfound faith.[1] For example, George Ladd claims the New Testament “involves a rather radical reinterpretation of the Old Testament prophecies . . . demanded by the events of redemptive history.”[2] Another error (that reinforces the first) is to overlook or downplay an essential detail of the episode, how Jesus (as told by Luke) places side by side two distinguishable but inseparable dimensions: (1) how he concealed his identity from the two Emmaus Road disciples and later revealed himself to them, and (2) how the Old Testament Scripture’s simultaneously concealed and revealed the Messiah promised long ago to the patriarchs.
1. See, for example, George Ladd portrayed the NT writers as engaged in “reinterpreting” the OT “in light of the new revelation given in Jesus Christ” (The Last Things, [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978], 19). See also Richard Longenecker, who argued that sometimes the New Testament writers interpreted the Old Testament creatively from a “revelatory stance” of “privileged apostolic insight” unique to them, which people today cannot replicate (Longenecker, “Can We Reproduce the Exegesis of the New Testament?” Tyndale Bulletin 21 [1970], 38 and Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975]). Peter Enns advocates for the same when he states, “[New Testament writers] go back and read their scripture in such a way to support what they already know to be true by faith.” See a fuller development of this in Peter Enns, “Fuller Meaning, Single Goal: A Christotelic Approach to the New Testament Use of the Old in Its First-Century Interpretive Environment,” Counterpoints, Three Views on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, eds. Kenneth Berding & Jonathan Lunde (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007), 167–217. Enns holds a view like that of Barnabas Lindars, New Testament Apologetic: The Doctrinal Significance of the Old Testament Quotations (London: SCM Press, 1973). For insight on Lindars’s approach, see Andy Naselli, “Review of Barnabas Lindars’s New Testament Apologetic.”
2. George E. Ladd, A Theology of the New Testament, reprint 1991, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 336. Against Ladd’s concept of “radical reinterpretation,” like Cleopas and his fellow traveler, the New Testament writers came to recognize how the Old Testament Scriptures simultaneously reveal and conceal the Messiah embedded in its narratives, psalms, figures, events, ceremonies, institutions, and even places.
The Old Testament’s Messiah-Focused Revelation
Concealment and revelation frame Luke’s entire episode concerning Jesus’s dialogue with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. The narrative hinges on the divine restraint of the two disciples’ eyes from recognizing Jesus (Luke 24:16) until the appointed moment when Jesus removes the restraint, opening their eyes to recognize him (Luke 24:31), at which time Jesus suddenly disappears from their sight.[3] Jesus took this occasion to distinguish how these two disciples would come to see him as the resurrected Messiah by believing the Scriptures, which inverts how both the women who had accompanied him from Galilee and Peter came to believe. For the women and Peter, sight of the empty tomb and the testimony of angels prompted belief. Though the two travelers to Emmaus had heard testimony that their Lord was alive, they had not seen the empty tomb or their risen teacher. Hence, when Jesus approached them, they did not yet believe the good news. He did not rush to reveal his resurrected glory to the two disciples. Instead, he prevented them from recognizing him (Luke 24:16).
Jesus intended to confirm their belief concerning the resurrected Messiah, not by first seeing him, but by hearing the testimony of the Scriptures. Specifically, Jesus wanted them to know him by hearing what the Scriptures say about the Messiah’s prophesied suffering, and only after this, entering into his glory. Therefore, Jesus kept them from recognizing his form, face, voice, manner, and the wounds of his crucifixion. Instead, Jesus expounded the Old Testament teaching that the promised Messiah had to die and rise from the dead to elicit their belief (Luke 24:26, 46). Jesus taught them this from all the Scriptures, by rehearsing the Old Testament plotline concerning the Messiah: “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets he thoroughly explained what was said concerning him in all the Scriptures” (Luke 24:17). Only later, as their home guest, when he broke bread (a symbolic act reminiscent of the Last Supper), did Jesus suddenly open their eyes and impart belief (Luke 24:31, 35).[4] The two disciples instantly realized they were in the presence of Jesus, whom they had been mourning, and that he was the promised Messiah of the Old Testament, raised from the dead. As instantly as they recognized Jesus, he vanished from sight.
3. I. Howard Marshall correctly affirms that the passive verbal statement, “their eyes were prevented so that they could not recognize him,” refers to an “action by God . . . rather than Satan” (Commentary on Luke, NIGTC [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978], 893).
4. Robert Stein agrees that “Jesus was recognized in the ‘breaking of bread’ (24:35), which for Luke meant the breaking of bread in the Lord’s Supper” (Luke, NAC [Nashville, TN: Broadman, 1992], 613).
Just as Jesus first concealed himself from the two disciples only later to reveal himself to them at the right moment by opening their eyes, another dimension of concealing and revealing becomes discernible to these men. Once their eyes were opened, Cleopas and his friend immediately reflected on another opening: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was speaking to us on the road as he opened the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32—the same Greek word is used in Luke 24:31). Thus, in Luke’s episode, Jesus’s acts of concealing and revealing entailed both eyes, the human capacity of interpretation, and Scripture, God’s gift of revelation.
We, like these two men, need both our eyes and the Scriptures opened. Both are God’s work. He opens our eyes when he wakes us from death’s slumber to believe in Christ Jesus, who arose from death. Our Lord opens the Scriptures to us by disclosing what he concealed there throughout the narratives, psalms, and prophecies. The concealing and revealing entail God’s giving of revelation and our need for correct interpretation. Though revelation and interpretation are inseparable, they are distinguishable, and revelation controls interpretation. Like a fully furnished but dimly lit multi-room palace, the Old Testament is a complex entity. When a lit lamp is introduced, nothing that was not already present is added. However, the light dispels dark shadows, and things shrouded begin to emerge with clarity, even as shadows linger, still semi-concealing.[5] The glory of the resurrected Jesus brings to light the wondrous mystery of the promised Messiah, revealing the Old Testament’s concealed prophetic foreshadowings, prefigurations, harbingers, and types that were always there to be seen clearly through the eyes of faith.
5. The illustration concerning how God’s revelation within the two testaments relates is from B. B. Warfield, Biblical Doctrines (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1929; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1981), 141.
While on their way to Emmaus, Jesus dramatized for his two disciples the blessing he would announce a week later to Thomas: “Because you saw me, you believed; blessed are those who do not see but believe” (John 20:29). Thus, Jesus assigned a role to his two disciples they did not recognize until after their encounter with him. They represent us who “believe Christ though we have not seen him” (1 Peter 1:8–9). Jesus blessed these two disciples by reversing the order of belief and understanding that his apostles experienced. For example, after arriving at the tomb before Peter, “stooping to look in,” John “saw the linen cloths lying there, but he did not go in” (John 20:5). Then, Peter arrived and entered the tomb where he “saw the linen cloths lying there, and the face cloth, which had been on Jesus’s head, not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself” (John 20:6). John’s Gospel explains they both “saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that Jesus must rise from the dead” (John 20:8–9). Sight induced Peter and John to believe, although they did not yet understand how the Scriptures prophesied that the Messiah must “first suffer and then rise from the dead on the third day” (Luke 24:46). Jesus situates the two Emmaus Road disciples differently, planting their faith firmly in the Old Testament revelation concerning the Messiah before confirming it by showing himself to them.
Cleopas and his companion, like their Old Covenant forebears, became characters in God’s unfolding drama of redemption, which simultaneously reveals and conceals, eliciting their believing inquiry but eluding their understanding. They understood the Old Testament sufficiently to anticipate the promised Messiah, but because the promised one is also veiled in figurations, types, foreshadowings, and prophetic utterances that awaited greater illumination, their misunderstanding—signified by their restricted eyesight—awaited the Messiah’s lifting of the veil. Also, like many of their forebears, they occupied representative roles that they themselves did not comprehend until after their encounter with Jesus on that road.
Luke produced a literary replication of Jesus’s discourse with his two disciples on their way to Emmaus, calling for us to ground our faith concerning the resurrected Messiah within the unfolding mystery of the Old Testament’s storyline, which entails God’s revelatory words correlating with His redemptive acts. Jesus prevents the two men from seeing him as the climactic resolution of redemption’s mystery until they recognize the Messiah revealed within the countless divinely hidden disclosures throughout the Old Testament. These prefigurings of the Messiah’s suffering and subsequent glory are consequential to the grand story’s dramatic climax. By expounding Scripture’s plotline concerning the Messiah’s suffering and death, Jesus obligates his two disciples to ponder the mystery’s foreshadowing clues embedded throughout the Old Testament. He does this before revealing to them that he, now resurrected, is the One who was crucified—the very One that has reversed the circumstances they failed to anticipate from these same Scriptures. The irony of God’s concealing and revealing resolve in the Messiah’s self-disclosure, for in him converge (1) two covenants—promise and fulfillment, (2) two eras—the old and the new, (3) two realms—the earthly and the heavenly, and (4) two forms of revelation—the objective unveiling of Messiah and the subjective clearing of our obscured vision.
Thus, Luke’s account of Jesus’s conversation with his two disciples on their way to Emmaus teaches us to plant the roots of our faith and understanding of the resurrected Messiah deep in the soil of the entire Old Testament, where God revealed and concealed his progressive prophetic words with his redemptive actions richly suffused with typological prefigurations and foreshadowings of the Coming One, his suffering and glorious Son.
Conclusion
With each fresh revelation God gave, his prior revelation that came in various forms—whether trope, type, foreshadow, parable, allegory, etc.—had a shroud of darkness recede as the dramatic escalation of God’s story of redemption unfolded. This darkness receded especially when the climactic finale emerged from the shadows and Light broke forth from death’s tomb. All human-authored mystery novels imitate God’s grand mystery of redemption. Within characters, events, settings, and plotted conflicts throughout their storylines, mystery writers embed hints, foreshadowing, prefigurations, harbingers, and portents that evoke anticipation of a full and climactic resolution. This resolution is revealed through surprising reversals, which invoke credibility and satisfaction. Infinitely grander is the original, the storyline of God’s unfolding mystery, the story of which we are not only readers, but participants. Though we are participants, we do not inhabit the storyline as characters who fill roles imbued with varied typological significance as did Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Rahab, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Ruth, David, Isaiah, John the Baptist, Mary, Jesus, and Cleopas (and his friend) on the Emmaus Road. For each of them, as they completed their redemptive-historical roles, the unfolding mystery generated an expectation of the coming promised Seed of the woman and Seed of Abraham, the very Seed who would accomplish redemption and reconciliation.
For these Bible characters and Bible readers alike, integral to the conflict of the plotline of rising hope are numerous other cast members (protagonists; antagonists), events (e.g., exile; exodus), places (e.g., wilderness; Canaan), and institutions (e.g., temple; kingship). These are all infused with an oft-layered symbolism, and they pose as puzzling shadows, enigmas, riddles, tantalizing conundrums, and prefiguring types of things to come with Messiah—yet veiled from full comprehension as disclosures accumulated. All these escalated toward the plotline’s climactic resolution. At last, the time is fulfilled, and the mystery is finally revealed in its variegated culmination, converging in Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, who suffered, died, was buried, rose, and was glorified.
Thus, when we read the Old Testament, do we see our Lord, who suffered and then was glorified, revealed there as the One who formed Adam from the dust of the earth and shaped Eve from a portion of Adam’s flesh (John 1:3; Col. 1:16; Heb. 1:2)? Do we recognize him when he appeared to Abraham “by the oaks of Mamre,” accepted being addressed as Lord, announced the birth of the promised son to Sarah a year hence, and announced the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18; John 8:56)? Do we see our crucified and risen Savior prophesied in the dramatized parable on the mountain when the ram, caught in the thicket, substituted for Isaac, Abraham’s “only son” (Genesis 22; Heb. 11:17–19)? Do we see him revealed in the Passover lamb whose blood on the doorframe delivered the “firstborn son” from death (Exodus 12; 1 Cor. 5:7)? Do we acknowledge him as “the Lord’s presence” signified by the pillar of fire by night and the cloud by day, guarding the Israelites during their days in their time of wandering? Do we also see him in the wilderness as the bronze serpent lifted high on a pole to which everyone bitten by a poisonous snake should look and live (Num. 21:8–9; John 3:14)? Likewise, do we see him in the ritual of the Day of Atonement (Lev. 23:26–32) and in each Sabbath, whether weekly, annually, septennially, or in the fiftieth year (Leviticus 23–25)? In his sermon on Pentecost, Peter taught us to recognize David’s prefiguring prophecy concerning our suffering and resurrected Lord by quoting, “For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption” (Ps. 16:10; Acts 2:31). Thus, we should not be surprised that David, for whom God promised an eternal kingdom over which his seed would reign (2 Sam. 7:12–17), speaks of Messiah’s resurrection in the next psalm: “As for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness; when I awake, I shall be satisfied with your likeness” (Ps. 17:15). Do we recognize our crucified and risen Redeemer as prefigured by Moses, Joshua, David, and all the prophets? Like those two disciples who listened intently to Jesus’s exposition of the Scriptures on the Emmaus Road, when we read or hear the Old Testament expounded, do we not put our foreheads to our palms and exclaim, “Did not our hearts burn within us? There he is, present throughout the whole Old Testament. He is right there before our eyes from the beginning in Genesis. How could we have missed him? How could we not have seen him until he made himself obvious?”
What is now revealed is what was hidden in plain sight, seen by both Scripture’s characters and readers, though dimly because God’s revelation awaited its climax in Christ Jesus. This is how the Old Testament reveals the Messiah. This is how Scripture bears witness to him. This is how Jesus reveals himself. Throughout his ministry, even to the end, Jesus, the incarnate one, veiled in flesh, replicated Scripture, concealing while revealing with symbolic acts and speech, ever progressing toward his passion and resurrection. How could it be otherwise? How else could the Creator reveal himself to his creatures as their Redeemer? Hence, if we characterize Jesus’s exposition of the Old Testament to his two disciples on the Emmaus Road as “Christ-centered interpretation,” we can do so only because the entire Old Testament is “Christ-centered revelation.” God’s word-revelation constrains us to acknowledge the incarnate Word, who came to give himself as a ransom for many, whom the whole Old Testament prophesied.
