“Our Hearts Burned Within Us”
There is a unique feeling we experience while reflecting on good times after they are over. It happens when we speak about the fun we had on a vacation when we finally arrive home. We enjoy talking about how good it was to reunite with old friends and family and how seeing them made us glad. We get joy from this because remembering these special moments allows us to live them out again in some small way. This feeling is often called nostalgia. Nostalgia can be an awkward and eerie feeling. The pleasure we get from remembering lost moments is bitter sweet because remembering them reveals to us how they are lost. We will not experience them again. C.S. Lewis comments on this feeling in his beautiful novel, Out of the Silent Planet. The main character Ransom is told this by his alien friend: “A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.” Our enjoyment of cherished moments does not end when those moments are over. And this happens with spiritual experiences in our lives as well. I believe practicing this sort of spiritual nostalgia can grow our faith and motivate us to persevere in our pursuit of hope. Remembering the stories of the Scriptures and the hope of our faith in Jesus when we gather together, our faith grows. This seems to happen in one of the accounts of Jesus’ appearances after he rises from the dead.
This appearance is written about in chapter twenty-four of Luke’s gospel and is called “The Emmaus Road.” This story is no less beautiful or shrouded in mystery than other appearances we read about. It opens up with two disciples talking together while walking down a dirt road. They are talking about the times they shared with Jesus and the claims he made before he died. Jesus appears to them as a stranger passing them on the road. As he walks by them, he says: “What are you two talking about while you walk?” As Jesus speaks, Luke says the disciples were “kept from recognizing him” but regarded him as a common visitor to Jerusalem. The disciples told him they were talking about Jesus of Nazareth and how they “had hoped he was the one to restore Israel.” Instead of talking with them about his life and ministry, Jesus rebukes them and calls them fools. He tells them their hearts were slow to know the testimony of the prophets. If they knew that testimony, they would know Jesus of Nazareth was indeed the one to restore Israel because the prophets tell us the Messiah must suffer and enter into glory. But the two disciples were still unsure.
These disciples heard some women say Jesus rose from the dead. Although they earnestly hoped this to be true, they still did not know. They were not sure until they talked to this stranger on the road and invited him to stay with them when they arrived at Emmaus. When he enters their home, the strangest thing happens. The three of them sit down at a table together. Since they returned from a long walk, they prepare some food and drink on the table as refreshments. Once they are settled, the stranger picks up bread, breaks it and blesses it. As He broke the bread, immediately the eyes of these disciples were opened and they recognized him. He was no longer a stranger to them and for just a moment Jesus was right before their eyes. Then He visibly vanished from their sight straight away.
They looked at one another baffled and said, “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” While they listened to Jesus explain the meaning of the Scriptures on the road, the eager longings of their hearts for the restoration of Israel were met. It’s not until after recognizing the true identity of the stranger is Jesus and that he did indeed rise from the grave when their hope turned to joy. They got up from the table right away and walked back to Jerusalem and told the rest of the disciples what happened on the road and how he was known to them in the breaking of bread. The burning joy their hearts felt while Jesus talked with them on the road could not be kept for themselves.
In the same way these two disciples shared their testimony about meeting Jesus on the road, we too have cherished stories to share of meeting Jesus in our walk with him. When we remember our stories of meeting Jesus in our reading the Scriptures; when we share communion by breaking bread and drinking wine, our faith grows and hope burns hot as the fires of our hearts catch flame together. This experience of spiritual nostalgia will push us to persevere in faith and hope. I imagine these two disciples continued to share this story for the rest of their lives. This end to the story reminded me of another part of the C.S. Lewis quote I mentioned earlier. Ransom’s alien friend says again: “When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then–that is the real meeting.”
