On the run

This morning I want to tell you something about the resurrection stories we hear in the season of Easter from the Gospel of Luke. If you like puzzles, you will probably find this as interesting as I do. If you don’t like puzzles, you have my full permission to find yourself at any point during this sermon suddenly deep in prayer. 

When the author of Luke’s gospel was putting together the stories of Jesus’ resurrection appearances, there was a technique they used if there was something they really wanted their readers to pay attention to. They would leave a clue, often the name of a place, or the name of a person that linked a particular resurrection appearance to a story the reader was already familiar with. This was so the reader could see the similarities, the connections between the two stories and know that they could place the same confidence, the same trust they had in their sacred stories in this new story now being told. 

Now, let’s imagine you’re a Jew in the first century and you get wind of one of Luke’s resurrection stories. You’re told that there were these two disciples walking along when Jesus (the dead man himself) appears and strikes up a conversation. The disciples don’t recognize him, but having chatted for a while they decide to invite him over for dinner. During the course of the meal the disciples suddenly realize who this man is and they come to believe that Jesus really is the Messiah and that he really has risen from the dead. 

First century Jew or not, if you’re hearing this story without having seen or experienced any of the events described, you’re probably going to think this is just another ghost story. Here’s where Luke’s literary technique comes in. It’s not just any road the disciples are on when Jesus appears to them; we’re told that it’s a road to a place called Oulammaus (Emmaus in our English translations). Oulammaus, for a first century Jewish reader, was none other than the village where their ancestor Jacob had a dream, a famous dream about a ladder stretching from heaven to earth, with angels going up and down.

A first century Jew who knows the story of Jacob’s dream, and hears that these disciples were on the road to Emmaus is going to say, “Okay, I'm listening.” 

They might have asked: is this a reenactment of Jacob’s ladder? It’s not a strict parallel, but there are a series of clues that point to some interwoven strands. For example, once the disciples arrive in ‘Emmaus’ (the place where Jacob had his dream) and sit down to eat with Jesus, the disciples’ eyes are opened and they recognize Jesus, just as Jacob awoke from his dream at Emmaus and realized God had been revealed to him. Jacob leaves a stone as a monument to the place where God had been made known to him, a stone which will later represent the foundation stone for the Temple. Jesus leaves with the disciples the breaking of bread, a sign that the presence of God is now not only in a specific place or building, but in the community of believers wherever and whenever they gather. 

There are more strands that link Emmaus to the story of Jacob’s ladder. I’ll mention just one other this morning. Jacob falls asleep and has this dream when he’s on the run from his brother, who he’s just tricked into losing his inheritance. It’s while he’s running away that God meets Jacob. If Luke is using the Jacob story as a basis for the account of Jesus’ resurrection appearance to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, it would seem that Luke wishes to portray the journey of the two disciples as a journey of flight, to show that they, too, were on the run. 

But, running away from what, we might ask?

I wonder if you’ve ever had the way you’ve always thought about the world suddenly turned upside down? Maybe things you’d never questioned, suddenly became less certain? A viewpoint you’d held on to for many years suddenly less important? For me it was the years I spent deconstructing and reconstructing my faith. The Christianity of my young adult years didn’t really know what to make of women who were called to be leaders, never mind the inclusion of gay or transgender people. I remember in those years feeling like I was on the run from God, like the deconstruction of my faith was some sort of betrayal. I started to think that maybe I was post-Jesus, post-Christianity. Sure, Jesus was a liberating, radical figure for people back then, but there was no way he had scope or imagination for the stuff going on now. 

It was my auntie Jenny, a biblical scholar, who first introduced me to this reading of the Emmaus story as a reenactment of Jacob’s ladder. She told me to see the Emmaus story not as one that somehow replaced, or superseded the Jacob story. She said to see the road to Emmaus as a story written from an insider’s perspective: “the natural and spontaneous expression of a Jewish believer in Jesus who is writing about and for [their] own people.” 

She helped me see that the disciples’ experience of Jesus on the road to Emmaus wasn’t post-Jacob or post-Jewish, it was an expansion, a continuation of the story that God had already written and would always write: a story about how God doesn’t wait until we’ve arrived some place to come alongside us; God meets us when we’re on the run. 

I’m telling you this because sometimes when our worldviews change, or our religious beliefs evolve, we wonder if there is room for the new ‘me’ in the old us, if the Jesus who has walked with us up until this point, will continue to be with us on the road we now walk. Let the Emmaus story assure you that Jesus will meet you on the road, but he might look different, that it might be a while before you recognize him, but there will be signs. Amen. 


Further reading:

Jenny Read-Heimerdinger and Josep Rius-Camps, “Luke’s use of the Jewish scriptures in the text of Luke 24 in Codex Bezae.” Accessed online on 19 April 2026.

Jenny Read-Heimerdinger, “Where is Emmaus? Clues in the text of Luke 24 in Codex Bezae.” Accessed online on 19 April 2026.

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