Have you ever felt like life is a thousand-piece puzzle and nobody gave you the box top?
You have got the pieces. That is all. You hold up a blue one and wonder, is that the sky or the lake? A green one — is that a tree or somebody's shirt? It is confusing.
It is worse when it is your actual life. The business you dedicated to the Lord that went bankrupt anyway. The vows you made in front of God and your family that did not hold. The child you raised right who is a thousand miles from God today. The diagnosis. The thing at work. The battle in your own head that nobody sees.
And you pray, God, you said you work all things together for good. So how does this piece fit?
If that is where you are, you know exactly how those two men felt walking to Emmaus. Everything they had hoped for died on a cross on Friday. Was he not the one who was going to deliver us? Did he not walk on water and give sight to the blind and raise the dead? And we ran off like cowards.
That is not just a road to Emmaus. That is the road of disappointment.
What I saw on the causeway
Heidi and I celebrated twenty-two years this weekend — one night away on Miami Beach, a run along the water, thousands of fish jumping off the end of the pier with tarpon under them and a hundred strangers watching like it was National Geographic live.
Then we drove home. I am a pilot, so I am always watching aircraft. Coming up on the MacArthur Causeway I noticed one flying low, wings rocking. Then it nosed over. No floats. No wheels coming down. And it went down, down, down.
You are on a bridge. You cannot stop. Three miles to the next exit. We thought the people behind us were pointing at the plane too — turns out they were just letting us know how slowly we were driving. Thank you, Miami.
So we called 911, got bounced dispatcher to dispatcher, and finally reached Miami Beach. Heidi described the spot, and the man on the line said, oh — right where the seaplane lands.
It was an experimental aircraft. No pontoons, no wheels, a flat bottom like a fishing boat, propellers up high. It lands on the water on purpose.
I am happy to report there was no plane crash in Miami on Saturday.
But sometimes life is precisely like that. You are certain you know what you are looking at. And there is a bigger picture you cannot see from the bridge.
The only one who knew
Jesus shows up on that road and their eyes are kept from recognizing him. He asks why they are so sad, and they turn on him — are you the only person in Jerusalem who does not know what happened?
The irony of the whole story: he is the only one who does know.
And he does not correct them. He could have said, funny you should mention it, I was ditched by the guys who said they had my back and left hung out to dry. He says none of that. He listens, and he lets them get it out. When Jesus asks a question in Scripture, it is almost never because he needs the answer. It is because we do.
I have known generals who put on a plain uniform and walked the line so soldiers would tell them the truth. Something like that is happening here.
Then look at verse 21. We had hoped. Past tense. All of it in the past tense.
I have sat in my office with a lot of you, and I know some of your hope is dying too. There was a time you were sure God was good and working all things for good, and now he is not your living hope. He is your past hope. You believe he can. You are no longer sure he will.
The greatest sermon never recorded
Here is what Jesus does not do. He does not say, look, it is me.
He opens the Bible. Moses, the Psalms, the Prophets. He shows them that like a scarlet thread through the whole thing, every story had been whispering his name, and that the Christ had to suffer and then rise.
If I could go back in time, that walk is in my top three. Not the Beatles. Not Alexander the Great. That sermon, seven miles long, and nobody wrote it down.
Maybe he went to Psalm 22 — my God, my God, why have you forsaken me — the words he shouted from the cross. Maybe Isaiah 53: he was pierced for our transgressions, and by his wounds we are healed. Maybe Micah 5:2, naming Bethlehem like a postal address centuries early.
Maybe he went to Numbers 21, where God tells Moses to put a bronze snake on a pole so anyone who looks at it lives. Which had to feel like a piece with no picture. Lord, did you not just tell us no idols? Did you not come down hard on Aaron for exactly this?
And then John 3, one verse before the most quoted line in the English language: as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.
There it is. The Old Testament hands you pieces. Christ is the box top.
Their hearts, and then their feet
They beg him to stay. They sit down — and the guest becomes the host. He takes the bread and breaks it. The last time these men saw that, it was the night before the cross. The hands that were pierced on Friday are breaking bread on Sunday.
Their eyes open. And he is gone.
What he left them was this: did not our hearts burn within us while he opened the Scriptures?
Hearts on fire get feet moving. Two men who had walked seven miles with their shoulders down turned around and ran seven miles back to Jerusalem in the dark, because they had to tell somebody. Lovers tell. That is all evangelism has ever been.
You may have walked in here holding a fistful of pieces that make no sense. I cannot hand you the answer to your particular situation. I can hand you the box top, and his name is Jesus.
So when you open this book, does your heart still burn? Or has it gone quiet?
