It is Easter Sunday, so naturally all of you are thinking about road trips.
Did he say road trips? He did.
Summer of 1979 — yes, I am that old. I had just finished intern training with Youth for Christ in Rockford, Illinois, and I was driving home to Birmingham on a Saturday night because I was due to preach at my home church the next morning. I had just turned twenty-two, which is the age at which a man drives all night and does other foolish things. Somewhere down I-65 I pulled into a gas station in the booming metropolis of Shepherdsville, Kentucky, and my car died. Nine o'clock at night, three hundred and fifty miles still to go, and this was before God created the cell phone.
So I said to myself, self — would Moses or Elijah or Daniel have let a little thing like three hundred and fifty miles and no transportation keep them from bringing God's message to God's people? And myself answered: no, sir, they would not.
So I did what any wise twenty-two-year-old would do. I pulled my duffel bag out of the car, walked back down the ramp to the shoulder of I-65 in a dark stretch of Kentucky, stuck out my thumb, and started hitchhiking. Do not try this at home. I am a trained professional.
Inside of an hour a car pulled over. The passenger door opened, I ran up and got in, and I was turning to thank my benefactor when what greeted me was the cold metal barrel of a gun, right about here. Nice to meet you too, sir. And a voice saying, now — you're not carrying a gun or a knife or anything, are you? I raised my hands very slowly and said no, sir, I'm clean. He put the gun back down on the seat beside him, where he could reach it quickly if he needed to. After a few minutes I managed to explain who I was and what I was doing, and we rode on together perfectly amiably for an hour or two until his exit. I made it the rest of the way to Birmingham thanks to an eighteen-wheeler. The driver's name was Jack, and by the time we reached town we were lifelong friends.
That is a road trip I remember. It does not come close to the one Dr. Luke records for us this morning.
Here is the setting, for anybody who does not know the Easter story. It is the same day Jesus rose — by our calendar, a Sunday, April 5th, in the year we call 33. Two of his followers are walking the seven miles from Jerusalem out to a village called Emmaus, and they are talking about nothing else. Jesus of Nazareth died on Friday afternoon in one world and rose on Sunday morning into a completely different one, and everything is different now, because he lives. The power of sin is broken. Death is defeated.
A man falls in beside them on the road and asks what they are discussing, and they stop walking and stand there looking sad. Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know what has happened? And then this, which is the saddest line in the chapter: we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.
And he says to them, oh foolish ones, slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken — and beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interprets to them everything in the Scriptures concerning himself.
Scholars count something like forty-eight major messianic prophecies. We will not do all forty-eight. Consider two.
A thousand years before Christ, David writes in Psalm 22 that they pierced my hands and my feet, they divided my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots. Matthew 27: when they had crucified him, they divided his garments among them by casting lots.
Around 750 BC, the prophet Amos: on that day I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight. Matthew 27: from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth.
Lee Strobel was an investigative reporter at the Chicago Tribune and a hard-drinking atheist when something terrible happened to him: his wife became a Christian. So he did what he knew how to do and investigated the death of Jesus of Nazareth the way he would work any other murder. To his horror, the prophecies and the historical facts lined up.
In his book he interviews Louis Lapides, an Old Testament scholar and pastor, and asks whether one man could have fulfilled all of this by accident. Not a chance, Lapides says. The odds against any one person fulfilling just eight of these prophecies are one in a hundred million billion. Picture it this way. Cover the state of Texas in silver dollars — a hundred million billion of them would lie two feet deep across the whole state. Mark one of them. Now blindfold a man, turn him loose, and let him wander until he decides to bend down and pick up a single coin.
For the skeptics among us — and you are welcome here — I would ask only this. Do you have enough skepticism in you to be skeptical about your own skepticism? Can you honestly challenge your own doubts?
Because he lives, everything has changed. Because Jesus suffered, our suffering has meaning. Because he submitted to the judgment of men, we can stand before the judgment of God. Because he endured death, we have life.
And now, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story.
The two of them reach the village, and he acts as though he is going further, and they will not have it — stay with us, it is nearly evening and the day is almost gone. So he goes in. And when he is at the table with them he takes the bread, and blesses it, and breaks it, and hands it to them. And their eyes are opened, and they know him. And he is gone.
Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road?
They got up that same hour — seven miles, at night, after walking it once already — and went back to Jerusalem to tell the others how he had been known to them in the breaking of the bread.
That is the road trip to end all road trips.
