We had hoped

It is the third day, and two disciples are walking away from Jerusalem, away from the wreckage of everything they believed. A stranger falls into step beside them on the Emmaus road and asks why they are downcast, and they pour out their grief in three of the saddest words in the Gospels. We had hoped. We had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel, but they crucified him, and the women's report of an empty tomb has only deepened the confusion. The redemption they staked their lives on is, as far as they can see, simply over.

Here is the ache underneath the scene. They are so blinded by the death of their hope that they do not recognize the risen Jesus beside them, the very one they grieve, explaining from Moses and all the prophets how it had to be this way. He is present the entire time, and they cannot see Him through their disappointment. Only later, at the table, when He takes the bread and breaks it, do their eyes open, and He vanishes from sight. And in the same breath they realize what they had missed: their hearts had been burning within them the whole way, while He opened the Scriptures on the road.

We had hoped is the native language of disorientation. The prayer that was not answered. The future you had already furnished in your mind, now dismantled. The redemption that did not come, or did not come the way you were certain it would. To say we had hoped is to walk a road away from a Jerusalem where your expectation died.

But look at where Christ is in this story. He is not waiting back in the city for the disciples to get their faith together. He is on the road, in the middle of the disappointment, walking at their side, unrecognized, doing the patient work of reopening the Scriptures to grief-dulled hearts. That is the comfort hidden in the scene, and it may be hidden in yours. The risen Christ has a way of being nearest in the very we-had-hoped where He seems most absent. Your task on the disorienting road is not to manufacture recognition. It is to keep walking, and to keep breaking bread, until your eyes are opened and you realize He was there the whole time.