As we walk through the Christian year together, each season will be accompanied by a guiding question – a question to wrestle with, pray through, and bring to God. During the season of Easter, as we celebrate and practice resurrection, we’re asking together: “What are we seeing come alive?”

On the road to Emmaus, Jesus helps the two disciples unlearn and relearn the entire Bible through Him. What’s one way you’ve come to see the Scriptures differently as you’ve grown to see them through Jesus?

In the end of our story, the two disciples recognize Jesus during an ordinary moment – the breaking of bread. Talk about a way you’ve experienced the presence of the risen Christ in something seemingly ordinary.

Now that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem. They were talking with each other about everything that had happened. As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them; but they were kept from recognizing him.

Luke 24:13-16 NIV

He asked them, “What are you discussing together as you walk along?” They stood still, their faces downcast. One of them, named Cleopas, asked him, “Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?” “What things?” he asked. “About Jesus of Nazareth,” they replied. “He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people. The chief priests and our rulers handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him; but we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel.

Luke 24:17-21a NIV, emphasis added

Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?

Acts 1:6b NIV

Jesus meets us where we actually are – not where we think we should be.

“I suggest…that our life of faith consists in moving with God in terms of: (a) being securely oriented; (b) being painfully disoriented; and (c) being surprisingly reoriented.”

— Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms

God is not nostalgic.

He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

Luke 24:25-27 NIV, emphasis added

“For all of us, there will come times when everything that is precious to us religiously will get crucified, and we will find ourselves, discouraged, shattered religiously, and tempted to walk towards some place of consolation. God, Christ, and church will still be very much alive in our lives, but we will not be able to recognize them because our eyes and hearts will have been trained to see God, Christ, and church only in the way that they were integrated into our lives before this crisis beset us. But as the mystics say, this is not a crisis of faith, but a crisis of the imagination, a particular dark night of the soul within which we have to sort through a death of which is precious to us religiously so as to receive God, Christ and church into our lives in a new and deeper way.”

— Ronald Rolheiser, Sacred Fire

Jesus is enough.

As they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus continued on as if he were going farther. But they urged him strongly, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. They asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”

Luke 24:28-32 NIV