Summary
The story of Jesus appearing to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus sheds light on the necessity of suffering and its use in the plan of salvation. At the tail end of the story of salvation history, Jesus gives us the Eucharist as an antidote to sin that Adam and Eve brought about through eating the forbidden fruit.
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Reflective Study Guide Questions
“Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and enter into his glory?”
Lk. 24:26.
1. When Jesus appeared to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, they did not recognize Him. How can you work on recognizing Jesus in places or situations where He doesn’t seem to be?
2. After Jesus rose from the dead, His glorified Body still bore the wounds of the Cross. But His wounds were now glorified. What are some wounds that you carry that you can ask Jesus to glorify?
3. The story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus contrasts with the story of Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve’s eyes were opened to sin and death when they ate the forbidden fruit. But the two disciples’ eyes are opened to salvation when they eat the antidote of Original Sin, the Eucharist. How can you make better use of Eucharist in your life as an antidote to sin?
4. We can see through the story of salvation history that God is a God of reason and order. He wants our lives to be ordered and happy. How can you work on turning to Him when your life is chaotic?
Text: The Question of Suffering & Redemption in our Faith
Well, hello everybody, my name is Scott Powell and I want to welcome you to the Pray More Lenten Retreat. I am a teacher and theologian, I teach at a Catholic seminary here, and I run an apostolate with my wife called Camp Wojtyla. And I’m so excited to share a little bit with you today about the question of suffering and redemption, which is a really, really hard question.
Opening Prayer
So before we do that Let’s open with a prayer. In the name of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit. Amen Jesus, thank you so much for the gift of this retreat Thank you for all of the people who are listening and watching And we pray that you help us as we enter into this Lenten season. Help us follow closely after you help us carry our crosses, give us the grace, uh, to understand who we are and what it means to live the lives that you’ve called us to.
We pray that, uh, you would be in my words. Let me not say anything outside of your will. And we pray all these things through your Holy name. Amen. In the name of the father and of the son of the Holy spirit. Amen.
The Story Of Salvation History
All right, so one of my favorite passages in the whole Bible comes from the end of the gospel of Luke. And it’s a story that you’ve probably heard before, perhaps it gets read in mass periodically, but it’s the story of the road to Emmaus. And if you remember this, this is coming at the tail end of really the whole story of Scripture, right? The story of salvation history. It’s not the end of the Bible, of course, but it really is the end of the gospel narrative.
Now, there’s another gospel account of John, which is his perspective on the same story. There’s Acts of the Apostles, which is what the church does about all of this. And then there’s all of the letters and epistles, which is really commentary on salvation history. And then Revelation, where we get a little insight into what is yet to come.
But for all intents and purposes, the end of this gospel, the end of the gospels in general, is the tail end of the story of salvation history, what God is doing in the world. And at the end of the story of salvation history, Jesus has risen from the dead. This is a fascinating story, right? It’s the day of the resurrection when we drop into this narrative.
Jesus has risen from the dead. And nobody actually knows about it yet. There’s some women who went to the tomb, they found it empty, there’s speculation, people are wondering, they’re guessing where Jesus is. Nobody really knows what’s going on. It’s a totally fascinating moment in the history of the universe because God has flipped creation upside down.
He’s conquered down death by death. He’s redeemed all of us with his blood. He’s risen from the dead for pete’s sake. And nobody knows it, nobody knows that the world has been transformed and Jesus chooses in this really unique moment to go on a walk. He accompanies two disciples. We don’t know exactly who they are.
Jesus’ Walk With the Two Disciples
One’s named Cleopas. We don’t know who the other one is. But he decides to take a seven mile walk with these two people and unpack the scriptures. And we’re told that as Jesus goes with them and accompanies them, they don’t recognize him. These are followers of Jesus. They’re leaving Jerusalem because they’ve been disappointed, they’re let down. They’ve been hurt by what’s happened there. And they’ve given up hope. And Jesus goes near and walks with them. And he asks them, Why are you troubled? What’s going on? What are you talking about? And they, it says, they stood still and they looked sad because they were so disappointed. And they said, Are you the only one who doesn’t know what has happened in Jerusalem in these days?
And Jesus, I think it’s hilarious. He chooses to mess with them. And he’s like, no, what, what things? And they’re like, well, Jesus of Nazareth, he was a prophet, mighty indeed. And word before God and all the people and our chief priests, they delivered him up to be condemned to death and they crucified him and they killed him.
But now it’s been three days and we’re going home. We thought he was the one to redeem Israel, but now we have no hope left. And so Jesus walks with them. And what we’re told is Jesus. points out that they don’t understand the story. Their suffering isn’t meaningless. The suffering of Jesus, the suffering of the Messiah that they have not seen the other side of.
He says this isn’t meaningless. And he goes through and he unpacks in the scriptures all of the things concerning himself. But before he says that, he says, this is chapter 24, verse 20, chapter 24, verse 26. He says, was it not necessary? That the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory.
And then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all of the scriptures the things concerning himself, so everything. And then we’re told at the end of this walk, he goes in and he sits at table with them, and it sure sounds like he shares the Eucharist with them. And their eyes are opened and they get it.
Did Jesus Have to Die?
And they have to run back to Jerusalem to tell everybody what they’ve heard and what they’ve seen and what they’ve experienced. But there’s a haunting line in there that I think is really important. Jesus says “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things?” Was it not necessary? Why is it that Jesus had to suffer? Why did he have to die?
You know Ancient thinkers and saints and fathers and mothers of the church, they’ve debated the reality of this question. Did Jesus have to die? Did he have to suffer? And there’s some ancient saints who were really convinced that all Jesus really needed to do to save us, all God had to do was simply to take on human flesh.
That was enough to redeem us. And we know, of course, that God is God. God can do whatever he wants to. God can do anything. So why did he have to suffer? Why did he have to die? And I think the question of, did he have to, I think it’s the wrong question. I think the question more is why is it appropriate that Jesus suffered this way?
Because that’s the reality. God is God. God is beyond me. I don’t know what God had to or didn’t have to do. That’s a question that’s far too deep for a frail human mind like me. But what I do know is that the reality of humanity, the reality of all of the people around us, the reality of every human being in the history of humanity, It’s actually been one of suffering.
There’s always been hurt. There’s always been broken heartedness. There’s always been tears. There’s always been pain. And so many religions in the history of the world have promised gods that eradicate all those things that are far beyond those things or bigger than those things. And oftentimes in modernity, there’s been promises in religion that, well, if you just follow these steps or if you just worship in this way, then you’ll be happy.
Then you won’t have to suffer anymore. That’s not Christianity, that’s never what the church has promised. The only promise that Jesus makes, I mean, one of the promises that Jesus makes definitively is that if you follow me, he doesn’t say, if you follow me, you’ll be happy. I hope we are if we follow him, but he says definitively, if you follow me, you’re going to have to take up your cross, right?
Because that’s appropriate. And what I love about. The church. What I love about Christianity, about Catholicism is that the church is not afraid of suffering. I love that we have a God who is not scared of suffering. We have a God who is completely willing to enter headlong into all of the messiness of humanity.
To take it upon himself, to then go to the cross, to bring it to its total, to bring love, love, to its complete fulfillment. Love is a total self-gift. And where does that self-gift logically go? The self-gift of love leads logically to the giving of everything, which is what Jesus does. God is not afraid of your suffering.
God is not afraid of your brokenness. God is not afraid of your baggage, the background, the things that you’ve done in the past that have hurt you and hurt other people. He’s not afraid of any of that. In fact, he loves the world so much that he’s willing to take it all upon himself. Now here’s the thing.
The Importance of Suffering
That’s good news, by the way. And that’s actually, at the end of the day, I think if nothing else, that’s why I’m a Christian. That’s why I follow Jesus, because I believe in a God that’s not afraid of our suffering. You know, after this scene with these two disciples on the road to Emmaus, it says that he then appears to the apostles, to the rest of the church back in Jerusalem.
And one of the things that they’re scared, they’re shocked, they don’t know what’s going on. They think he’s a ghost at first. And what Jesus does is shows them the wounds in his hands and his feet and his side. And I think that’s really telling, and that teaches us something else about the nature of suffering and our redemption.
What it teaches us is that When Jesus, now think about this. Jesus, when he was on that road to Emmaus with these disciples, he is resurrected, he’s conquered death. The one thing that’s going to get all of us in the end. Jesus has conquered. He’s back from the dead. That’s unbelievable. And it’s so glorious that these people don’t even recognize him.
He’s in his glorified body. And they don’t even know, I mean, this is a person that these two have followed. They don’t recognize Jesus for the glory of the resurrection. But in the glory of his resurrection, when he appears to the rest of the church a little bit later on, he shows them the wounds. Again, if I, if I was given the chance to design the perfect glorified human body, you know, I’d be a little bit taller, I’d be a little bit more muscular and built, you know, I’d have a bigger six pack.
There’s a lot of things I would do. What I would not do was leave big gaping wounds in my flesh. That doesn’t seem right. That seems kind of weird. But that again teaches us something about the nature of suffering and what God thinks about it. Is that in the resurrection, Jesus doesn’t wipe away all of our pain.
He doesn’t wipe away the suffering. He doesn’t pretend that the cross didn’t happen. He doesn’t ignore Good Friday. Rather, he takes the wounds of Good Friday, and he keeps them. He retains them to show that when we give ourselves to God, when we follow after Jesus, when we give ourselves to the church, it’s not going to eradicate all of our suffering.
It’s not going to wipe it away and ask us to pretend that it never happened. It’s going to say, like Jesus does, these wounds that I carry with me. They’re not something that I want to forget about. They’re something that I have glorified. God’s not going to take your suffering and just wipe it away. God, if you let him, can take your suffering and make it into something glorious.
This is why we hang crosses from our neck, why we, you know, hang them at the ends of rosaries and put them from the rear view mirrors of our cars. A cross. is just an ancient, brutal torture device. It’s like hanging a little electric chair from your neck. That’s a weird thing to do. Unless Jesus has taken suffering and transformed it, flipped it upside down and made it something not painful strictly anymore, but something glorious.
And again for my money that’s really good news because I don’t want to follow a God that just asked me to pretend that suffering isn’t real that asked me to pretend that if I follow him and I Check these boxes, they don’t have to worry about anything anymore.
I want a God who’s honest with me I want a God who understands the reality of our suffering enters into it and then says that suffering doesn’t have to be the end. You know, the reason God comes in the first place, this goes back to the whole theology of the incarnation, and this is really challenging.
So I mentioned that that story of the road to Emmaus I mentioned to you, it is the tail end of salvation history, right? What’s at the front end? At the front end of salvation history, so the story essentially brings to a wrap in the form of these two people walking on a road Who at the end of this walk, they eat something.
It says they sat at table with Jesus and Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it the Eucharistic formula for Luke. And then they eat it, which I think is the Eucharist. And it says their eyes are opened. Do you all remember the first time in the Bible where it says someone ate something? It’s actually the very beginning.
It’s Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the very outset of creation. They eat what they were asked not to eat. The fruit that hung from a tree that said, this is for God alone. Because if you eat this fruit, you will make yourselves gods. You will choose to arbitrate for yourself what is good and evil, what is right or wrong.
And that’s not for us to decide, that’s God’s alone. But out of fear, or pride, or some combination, Adam and Eve, our first mom and dad, they eat the fruit. Because they’re scared and they’re prideful and a whole bunch of other stuff. They eat the fruit and it says their eyes are opened. Not to their god likeness, as the serpent promised.
Their eyes were opened to suffering, to death, to corruption, to chaos, to shame, to nakedness, to the sword, to all of the stuff that we experience in our human lives. At the other end of the story we have two more people. Who eats something, and what, their eyes are opened, what, to the antidote, to the antidotes for suffering, the antidote for death, the antidote for all the tears that we shed, all of our sinfulness, all of our brokenness.
It’s Jesus body broken in sacrifice, you know, the only antidote for suffering. Is in a certain sense to throw oneself headlong into suffering the only way to deal with this giant elephant in the room of humanity from the beginning of the story is for the only one who can actually deal with it God himself to face it head on.
Only God Can Fix It
Now, here’s the thing last thing I’ll say. Why did God had to have to suffer? Again, I don’t like that question, but I do think there’s an appropriateness to it. Now, I heard this from a professor of mine long ago, many years in school, as he was trying to understand, help us understand to students why this matters and how this makes sense.
God is perfect. God is the perfect father. I’m a father. I’ve got three kiddos. And, my kids, they have made their share of mistakes, I have gotten mad at them, there’s things that have consequences, this is just the way it works, but check this analogy out and see if, see if you track with this. Say one of my kids, um, my kids are, are getting older now, but when they were really little, I don’t want to make any statements about my kids.
My kids are, they have been crazy. They have had their moments, right? So imagine a little kid gets in their parents car and is like messing around and accidentally puts it in gear and the car kind of scoots down out of the driveway and smashes into another car. Hopefully the kid’s okay. Hopefully there’s, you know, nobody’s hurt or anything.
But what do you have? You have a car that’s wrecked. Now, you know, say my kid’s 7 years old or something like that. A 7 year old has no ability to fix that problem. They can’t repair the car. They’re 7 years old for pete’s sake, right? I have the ability as a father, even a broken, flawed father, I have the ability to forgive and forget.
I could say, you know what? It was a mistake. It was an accident. You’re obviously sorry. We’ll just forget about it. I can look the other way and I can forgive my child. I have that ability. And I’ve always thought, isn’t it strange then, why can’t God just do that? Adam and Eve sinned. They broke trust with God.
They did what they should not have done. They crashed the car. Why couldn’t God, who’s the perfect father, simply forgive them? Well, of course he could, because he’s the perfect father. However, here’s the problem. In the analogy, if I forgive my kid, which is appropriate, that’s fine. I still have a broken car.
I still have a car that’s wrecked, which means there’s something in our life and our family structure that’s out of whack. Something is out of order, right? God is a God of order. He’s a God of perfection. He’s a God of beauty and of things making sense. He’s a reasonable God. And so original sin puts a rupture in the cosmos.
It ruptures us. It breaks us. Because relationships get damaged, right? It breaks the whole cosmos. It great, it breaks nature. It breaks relationships. Something is broken. And so a God who is a God of reason and order, there’s something kind of inappropriate about God just looking the other way and pretending it didn’t happen.
Because something’s out of whack in the cosmos. But here’s the problem. We are, in our humanity compared to God, We’re seven year olds. We’re just little, tiny things. That’s not even an appropriate analogy because of how much bigger God is. But just like my seven year old can’t really do anything to fix what they broke, so too, it’s really hard for human beings to break a brokenness that we’ve committed before God.
Because He’s so far beyond us. But the problem with God looking the other way is that there’s still a responsibility. Human beings have really done something. So if a human being broke something, it’s appropriate that that human being make it right. But what if that human being is incapable of making it right?
Well, what do I have to do as a father if I want to set my familial world back in order? I’ve got to suck it up and I’ve got to pay for the car. I’ve got to take it out of my own money. I can’t just make my seven year old pay for it because that’s untenable. That doesn’t really make sense if I don’t want my car to stay broken for 10 more years.
So I have to suck it up and I have to take it upon myself. I have to step into that child’s place. To act on their behalf, to do a kind of suffering, to take it out of our bank account, whatever it is, and fix the car. Again, it’s an analogy, so analogies break down. But in the brokenness between God and humanity, what do you do?
If humanity caused a break in the universe that’s too big for us to fix, then the only one who can fix it is God. But it’s our brokenness, it’s something we did. So how do you actually bring order back? The only way to bring order back is for God To take on humanity. And go to the fullest extent of sacrifice and love to make right on behalf of humanity, on the part of humanity, what was made wrong before God.
God becomes a human being to make human beings back like God, back in right relationship with God. And so Jesus makes himself. Into a sacrifice he sheds himself. He gives himself because it’s the only way it’s not that we have this God Who’s the father up in heaven sitting on his throne just demanding somebody’s got to pay I need blood That is not the God we believe in you guys.
Some of us have been taught that that’s our God that God’s just angry He needs somebody’s blood. Somebody’s got to pay. No, no God is a God who loves us. God is a God of order. And God is a God who wants things made right, but also loves us and knows us enough to know that we can’t do it ourselves. So he takes on flesh, he becomes us so that we can be made right before God.
You guys, this is a huge concept. Why is this necessary? Why is it important? It’s important for a lot of reasons. It shows us that God loves us. It shows us that God is reasonable. It shows us that God actually wants order. He doesn’t love it when our lives are totally out of whack.
He wants us to be ordered and happy, but he also wants to be really honest with us about the reality of suffering. That life hurts. Life is a struggle. And one of the things that really brought me back to my Catholic faith when I was kind of confused and began to wander away was recognizing that it’s really only the church who keeps Jesus, his body on the cross.
God is Not Afraid of Suffering
You know, in many of my Protestant circles, they don’t like to put Jesus’s body on the cross because it really emphasizes Uh, Good Friday over Easter Sunday. But Good Friday is important, you guys. Because so much of our life looks like Good Friday. If we’re honest with ourselves and we recognize how real that is.
God’s not afraid of your suffering. God’s not afraid of your brokenness. God’s not afraid of the pain you feel, and the hurt that you’ve experienced. He wants to take it upon Himself, not to wash it away, not to pretend it doesn’t exist, but to make it into something glorious. That’s why He keeps the wounds.
That’s why we look to the cross. That’s how we know He loves us. Y’all, thanks so much for listening. Thanks for being with us. I hope the Lord blesses your retreat. In this time of Lent, and let’s close in a prayer.
Closing Prayer
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
About Dr. Scott Powell
Dr. Scott Powell is a teacher, theologian and author. Currently, he serves as Assistant Professor of Theology at the St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver. Scott and his wife, Annie, founded and direct Camp Wojtyla, a Catholic outdoor adventure program for youth based in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. He holds a doctorate in Catholic Studies from Liverpool Hope University in England, and has authored a number of books, articles and book chapters on topics of theology, the Bible, and ecology, as well as Catholic culture and its relationship to the modern world. Scott has also appeared in numerous Catholic productions, including “Symbolon,” “Beloved,” “Reborn,” “YDisciple” and the “Opening the Word” series. He has been featured on EWTN, “Catholic Answers Live” and several other outlets. For nine years he co-hosted the popular podcast “The Word on the Hill with the Lanky Guys,” and currently hosts the podcast, “Sunday School, a Pillar Bible Study”. Scott and his wife live near Boulder, Colorado with their three children: Lily Avila, Samuel Isaac, and Evelyn Luca.