"But We had Hoped"

I am leaving the house for a walk… it’s been a long day, and I have to get out for a while. Do you want to come too? It might do us both some good.
We step into the cool evening air and start down a gravel road. The sun is sinking lower… I look up at its diminishing rays and wonder if it’s the sun or my heart that is going down. A heaviness, like a weight, in the pit of my stomach slows my steps, as I remember again. Why did things have to turn out this way? I had so many hopes, so many dreams…so many things have turned out differently than I thought they would.
As we walk we talk…about the way things were before the walls collapsed and the bottom fell out on all our plans and dreams. Were we deceived all along? Wasn’t all we had believed in good…and safe? What had happened? And how do you say goodbye to the things you have built your life around but that have disintegrated before your eyes in a moment? Unspoken expectations and hopes now dashed fill my heart like bitter waters and, weary of crying, tears won’t come and all we can do is plod forward, trying to understand. If all we had believed in is gone, what is there left to believe in?
We had hoped.
Our hopes had been crushed.
Where do we go from here?


I imagine this scene is one we could all identify with…our own journey down the road to Emmaus. Perhaps not feeling the agony of crushed dreams of the long-awaited Savior…but the agony of our own disappointed expectations. When, on the 3rd day after Jesus' death, the two disciples walked the long dusty road to Emmaus, full of the questions that follow broken dreams, a stranger met them and began to walk alongside. “What are you talking about?” He asked kindly, opening the conversation. One replied, probably a little indignantly, “Are you the only man in Jerusalem who doesn’t know the things that have been going on the past few days?!” The impact of current events on these two men’s personal lives is evident in the question. It’s as if he’s saying, “This is the greatest event in our lives…how can you not know what we‘re talking about?!” The stranger probed a bit further, “What things?” He wanted to know…to hear them say it…to hear them voice the struggle they were feeling. To this they replied, “Concerning Jesus who was a mighty prophet in all ways before God and the people, and how he was delivered to the Jews and crucified…” Here I can imagine that the speaker paused for a brief moment…perhaps gazing longingly into the distance, or dropping his gaze to the ground, the potent epitaph of their lost dreams echoing in the next words, “But we had hoped…that He was the One to redeem Israel.”
But we had hoped.
Had hoped.
Had dared to dream, to believe, to place confidence and security in something great and beautiful and powerful. But dreams seemed to have failed. Confidence broken and security shaken as the man they had pinned their hopes and dreams on had been taken...and killed. Besides this, their last hope, that He would rise again on the 3rd day as He had spoken of, was now fading with the setting sun. The 3rd day had come, and was nearly gone. He had not appeared. All that was left was the winding road, an ignorant stranger, and two men bearing the burden of “we had hoped”.

(How many times have you walked the road to Emmaus? Have you ever come to the end of your confidences, your dreams, your expectations…and in a gaping hole of disbelief…found them unfulfilled?)

The road to Emmaus wasn't the end of the journey however...in fact it was only a bridge. At one end lay Jeruselem, the place where their dreams had been laid to rest with the body of Jesus Christ...at the other end was Emmaus, the village in which their greatest hopes were restored. I smile as I read the end of the story…how the “ignorant” stranger listened to the hearts of two men who loved him the most; how He joined them in their journey away from the scene of so much disappiontment and loss, and talked with them about this man Jesus and all that had led up to His life and death; how He tested them at Emmaus and was welcomed into their company rather than allowed to continue on. It was the Greatest Hope of eternity who journeyed with two men who walked into the sunset of everything they had pinned their hopes and dreams on, and at last revealed himself to them for Who He was.
Imagine the feeling of life that must have sprung into their breasts as they realized; struggled to grasp, to believe, that it was real…that this man really was the answer to all their questions after all…that Jesus was alive…that their greatest hopes had been realized.
Life is painful and brutal in its realities… much does not go as “we had hoped”. Much is lost to the chasm of broken expectations and shattered dreams. I have walked the road to Emmaus many times…wishing that out of nowhere, the hopes I feel were dashed, were actually as close and as fulfilled as the presence of Jesus was to those two men that day so long ago. They aren’t always. And it makes me wonder what my hopes are really placed in. Where does my confidence lie? What is the “thing that I long for”? What is my “refuge”, my security? I have learned that when my greatest, deepest, most consuming hopes are placed in things…in people…in possessions…in personal aspirations…and are injured or crushed…that I walk the road to Emmaus alone. “We had hoped” remains.

The road to Emmaus is never lonely, however, when my greatest expectation is in Christ, when my deepest hopes and dreams are ultimately in Him. Here, even when it looks like they will still be lost, or crushed beyond repair…I find Him often, maybe even as late as sunset, joining me on the journey as the perfect, faithful, dependable fulfillment of everything I truly long for.
Things do not always turn out as we had hoped. But when our greatest hope is in Christ, we will survive even the greatest disappointments…finding in them, somehow, a supernatural strength that allows us to rest in something greater than the here and now: the promises and expectation of a saving Father who never, ever deserts us in our hour of need. May we declare of God as the psalmist did, “Thou art my hope [my binding cord; the thing that I long for].”
But we had hoped.
Hoped.
Hope. Dare to place it all in the Stranger on the road to Emmaus.