Nail it down: the walk from Emmaus involves the cross. Nothing, absolutely nothing, reveals the heart of God, as does the cross.
I shared in a wedding recently back in Memphis — Ashley Bourland's. Ashley was a flower girl in our daughter Kim's wedding years ago. We have shared with the family during her growing up years as she has become an ardent Christian. Her parents Don and Paula are among our dearest friends. They gave us a beautiful wrought iron cross — about 24 inches high with a 12-inch cross-beam. At the center of the cross is a medallion on which is written these words: "When Jesus was on the cross, we were on His mind."
Advertisement
"Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer?" Jesus asked Cleopas and his companion on the road to Emmaus. And now, in the room back in Jerusalem, he reminded them, "It is written that the Messiah is to suffer."
This is our salvation — we claim it and we celebrate it. But I have a challenging word: if at Emmaus we have claimed and affirmed our salvation through the cross, then our walk from Emmaus involves our taking up the cross. Let me say that again. The walk from Emmaus involves our taking up the cross. Paul knew this. He was a man of one passion — to know Christ. And he knew that knowing Christ involved the cross for himself. Do you remember that radical expression of the deep, deep passion of his life — Philippians 3:10: "I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in His suffering, becoming like Him in His death." This was such a radical part of Paul's life that he never ceased talking about it. He wrote to the Colossians, "Now I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, which is the church." It's a strange and somewhat confusing word. Some may charge Paul with thinking that somehow Christ's suffering was insufficient for human sin, and that he had to do something about that. That's not the issue at all.
There is nothing deficient in Christ's self-offering as a reconciling act — nothing at all. What Paul is expressing is what he sought to live out as the deepest desire of his life — to join in the fellowship of Christ's suffering. He was calling for the pattern of Christ's own saving work to be incorporated in the life of every Christian — that we would reproduce that kind of passion, that willingness to suffer, to give ourselves in a cross-style of life.
Frances de Sales, one of the saints with whom I've kept company through the years, has a memorable passage about our relationship to the cross. Listen to him:
Kiss frequently the crosses which the Lord sends you . . . without regarding of what sort they may be . . .