Christ Meeting with Doubters.
The story of the two disciples going to the village of Emmaus is the one which men in later ages have most connected with their own experiences; the one which has done most to bridge over the chasm between them and those who saw and handled the Word of Life. They have been sure that it was written to tell them that this Word of Life is not far from any one of them; that it is their fault and not His if they do not hear His voice and follow Him.
I. "While they communed together and reasoned, Jesus Himself drew near and went with them." The Evangelist says nothing to heighten the effect of the meeting; not a word to make us feel that this was a new occurrence in the world's history an occurrence which would scarcely ever be repeated. And why not? Because, I apprehend, it did not strike St. Luke as a new occurrence, or one which would be rarely repeated. He accepted the coming of this Stranger to these disciples as a sign of that which had been continually taking place, when two men walking near Jerusalem, or walking anywhere else, had communed together and reasoned. "Where two or three are gathered together in My Name, there am I in the midst of them."
II. "He took bread and blessed it," etc. If you ask whether His breaking of bread in that cottage was a sacramental act, I should answer that I conceive no act of Christ can be anything else. Was it not a pledge of His stooping to men, of His union with men, of His dominion over men? But if the question is, whether this breaking of bread was like that to which we are invited, who may communicate in a completed sacrifice, who may draw nigh to God through an ascended High Priest? I answer, Christ Himself spoke of His departure to the Father as the beginning of all highest knowledge, as the opening of such a converse between earth and heaven as never could be possible whilst He was tarrying with them. It is therefore, I maintain, that we are guilty of strange faithlessness and ingratitude when we estimate our position as worse than that of those who saw Him before the Passion, or in the forty days' after the Resurrection. It must be better and grander. Christ reveals Himself not to one here and there: He is proclaimed as the universal King, as the universal Sacrifice. As such we are permitted to receive Him. As such we are permitted to declare Him to the world.
F. D. Maurice, Sermons,vol. vi., p. 33.
References: Luke 24:30; Luke 24:31. A. Maclaren, Christian World Pulpit,vol. i., p. 9; E. Blencowe, Plain Sermons to a Country Congregation,p. 229. Luke 24:31. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xii., No. 681; H. W. Beecher, Sermons,1st series, p. 396.