The road to Emmaus

Ian Hunter:

Easter Week is the most holy week of the Christian calendar. The traditional exposition of the passion of Christ has two foci: one, on the hill called Golgotha where Jesus was crucified under a hand-lettered sign whose superscription (“This is the king of the Jews”) was intended by Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor who wrote it, to be ironic; second, on the tomb discovered empty by the disciples on Easter morning, the stone rolled away, the inhabitant gone, the empty tomb a symbol of Christ’s victory over death and the climax of God’s redemptive drama.

But I like to think that the biblical penchant for threes (think of the Trinity, the three Magi, etc) is also in the Easter narrative if you look closely. In Luke’s Gospel, we find the third focus of Easter, and an unlikely one it is: a parched and dusty stretch of road running from the city of Jerusalem to the insignificant village of Emmaus.

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