Mark 8:31-33

The first announcement of the Passion: The vanishing of Christ did not fill the hearts of these two men with new sorrow and fear. They had the blessed remembrance of the words of Jesus which He had spoken to them on the way. Full of eager happiness they exchanged confidences on their experience. It is an expressive word: their hearts had been burning within them. "Their heart began to burn while the Stranger expounded Scripture, and kept burning, and burning up into ever clearer flame, as He went on. " In His discourse on the way the Lord had thoroughly opened to them the Scriptures. They now realized that the prophecies of old had been to them a sealed and hidden book. But now it had been opened to them, now they comprehended some of its wonderful treasures and beauties. This is always the effect of the words of Christ. When we are sad and weak, when we are longing for consolation and thereupon hear the Word of the Lord with all eagerness, then our heart will be warmed with the comfort of the salvation and the forgiveness of sins, and our faith, which was at the point of extinction, is once more enlivened to the brightness of a rich flame. For the risen Christ is in and with His Word. It is the living Christ who impresses the Word of the Gospel into our hearts and seals the comfort of the atonement through the blood of Christ in our hearts. The joy of these men did not permit them to rest at Emmaus. Though it must have been after six o'clock then, they arose from their meal at once; they hurried back to Jerusalem; they felt constrained to bring the good news to the others. And for the moment they found everybody happy. The apostles and disciples were all gathered together into one place, and they were met with the information that the Lord had risen indeed and had appeared to Simon. Sometime in the course of the day Jesus had met Peter, probably to reassure the deeply penitent apostle of His forgiveness. But the two disciples from Emmaus were not sorry that someone had forestalled them in bringing the happy news. For this would prove a welcome confirmation of their own experience, and the others would be only too glad to hear their story and thus to receive further assurance. It was unfortunate that the old doubts soon returned into the hearts of most of the disciples, as Mark is obliged to state. Christians must not depend too strongly upon moments of exaltation in their spiritual life. We cannot always be on the mountain peaks in our Christian experience, but must now and then descend into the valleys. But His Word is with us even in the valley of the shadow of death.