They say that hindsight is always what? 20/20. And of course we say that, or we get accused of that, because it’s about wrong decisions we might have made, or if we had known all the information at the time we might have done something different. It’s one of those phrases that helps us remember that we gain wisdom because of bad decisions and we make bad decisions because we lack wisdom. And yet, what the phrase also reminds us, although used less often this way, is the way we only see things once we have looked back at them, the things we missed noticing along the way. Or it’s the way we change the story and reevaluate everything based on what something led to it. And so we have to understand that that is what the early disciples and the early church did. The gospels are not autobiographies of Jesus, and they were not written at the time, but are stories look backing through the cross, and more importantly through Easter. They look back to the things that had taken place, things they had missed all along, and saw it in a new light, the things that they didn’t realize, the things they had overlooked and didn’t understand and but do now, because of Easter. It reveals how God had been involved, but they didn’t know. Their hindsight made all the difference in understanding and telling the story of Christ.
We see the same thing is true in the story from Luke. Cleopas, who seems to be associated with the disciples in some way, although we don’t know how, because he is never mentioned before, and never mentioned again, and another unnamed man are walking to Emmaus. We’re told that Emmaus is about 7 miles away from Jerusalem, although it actually says its 60 stadia away, but I’m sure none of you know how long a stadia is, and I had to look it up; it’s 600 roman feet, although I have no idea how long a roman foot is. But that’s what our best manuscripts say, but other manuscripts read 160 stadia, which is about 19.5 miles. Now, since they walk both there and back in one day, most scholars are in agreement that the 7 miles is probably the better number, but they are still guessing, because we don’t actually know where Emmaus is, as there was no town of that name in 1st century Palestine. So, we have two ordinary men, going to an ordinary town, of which we know nothing about. My interpretation is that this vagueness for details is so that it is much easier to put ourselves into the story. We could be the unnamed traveler, and the unknown town we are going to could be our own home.
