Dejection
“They stood still, their faces downcast.” (Luke 24:17b)
Jesus’s disciples have experienced a wide range of human emotion over the past week. Rejoicing at Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Becoming increasingly more confused by His failure to act like the savior they thought He was going to be. Crushed with disappointment and paralyzed by fear at His violent death.
No wonder the two disciples that Jesus meets on the road to Emmaus are downcast, dejected, disappointed, and heart-broken. How could they possibly be otherwise?
But by contrast, Jesus has every reason to feel joyful, hopeful, ecstatic, and every other positive word imaginable. The relief that He must have been feeling to be past the pain and shame of the cross. To have completed the world’s most important and most difficult work—to absolute perfection.
The two disciples that Jesus meets on the road are still downcast only because they don’t understand what He has done. So, Jesus explains it to them. How everything has happened exactly as it had been planned by God from the very beginning.
With this explanation from Jesus—whom they finally recognize—the two disciples become as joyful and as hopeful as Him. Despite the late hour, their weary bodies, and the danger of nighttime travel, they immediately turn back for Jerusalem. With a message of good news that that they cannot contain:
Dejection no longer has any place in their story.
