“But their eyes were restrained, so that they did not know Him.” Luke 24:16.
Consider this: A mother has a wonderful gift to give to her children. The day comes to give it but, instead of allowing the children to see and receive it, she just talks about it and keeps on talking about it. What would you say about such a mother? Especially if you are a child?
Perhaps you don’t dare answer because you sense where the question is leading you. You think to yourself that Christ, who ‘restrains’ the eyes of the ‘Emmaus travellers’ so that they don’t see Him, the wonderful Easter gift, is like that mother. Like her, He speaks all the time about that Easter gift. And because you don’t want to speak ill of Him, you prefer to leave the tricky question about that strange mother unanswered. But in your heart…
It’s good, that you withhold your criticism.
But you must go one step further. You must assume that He is right, that He loves, that He does not withhold the wonderful Easter gift, but comes bearing it completely, and with haste.
For the wonderful Easter gift is not the seen Jesus, but the heard Jesus Christ.
If the seen Jesus was the actual Easter gift, well, how poor we, today, would be. Then we would never have celebrated Easter: for none of us ever saw Him with our eyes.
But now that the message of Jesus as the Christ, who we heard about through the Word, is the real Easter gift, it is clear to us that Jesus Christ hastens to give the great Easter gift to His fellow travellers, to His timid children.
He restrains the eyes of the travellers to Emmaus from seeing the trusted Jesus-from-before, and not without purpose. For now is the day of hearing. All the children of God’s church will henceforth have to hear. To hear the Word. And, in order that one church member should not be advantaged above the other church members, our highest Prophet and Teacher closes the bodily eyes of these Emmaus travellers until they have heard the Word to the extent that was needed at this moment of Christ’s church-building program.
Had He shown Himself to them as the Jesus of old, before the Word had been heard, then the seed of the Word would have been smothered by thorns. That is, the temptation would be there to extol the riches of seeing Jesus in the flesh above that of hearing about Him. And that would have devalued the proclamation of God’s Word. For are not all those blessed today, and only those, who will not see and yet will believe?
That is why He immediately makes His travelling companions blessed; He makes them believe what they heard was written in the Scriptures, and only when this hearing, or believing, has been completed, only then does He let them see Him for a moment; just for a moment. For that seeing is now no longer a pleasure in and of itself, but a burden, i.e. a task. It is a superfluous proof, that they, as eyes of the church, may testify to us that Jesus truly is the Christ, that He really was dead and now lives.
They learnt to hear, as do we, and to believe what they heard. Blessed are those who (unlike Thomas) have not seen Jesus in the flesh and yet have believed (Jn 20:29). Blessed because, believing what they have heard, they have life in Him now and forever, and will rejoice to one day see Him in the flesh.
This short article is a condensed translation of the first and main part of K. Schilder’s meditation, “Horen is meer en eer dan zien”, De Reformatie, XXI, 27 April 1946, and republished in Schrift-Overdenkingen III, Oosterbaan & Le Cointre, Goes, 1958, pp. 141-142.