“Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?”
The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Lk 24:18.
When the unrecognised Jesus approached the two disciples who were engaged in dynamic conversation, this was their question to this unrecognised stranger. They are dismayed about what had happened to Jesus, their hope.
Dismay can be characterised now in this time too. Many times in my extensive travels have I heard dismay to many so called projects which were lauded as projects of God, never built, never reaching their aspired objective. Maybe there is an explanation to be had. We need to delve deeper into the dismay to get a fuller picture.
Their hope was in Jesus. Sounds right? No, not quite. Sometimes we need to examine what our hope looks like, and in seeing it as it is, you get a fuller picture. What was their lives going to look like in the context of their hope in Jesus? They were seeing Jesus’ mission from the political spectrum. Jesus confounded these suspicions in key moments, example, when he had fed the 5000 men, they wanted to make him king, so he withdrew.
Then there is the occasion He came into Jerusalem on a donkey.
Our issue is this, our human expectation and how it does not meet up with the divine objectives. We fix our human thoughts onto what we believe is the true divine objective then when we see it fall about our ears, whether it be an investment, church project, anything we care to do for God, but when it fails we must ask whether God inspired it, whether the timing was right, whether our methods were founded on solid grounds in terms of our motivations. All these must come under scrutiny.
Jesus was not a warrior king…He gave much teaching and signs about that. Yet the ambitions of His disciples blinded them to His true mission. Could it be that our human ambitions and our expectations blinded us?
Let us take comfort, Jesus is our Hope and even when we mess up, He comes to present His Word, and lifts us from our earthly ambitions, causes us to see His heavenly objectives. These 2 disciples not only were lifted, they no longer viewed Jesus as a prophet but the Risen Lord, and shortly to behold Him carried to heaven as the Lord in the heavens. If we have come into failure in some area, believing we were serving God, He will come to restore and lift us.
Maranatha!
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