He Acted As If He Were Going Farther

There is a sentence I have said out loud in a sermon, and I have not been able to get free of it since.

I said that I sometimes imagine Jesus walking with the ones who are turning away. Not standing at the fork with his arms crossed. Walking. Going with them in the direction they have chosen, still speaking tenderly, still offering the other option, all the way to the gate.

I said it as comfort. It came out as something else.

Because it comes from Hosea, chapter two, verse fourteen, where God says a thing that ought to be strange to us and is not, because we have heard it too often. Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her.

Allure. Not seize. Not expose. Not corner.

And I have preached this. Faithful love never forces itself on anybody. He does not overpower the one he pursues. He simply offers a different option than the one you are living, and he asks a question, and the question is roughly this. Would you be willing to see my goodness as greater than whatever it is that you love more than me.

He will not make you lay it down.

I have always presented that as the good news, and I want to say now that I no longer think it is only that.

· · ·

The clearest picture of allurement in the whole Bible is not in Hosea. It is on a road out of Jerusalem, on a Sunday afternoon, with two men walking the wrong way.

They are leaving. That is the first thing to see. They are walking away from the city, away from the eleven, away from the group, and they are doing it after the evidence has already come in. The women had gone to the tomb and come back saying it was empty and that they had seen angels. The men went out to check and found it exactly as the women said.

Two testimonies. Both confirmed.

And they walked away anyway.

That is not a story about people who lacked information. That is a story about people who had the information and left. I have been that. Most of us have been that. There is a particular kind of leaving that happens not because you were unconvinced but because you were tired, and the thing you hoped for did not arrive on the schedule you needed it to arrive on, and you cannot keep standing in a city where the thing did not happen.

And Jesus comes alongside them.

He does not appear in glory. He does not correct them. He does not say what is wrong with you, you had two witnesses. Luke says their eyes were kept from recognizing him, which is a passive construction, and it is worth sitting with, because it means the concealment was deliberate.

He hid himself, and joined the journey away.

That is the allurement. He walks in the direction they are already going. He asks them what they are talking about. He lets them explain their disappointment to him, at length, and he stands there and takes it. And then he opens the Scriptures and shows them that everything they have been reading their whole lives has been pointing at him, and he does it without once telling them who he is.

I have loved this story for years. I have preached it as the tenderest thing in the Gospels, and it is.

And then I read the next verse.

· · ·

Luke twenty-four, verse twenty-eight.

So they drew near to the village to which they were going. And he acted as if he were going farther.

He acted as if he were going farther.

He was going to walk past.

I want to be exact about what that verse is doing, because the softer readings of it are lies. This is not Jesus being coy. This is not a game. Luke is telling us that the walk was ending, and the village was there, and the Lord of glory was prepared to keep going up the road and out of the story, and the two men would have gone into their house and shut the door and eaten their supper and never known.

Their hearts were already burning. That is the part that undoes me. They tell us so afterward. Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures.

The burning was already happening.

And the burning was not enough.

He was still going to walk past.

· · ·

What stopped him was a courtesy.

But they urged him strongly, saying, Stay with us, for it is toward evening and the day is now far spent. So he went in to stay with them.

Read the reason they gave. It is toward evening and the day is far spent.

That is not a confession of faith. That is not a moment of recognition. They did not say stay because they knew who he was, because they did not know who he was. They said stay because it was getting dark and it would have been rude to let a stranger keep walking. It is the ordinary hospitality of ordinary tired men at the end of a bad day.

He came in on a courtesy.

And it was at the table, indoors, in a house they had to open, that he took the bread and blessed it and broke it, and their eyes were opened, and they knew him.

The recognition happened inside. It could not have happened on the road. He would not have forced the door.

· · ·

We preach he will never force you as though it were entirely good news, and I have done it, and I want to stop doing it that way.

Because if he will never force you, then he will walk past your house.

Not out of coldness. Out of respect so complete that it will let you lose him. The same restraint that made him hide his face on the road will make him keep walking at the door, and there is no point in the text where he overrides that. He does not knock the thing down. He does not reveal himself in a blaze on the roadside and settle it. He goes as far as you take him and no farther, and if you say nothing, the walking stops being a mercy and becomes a departure.

That is what I did not understand when I said he walks with them all the way to the gate. I meant it as a picture of a God who never gives up. It is that.

It is also a picture of a God who will accompany a man his entire life and never once be invited in.

· · ·

I can hear the objection, and it is a good one, and it is mine.

Does this not put it all back on me? Have I not just rebuilt the very thing I have spent years tearing down, the transaction, the ledger, the you-do-your-part? If the meal depends on my invitation, then the invitation is the price, and we are back at the counter.

No. And the text is careful about this in a way I nearly missed.

Look at what he had already done before they said a word. He chose the road. He caught up to them. He concealed himself so they could speak freely. He asked the question. He listened to the whole complaint. He opened the Scriptures. He set their hearts on fire. Every single act in that story is his, and all of it happened before they invited him anywhere.

The invitation did not earn the meal. The meal was already walking beside them.

The invitation is not payment. It is consent.

And there is a world between those two words. Payment says I have made myself worth the bread. Consent says come in, it is getting dark, and I have nothing to offer you but a table.

He never asks for more than that.

But he does ask for that.

· · ·

Which brings me to the thing I actually have to say, and it is the reason this exists.

My problem is not that I will refuse him.

My problem is that I will not notice him in time to say stay.

I practice the presence of God. I have tried to build my life the way Brother Lawrence built his, which is to say that prayer is not an appointment I keep but a place I live, and the question has never really been where I stop to pray or when. The question is where my heart is while I am praying.

And my mind slips.

I forget. It is not a metaphor and it is not false modesty. I get a kind of amnesia. My mind feels like a battlefield most days, and there is pain in there, and compassion, and wounds, and shame, and there is so much moving around in that field that a man can walk seven miles with the risen Christ and be so busy narrating his own disappointment that he does not think to ask him in.

That is not a small sin. I used to think forgetfulness was a small sin, a lapse, a matter of discipline.

It is the exact mechanism by which a man loses God at his own front door.

· · ·

Which is why I keep coming back to a line I cannot get away from, and it is David, and it is Psalm one hundred and three, and it is the first thing out of his mouth.

Bless the LORD, O my soul.

He is not talking to God there. He is talking to himself. He is giving his own heart an order, and the order is not try harder, and it is not be better, and it is not pay him back.

The order is do not forget.

Forget not all his benefits.

David is a man with a battlefield in his chest, summoning the parts of himself that have wandered off, because he knows what I am only now learning, which is that the danger was never that God would leave.

The danger was that he would keep walking, out of respect, and I would be too far inside my own head to say the one thing that stops him.

Stay with us. It is toward evening.

The day is far spent.

· · ·

I do not have a practice yet that reliably makes me notice.

But I notice that the two men were not spiritual giants. They were leaving. They were wrong about everything. Their hearts were burning and they could not identify why, and the only thing they did right, the only thing, was to be ordinarily kind to a stranger at dusk.

He came in on that.

He will come in on almost nothing.

He just will not come in on nothing at all.