Luke 24:19-27 - How foolish you are!

24:19-24

Jesus continues to “play dumb”, asking them to expand. They reply that it is Jesus of Nazareth. Then they tell Him who and what they thought Jesus was. He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all people”. So He was a powerful godly man. They clearly held the chief priests responsible for His death, despite it being the Romans who actually carried out the deed.

They had hoped Jesus was the one who would redeem Israel. This implies two things. First, they thought all was now lost. Secondly, they still seemed to have been hoping for a political messiah. Then they reported what the women had seen, and that some of the disciples had been to the tomb and found it empty, but had not seen Jesus. It seems clear that they did not consider it a realistic proposition that Jesus was alive, and again we see that the early disciples were in no way gullible people who would readily believe that a man had been raised from the dead.

24:25-27

“How foolish you are ..” Well Jesus does not mince His words! We often think it is entirely reasonable that we do not understand, and that it is God’s fault for not making things clearer. Well, God has quite a different perspective on things! In the gospels Jesus told them quite plainly that He would have to suffer, but would then rise again from the dead, but the disciples understood nothing. Yet Jesus is actually pointing them back to the prophets, ie to the Old Testament. So Jesus began to show them from Moses and the Prophets how it was all pointing to what He did. By the way, this is our justification for one line of interpretation of the Old Testament, ie seeing how it points forward to Jesus.