Preach the Gospel with Your Ears
“Then one of them, Cleopas, replied, “You must be the only person in Jerusalem who hasn’t heard about all the things that have happened there the last few days.” “What things?” Jesus asked. “The things that happened to Jesus, the man from Nazareth,” they said. “He was a prophet who did powerful miracles, and he was a mighty teacher in the eyes of God and all the people. But our leading priests and other religious leaders handed him over to be condemned to death, and they crucified him. We had hoped he was the Messiah who had come to rescue Israel. This all happened three days ago. “Then some women from our group of his followers were at his tomb early this morning, and they came back with an amazing report. They said his body was missing, and they had seen angels who told them Jesus is alive! Some of our men ran out to see, and sure enough, his body was gone, just as the women had said.””
Luke 24:18–24 NLT Read More
Jesus is so good at this. Look at how He handles these guys.
They are visibly shaken. They are walking along, downcast, down a road spotted with other people walking, pulling carts, leading animals, etc. Jesus joins in with them, asks them why they are sad,
and listens.
There are so many stops in this description that He could have butted in and corrected them. He wasn’t a prophet, He was the Messiah! He wasn’t just a teacher! Oh it wasn’t a priest that handed Me over, oh no! It was one of My own disciples! And you say the leaders condemned Me, but I could hear a whole crowd out there shouting “Crucify!”
So if Jesus loves the truth, how could He let these people carry on for so long with such wrong info?
Because the story they were telling was as much about their feelings about the event as it was about the event. The re-telling of the story was being done with the retrospect and the wisdom of seeing Jesus die on the cross and the realization that “surely this WAS the Son of God.”
We can learn so much from Jesus here. Before He went into explaining the truth to them, He let them get it all out. He let them fully express themselves and He listened to understand right where they were in their (un)belief.
Honestly, how fun it must have been for Him to hear about His resurrection from the perspective of a 3rd-hand account. This is how the news was going to be spread, after all, so He got a glimpse of how people were going to spread it.
James said “Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry.” I think if we adopted this as our approach to life, or even only to evangelism, it would change the world. Jesus did.