All Men Are Liars?
The reports were true. They just weren't enough.
You know the drive home after church. The sermon was fine — good, even. You could summarize it if someone asked. You sang the songs. You took the bread. And now you’re back in the car, back on the highway, back to the afternoon and the week ahead. Nothing is wrong. Nothing has changed, either.
That’s the Emmaus road.
Two of Jesus’ followers are walking to Emmaus — about seven miles from Jerusalem — on the day of the resurrection. Not fleeing. Not protesting. Just going home. The weekend is over. And when a stranger falls into step beside them and asks what they’ve been talking about, Cleopas gives a remarkably thorough answer. Jesus of Nazareth — prophet, mighty in deed and word. Handed over. Crucified. And then: “But we were hoping that it was He who was going to redeem Israel.”
Were hoping. Past tense. Not “we’ve lost faith” — more like “we’ve run out of reasons to stay.”
And here’s the detail worth slowing down for: Cleopas isn’t missing information. He reports the women’s testimony. He knows about the empty tomb, the vision of angels, the fact that others went and confirmed it. He has the data. All of it. He just finishes the report with this devastating line: “but Him they did not see.”
The reports were true. They just didn’t produce encounter.
There’s a line in Psalm 116 that sounds like it could come straight from Cleopas’s mouth: “I said in my alarm, ‘All men are liars.’” Not necessarily that everyone was lying to him. More like: everything I was told would hold — didn’t. The reports came in. They should have been enough. They weren’t. You start to wonder whether any of it was ever going to deliver what it promised.
That’s not apostasy. It’s the gap between hearing about God and being met by God. Most of us have lived in that gap. Some of us are in it right now.
What happens next on the road is worth paying attention to. Jesus — still unrecognized — does something unexpected. He doesn’t correct Cleopas’s facts. The facts were fine. Instead, “beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures.”
He walks with them in the direction they’re already going, and he opens the word.
They still don’t recognize him. Not yet. But later they’ll say, “Were not our hearts burning within us while He was speaking to us on the road?” Something was happening in the word — something below the level of information. Not new data. Encounter.
Then comes the moment. They reach the village and Jesus acts as though he’s going farther. This is easy to miss, but it matters: the encounter almost didn’t happen. It required an invitation. “Stay with us, for it is getting toward evening.” They asked him to remain, and he did.
He took the bread. He blessed it. He broke it. He gave it to them.
And their eyes were opened.
The Psalmist knows this turn. After “all men are liars” — after the alarm and the disappointment — something shifts. “What shall I render to the LORD for all His benefits toward me? I shall lift up the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the LORD.”
The cup. The bread. The moment where the reports stop being reports and become presence. The question isn’t “is it true?” anymore. It’s “what do I do with what just happened to me?”
What Cleopas does is get up that very hour and go back to Jerusalem. He was going home. Now he’s going back. Not because he learned something new — because he was met. The bonds of ordinary, unchanged life came loose.
“You have loosed my bonds,” the Psalm says. That’s the Emmaus turn in five words.
Here’s what strikes me: Luke doesn’t let the pattern stay singular. He follows the Emmaus story almost immediately with Pentecost. Peter stands up and preaches — word, on the road, to people who are going about their lives. The crowd hears it and is “pierced to the heart.” Same thing that happened on the road to Emmaus, now happening at scale. And their response is the same as Cleopas’s: they don’t just nod. They reorient. They ask, “What shall we do?”
And what does the new community look like? Luke tells us: “They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.”
Teaching. And breaking bread. Word and table — the same two-part encounter that opened Cleopas’s eyes, now forming the rhythm of an entire community’s life.
This isn’t coincidence. It’s structure. Luke is showing us the pattern: the word preached, the bread broken, and lives that change direction because of it.
Peter’s first letter puts it plainly. After a passage about being redeemed — not with silver or gold but with precious blood — he says, “You have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God.” And then the kicker, almost in passing: “And this is the word which was preached to you.”
This. The thing you’re hearing right now. The sermon, the letter, the reading. This is the road. You’re on it.
I think we often treat the Emmaus story as a beautiful one-time event. Jesus appeared, broke bread, vanished. It’s moving. It’s mysterious. And it’s safely in the past.
But Luke and Peter won’t let us leave it there. The word is still being preached. The bread is still being broken. The encounter isn’t behind us — it’s the shape of every Sunday we walk into and every table we approach.
The question isn’t whether you have enough information. You probably do. Cleopas certainly did. The question is whether you’ve let the familiar become an encounter — whether the sermon you’ve heard before and the bread you’ve taken a hundred times might be the moment your eyes open.
Next Sunday, before the service starts, try this: pray one sentence. “Stay with me, for it is getting toward evening.” It’s what Cleopas prayed — the invitation that made recognition possible. See if it changes what you hear.
Matt develops these posts in dialogue with Claude. Matt owns the final claims and tone.