Each of the four gospels contains a story about Jesus appearing to His disciples after the Sunday morning when they had found the sepulcher empty. For example, see Matthew 28:16-20; Mark 16:14-19; Luke 24:13-33; John 20:19-31, and John 21.

In Luke, there’s a story of two disciples walking from Jerusalem to the village of Emmaus, a walk of about seven miles. Shortly after they leave the city they are approached by another traveler who has noticed their troubled faces and serious talk and asks them what is troubling them. Walking along together, they ask the stranger, “Haven’t you heard of the troubles in Jerusalem, how the prophet from Galilee, who we hoped would be the one to save Israel, was given up to be crucified? And strange to say, when some of the women went on the third day to anoint His body, they saw angels who told them that he was not there but was risen from the dead.”

On hearing this, the traveler chides them for not believing, and says “Don’t you see that Christ had to suffer these things and to enter into his glory?” The stranger then tells the two disciples many things concerning Jesus, from the books of Moses, and the prophets, in the Old Testament. The two disciples listen with awe, but do not recognize the stranger. At length they arrive at Emmaus. The stranger appears to want to go on when the two stop, but they beg him to stop also, because it’s getting late in the day, and they want to hear more. So they all sit down to share the evening meal, and when the stranger takes up the loaf of bread and breaks it and gives them pieces, their eyes are opened and they recognize Him, and He vanishes.

One can imagine the stunned awe that came over them both as they realized that this was Jesus. They knew He was crucified, and yet He had walked and talked to them for several hours. The women were right! The angels were right! He was alive!

The New Church believes that there are internal meanings to all the stories in the Word of the Lord, the sacred scriptures, and that this internal meaning, within the literal stories about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Joshua, Samuel, David, and the rest, and all the sayings of the prophets from Isaiah to Malachi, and the four gospels… this meaning is what makes the Word holy.

So what can we see here in this story? Well, that internal meaning in “Moses and the prophets” is the story of Jesus’ life in the world, from His birth in Bethlehem through all His growing years until His “death” and then His rising. Because Jesus knew that, and had certainly read the Scriptures and understood them internally, He knew for a long time how His earthly life was going to close, and that it was necessary for it to close as had been “written”, in order to save the human race. So He told the two disciples that story as they walked toward Emmaus.

More about that walk... In the Word, any mention of walking is really referring to how we live our lives from day to day. In many stories of the Word, it is said that someone walked with God. It is said that we should walk in His ways and that we should walk the straight and narrow path.

Also in this story we are told that this was a journey of sixty stadia (in the original Greek). Sixty (or other multiples of "six") represents the lifelong work of rejecting the temptations that come from our inborn selfishness. Apocalypse Explained 648. So, this journey to Emmaus means our life’s journey - as a person that is trying to follow the Lord’s teachings and become an angel.

The destination was Emmaus. In the Word any city represents a doctrine, an organized set of truths that we have put in order so that we can live according to them -- our rules of life. See Arcana Coelestia 402. They are not necessarily good, as with Jerusalem or Bethlehem, but can also be evil doctrines, e.g. Sodom or Babylon. My dictionary tells me that the name Emmaus means “hot springs”. Another universal meaning in the Word is that water means truth in its beneficial uses, but can also mean truth twisted into falsity by those in hell, in an opposite sense. See, for example, Arcana Coelestia 790. Think of the wells that Abraham dug, or the waters that Jesus promised to the woman of Samaria as they talked by Jacob’s well, or the pure river of water flowing out from under the throne in the New Jerusalem in the book of Revelation. In its converse sense, where water is destructive, think of the flood that destroyed all but Noah and his family, or the Red Sea that had to be parted so that the children of Israel could cross. The springs represented by Emmaus were holy truths bubbling up from the Word for us to use. And these are hot springs, and heat means love. So that's our destination, where truth and love together are flowing out for us to use, in a continual stream from the Lord.

This plain little anecdote about the disciples meeting the Lord on the road to Emmaus isn't just a story about Jesus's resurrection with a spiritual body. It is also a story of how we should be living our lives. We can be traveling toward heaven, listening to the Lord, walking in the way with him, and at the end He will break bread and have supper with us.

4075. 'And the God of my father has been with me' means that the Divine was the author of all that He had. This is clear from the fact that when used in reference to the Lord 'the God of His father' means the Divine which was His, and that 'has been with me' means the author of all that He had. When the Lord made the Human within Himself Divine, He too had communities of spirits and angels around Him; for it was His will that everything should be accomplished in keeping with order. But He chose for Himself the kind of communities that would be of service, and changed them as seemed good to Him. Yet He did not take any good or truth at all from them and apply it to Himself, but only from the Divine. And by acting in this way He also restored to order both heaven and hell; He restored them step by step until He had glorified Himself completely. The fact that these communities of spirits and angels were able to be of service and that the Lord took nothing from them can be shown from examples:

[2] Communities which are such that they believe good to originate in themselves, and as a consequence place merit in good deeds, served the use of introducing Him to a knowledge of such good, and from this knowledge to wisdom regarding good that is devoid of merit, such as originates in the Divine. That knowledge and wisdom deriving from it did not originate in those communities but was obtained through them. Take as another example communities which believe themselves to be rather wise, and yet reason about the validity of every aspect of good and truth. Such communities belong in the main to those which are spiritual. They served the use of introducing Him to a knowledge of those people and to how far they dwelt in shade in comparison with others, and that unless the Divine took pity on them they would perish. They also served to introduce Him to further things from the Divine which did not originate in those communities but were obtained through them.

[3] Take as yet another example communities which love God but believe that if they look to the Infinite, and so worship a God who is hidden from them, they are able to love Him. They cannot in fact do so unless by means of some idea or other they make that Infinite finite, or else within themselves visualize the hidden God by means of finite intellectual concepts. Otherwise it would be looking into thick darkness and embracing with love that which is enveloped in that darkness, and so would lead to further ill-formed and sketchy notions resulting from each person's own ideas. Such communities likewise served the use of introducing Him to a knowledge of the nature of the interior features of those people, and also to a knowledge of the nature of their love, as well as to a sense of pity for them, in that they could not be saved unless the Lord's Human was made Divine also for them to look to. This wisdom did not come from those communities but through them from the Divine. The same is so with any other examples that one might take. From all this one may see what is implied by the statement that nothing was taken from the good meant by 'Laban', but that the Divine - that is, the Lord Himself - was the author of everything He had.