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.

149. Freedom comes from the equilibrium between heaven and hell; if we did not have this freedom we could not be reformed. This has been shown in Heaven and Hell; see the discussion of the equilibrium itself in §§589-596 and of the freedom that arises from it in §§597-603. To provide information here about what freedom is and about the fact that it makes our reformation possible, I would like to quote the following from that source. ¹

I have just described the balance between heaven and hell and have shown that the balance is between goodness from heaven and evil from hell, which means that it is a spiritual balance that in essence is a freedom.

The reason this spiritual balance is essentially a freedom is that it exists between what is good and what is evil and between what is true and what is false, and these are spiritual realities. So freedom is the ability to intend either good or evil and to think either truth or falsity, the ability to choose one instead of the other.

The Lord grants this freedom to every individual, and it is never taken away. By virtue of its source it in fact belongs to the Lord and not to us, because it comes from the Lord; yet still it is given to us along with our life as though it were ours. This is so that we can be reformed and saved, for without freedom there can be no reformation or salvation.

Anyone who uses a little rational insight can see that we have a freedom to think thoughts that are good or evil, honest or dishonest, fair or unfair, and that we can say and do things that are good, honest, and fair, although we cannot say and do things that are evil, dishonest, and unfair, because of the moral and civil laws that keep our outward nature in restraint.

We can see from this that this freedom applies to our spirit, which does our thinking and intending, but not to our outer nature, which does our talking and acting, unless our outer nature is following the aforementioned laws.

The reason we cannot be reformed unless we have some freedom is that we are born with evils of all kinds, evils that need to be laid aside if we are to be saved. Yet they cannot be laid aside unless we see them within ourselves, admit that they are there, then no longer will them, and ultimately reject them. Only then are they laid aside. This cannot happen unless we are exposed to both what is good and what is evil, since it is from goodness that we can see evil, though from evil we cannot see goodness. As for the kinds of spiritual goodness we can think about, from early childhood we learn them from the reading of the Word and from sermons. We learn the kinds of moral and civic goodness from our life in the world. This is the primary reason we need to be in a state of freedom.

The second reason we cannot be reformed without freedom is that nothing becomes part of us unless we engage with it with love. True, other things can enter us, but no deeper than into our thought, not into our will; and anything that does not enter all the way into our will is not ours. This is because our thinking is derived from our memory, but our will is derived from our life itself. We never experience a sense of freedom unless our feelings, which are extensions of what we love, are engaged, because whatever we intend or love, we do with a sense of freedom. This is why our freedom and the feelings we have from our love or our will are one and the same. So we also have freedom in order to be able to be moved by what is true and good, or to love them, so that they become like part of us. In a word, anything that does not enter us while we are in a state of freedom does not stay with us because it does not belong to our love or will; and anything that does not belong to our love or will does not belong to our spirit. The reality underlying our spirit is love or will.

So that we can be in a state of freedom for the sake of our reformation, we are joined in spirit to heaven and to hell. With each of us there are spirits from hell and angels from heaven. By means of the spirits from hell we encounter our evil, while by means of the angels from heaven we encounter the good we have from the Lord. As a result, we are in a spiritual equilibrium-that is, a state of freedom. On the fact that angels from heaven and spirits from hell are present with all of us, see the chapter on the union of heaven with the human race (Heaven and Hell 291-302).

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