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.

10607. 'And no one shall come up with you' means that the Israelite nation is incapable of standing in Divine Truth. This is clear from the meaning of 'not coming up', in this instance of not coming up with Moses onto Mount Sinai, as not going into heaven from which Divine Truth is revealed, thus as being incapable of standing in Divine Truth. For 'Mount Sinai' means heaven, from which the revelation of Divine Truth comes, see 8805, 8931, 9420, 10605; and 'Moses' represents the outward form taken by the Church, worship, and the Word, which is where Divine Truth is received. The fact that the Israelite nation is meant is self-evident, for the prohibitions 'no one shall come up with you' and 'no one shall be seen on all the mountain' refer to members of that nation.

[2] The fact that 'Moses' at this point represents the outward form taken by the Word, the Church, and worship, which is where Divine Truth is received, is clear from all the details in the present chapter, such as these:

1. The requirement that Moses should go up onto Mount Sinai and stand there at the top of it, and that the people should be moved back from it.

2. Jehovah's talking to Moses, in the verses that follow, as if He were doing so only to him and not to the people ¹ - All the people in whose midst you are will see that this is a marvel which I am doing with you, verse 10. Observe that which I command you this day. Behold, I am driving out from your face, verse 11. Take care, lest by chance you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land onto which you come, verse 12. You shall not bow down to any other god, verse 14. Lest by chance you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they call you, and you eat of their sacrifice, verse 15. You are not to take their daughters for your sons, verse 16. And so on in verses after these.

3. The gleaming of the skin on Moses' face, described later on in this chapter, and the people's fear to approach him, so that he put a veil over his face whenever he talked to the people.

[3] From all these details it is evident that in the present chapter Moses represents the outward form taken by the Word, the Church, and worship, which is where Divine Truth is received and so is that through which the Divine Truth within shines out. The fact that Moses represents that outward form and not what it holds within it is likewise evident from all the details in the present chapter, such as the reference to Jehovah's descending in the cloud and His standing with him (for 'the cloud means the outward form which the Word takes) and then His commanding him what the external observances of the Church and worship were to be, but not what the internal ones were. Something similarly external or outward was represented by Moses in the previous chapter, as is evident in verses 7-11 and verses 17-23, see 10563, 10571. But an external unreceptive of anything internal existed among the Israelite nation.

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