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.

6306. 'Which I took out of the hand of the Amorite' means because of the victory over evil. This is clear from the representation of 'the Amorite' as evil, dealt with in 1857; and from the meaning of 'taking out of the hand' as acquiring through victory. As regards 'the Amorites', it should be recognized that they mean evil, just as 'the Canaanites' and all the other nations in the land that are mentioned in the Word mean various kinds of evil and also of falsity. Such things were represented by the nations when the children of Israel were taking possession of the land of Canaan. The reason for this was that whenever the children of Israel represented the things of heaven those nations represented the things of hell; thus the land of Canaan represented every state that exists in the next life. Also, because the nations represented the things of hell they were utterly destroyed; and entrance into any treaty with those who might remain was forbidden.

[2] The action of the children of Israel, of their taking possession of and dwelling in the land of those who represented the hells, was representative. It represented what happened around the time of the Lord's Coming, when spirits from hell had possession of a large part of heaven but He, by coming into the world and making the human within Himself Divine, cast them out of there and down into hell, and thereby delivered heaven from them, which He then gave as an inheritance to those who belonged to His spiritual kingdom.

[3] The representation of the Amorite nation as evil in general is evident from the places where it is referred to, as in Ezekiel, Thus said the Lord Jehovih to Jerusalem, ¹ Your tradings and your births are of the land of the Canaanite. Your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. Ezekiel 16:3, 45.

'Father' in the internal sense means the Church's good, or in the contrary sense evil, and 'mother' means the Church's truth, or in the contrary sense falsity; and this is why it is said, 'Your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite'.

[4] In Amos,

I destroyed the Amorite before them, whose height was like the height of the cedars, and whose strength was like the oaks. I led you in the wilderness, to possess the land of the Amorite. Amos 2:9-10.

Here also 'the Amorite' stands for evil, for the evil of self-love is described by 'the height of the cedars' and 'the strength of an oak'. The reason why 'the Amorite' means evil in general is that the entire land of Canaan was called 'the land of the Amorite'; for it says, 'I led you in the wilderness, to possess the land of the Amorite'. In addition the second Book of Kings says,

Manasseh king of Judah did what was evil, greater than all the evil which the Amorites did, who were before him. 2 Kings 21:11.

[5] 'With my sword' means through truth engaged in conflict. This is clear from the meaning of 'sword' as truth engaged in conflict, dealt with in 2799, 4499.

'And my bow' means received from doctrine. This is clear from the meaning of 'bow' as doctrine, dealt with in 2686, 2709.

[6] The words used here, 'the portion which I took out of the hand of the Amorite with my sword and my bow' were, it is quite evident, uttered by Israel on account of the internal sense; for Jacob did not take that portion from the Amorite with sword or bow. He bought it from the sons of Hamor, as is evident from Genesis 33, where these words occur, Jacob came to Salem, the city of Shechem, which is in the land of Canaan, as he was coming from Paddan Aram; and he encamped towards the face of the city. And he bought the portion of the field where he had stretched his tent, from the hand of the sons of Hamor, the father of Shechem, for a hundred kesitahs. Genesis 33:18-19.

The fact that this field was the portion he gave to Joseph is clear in Joshua,

The bones of Joseph which the children of Israel caused to be brought up out of Egypt they buried in Shechem, in the part of the field which Jacob bought from the sons of Hamor, the father of Shechem, for a hundred kesitahs; and they had become an inheritance for the children of Joseph. Joshua 24:32.

From this it is evident that the portion had been bought, and that this is what was given to Joseph. Nor was the city of Shechem nearby meant, the city in which Simeon and Levi killed every male and which they took with the sword, Genesis 34. This is made clear by the fact that Jacob detested what they did and for that reason cursed Simeon and Levi, completely dissociating himself from the crime. He said,

Simeon and Levi are brothers; instruments of violence are their swords. Into their secret place let my soul not come; in their congregation let not my glory be united; for in their anger they killed a man, and in their pleasure they hamstrung an ox. Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce, and their wrath, for it was hard. ² I will divide them in Jacob, and scatter them in Israel. Genesis 49:5-7.

From all this it may now be seen that the words 'the portion which I took out of the hand of the Amorite with my sword and my bow' were uttered by him, when the spirit of prophecy rested on him, for the sake of the internal sense.

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