I’ve been thinking a lot about the disciples on the road to Emmaus, those two who had lost hope in a moment of great struggle. We often tell this story as a story of the triumph of the meeting, them rushing back to Jerusalem to tell the good word. But we must look again.

They had been with Jesus, they had seen him. His rugged dark carpenter’s hand, making both wood and bodies come alive, dance, shout for joy, become beautiful again. They had also seen those same hands held on to the bloody platform as his dark flesh was broken.

They had witnessed poor little children run up to him, nestle in his arms, sharing laughters, knowing Jesus would have time. They had also witnessed him like a wounded child, helpless, in danger, hurt. Ultimately killed. No lynched, that’s what they witnessed, a lynching.

Now they are on the road. Lonely. Terrified. Maybe one of them threw up from the sickness of witnessing a public execution of a body like theirs. Sort of like we witness them on our cellphones. That churning of the stomach as you see someone pass from life to death.

But some how, by some miraculous force, they are walking. Some stopped. They did not. They kept walking. It may not mean much to us, but witnessing such complex trauma does something to the heart, the psyche. To walk is profoundly courageous.

They had lost hope. Who could blame them? We know how hard it is to hold out hope when the innocent and nonviolent are met by empire’s sword, it’s brutal logic of terror and violence on those who simply want to live, be free, and build life for themselves and their children.

As I think about them, we need to reimagine the language. Jesus came. Showing up in a body. He let them feel. They were honest. ‘We “had” hope’, they say. He corrects their misguided hope. Then they finally see, their eyes have been watching God, for a moment, joy. Burning.

Then Jesus leaves. He really leaves. And they go back, at once to Jerusalem, never the same. They now understood, they needed to lose hope in order to gain it. The hope was not in a theory or in an end point but the hope was in a person, in the living, and in the struggle.

We have given up hope in the belief that things will get eventually get better, a sort of triumphal note that takes one’s mind away from such inhumane violence. MLK lost it, Malcolm lost it, Du Bois, Cone lost it, Fannie Lou lost it, Ella Baker lost it, Baldwin lost it.

But their hope was not a destination, it was a discipline. They had lost hope, but never in themselves, what could be true of us, and what was true of God, and true in the struggle. Even today Ta-Nihisi Coates wrote he is hopeful but that picture of hope was hope reimagined.

We have move beyond the often triumphal idea of hope as future-only, progression that doesn’t not upend power, and optimism that does not honestly read history and our present moment, and when we did hope became life-giving and miraculously normal.

It is as normal and as powerful as choosing to keep on living in the face of white supremacist capitalist brutality, economic instability, political polarization, religious nationalism, and the ongoing struggle of the distance between faith, Jesus, and our lives in the present.

It is as normal as the disciples on the road, losing much, but have the courage to begin again, having the courage to return to the places of terror and violence, with the good news that the world as it is, is not the way that it always will be. Now, that’s a hope worth having.