When Our Expectations Hide Jesus
Have you ever been absolutely convinced God was doing one thing, only to discover later that he had been doing something entirely different all along? I know I have. And many times, I discovered God wasn’t absent (he never is), and sometimes he wasn’t even silent. The problem lied in the fact that I was usually looking through a distorted lens—or worse, expecting him to look like an image I’d created in my own mind.
The longer I follow Jesus, the more I’m convinced that one of the greatest obstacles to seeing God isn’t his unwillingness to reveal himself. It’s our tendency to expect him to fit inside the boxes we’ve built for him.
The story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus has become one of my favorite passages in all of Scripture because it reminds me that Jesus has a remarkable way of meeting us right in the middle of our misunderstandings. He isn’t threatened by our questions or disappointed by our incomplete theology. He simply walks with us until our eyes begin to open. Maybe that’s what he wants to do for all of us. Luke tells one such story:
“But their eyes were prevented from recognizing Him.” —Luke 24:16 (NASB)
That statement has always fascinated me. At first glance, it almost sounds as though God intentionally prevented the disciples from recognizing Jesus. If that’s the case, I have to admit—it seems a little cruel. Personally, I struggle to imagine God blinding anyone. If God is light and in him there is no darkness, why would he use blindness to accomplish his purposes? If Jesus spent his ministry opening blind eyes, why would the risen Christ suddenly begin closing them? That picture simply doesn’t resonate with the God revealed in Jesus. It causes me to wonder if something else was happening.
Perhaps the disciples’ inability to recognize Jesus had less to do with God hiding himself and more to do with the expectations they brought to the journey. Their preconceived ideas, past experiences, disappointments, and assumptions about what the Messiah should look like became a veil over their eyes. Maybe it wasn’t that God prevented them from seeing Jesus. Maybe their own expectations did.
I think all of us carry lenses through which we see God. For some, those lenses have been shaped by painful life experiences. Others have inherited pictures of God through family traditions, church backgrounds, or theological systems. Some have encountered a God of relentless love, while others have been introduced to a God of perpetual anger. Whether formed through suffering, religion, disappointment, or joy, these lenses quietly influence the way we perceive him.
The remarkable thing is that we often don’t realize we’re wearing them. We expect God to look, speak, act, and move in certain ways. Then, when he comes to us differently than we imagined, we fail to recognize him—even when he’s standing right in front of us.
The Pharisees looked for God through the lens of the Law. The Romans expected strength through military conquest. Many Samaritans anticipated a great moral reformer. Even today, some expect God to validate their political ideology, cultural assumptions, or their denominational tradition.
Every generation has its boxes. The problem isn’t necessarily that we have them. The problem is believing God must fit inside them. The beautiful news of the Emmaus story is that Jesus isn’t intimidated by our boxes. He meets us there. He doesn’t stand outside demanding we figure everything out before he walks with us. He graciously enters our world, our questions, our assumptions, and even our misconceptions—not to leave us there, but to lovingly lead us beyond them.
That’s what he was doing on the road to Emmaus.
The disciples sincerely misunderstood what God was doing. Yet Jesus didn’t shame them for being wrong. Instead, he walked with them, listened, asked questions, and, at the right time, opened the Scriptures. He patiently enlarged their vision until their hearts burned and their eyes were finally opened. I find that deeply encouraging.
God isn’t waiting for you, your church, or your denomination to achieve perfect theology before he draws near. He is the Truth, and Truth has never been afraid to walk with those who are still learning. He’s always meeting us where we are—not to affirm every conclusion we’ve reached, but to lovingly transform the way we see him. As Richard Rohr wisely writes,
“God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting the boxes.”
Wasn’t this the tragedy of so many in Jesus’ own day? They expected a Messiah who would overthrow Rome with military power, destroy Israel’s enemies, and establish his kingdom through force. That was the box they built. Instead, God arrived as a servant. Rather than crushing his enemies, he forgave them. Rather than taking life, he laid down his own. Rather than excluding the unclean, he embraced them. He washed feet, touched lepers, welcomed children, ate with sinners, restored the outcast, healed the sick, and entered the very depths of human suffering—even death itself.
The people many expected him to reject, he welcomed. The enemies they wanted him to destroy, he commanded them to love. The outsiders they believed had no place in the Father’s family, he invited to the table. This is the God revealed in Jesus.
And perhaps that’s one of the greatest invitations of the Emmaus road: to allow Jesus to gently dismantle every false image we’ve carried until we finally recognize the One who has been walking beside us all along. Because the greatest miracle on that road wasn’t that Jesus came near; he had been there all along. The miracle was that, in time, their eyes were opened to see him.
