We are told that on the day of the resurrection, two disciples were walking away from Jerusalem towards Emmaus, their faces downcast. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that every body of Christ inevitably suffers the same fate as Jesus: death through misunderstanding, ignorance, and jealousy. Everything good eventually gets scapegoated and crucified. While nothing that’s of God will avoid crucifixion, no body of Christ stays in the tomb for long. God always rolls back the stone, and soon enough, new life bursts forth, and we see why that original life had to be crucified. Resurrection invariably follows crucifixion. Every crucified body will rise again. Our hope takes its root in that. Jerusalem was the dream, the hope, and the religious center from which all is to begin and where ultimately, all is to culminate. And the disciples are “walking away” from this place, away from their dream, towards Emmaus (Emmaus was a Roman Spa), a place of human comfort. They never get to Emmaus. Jesus appears to them on the road, reshapes their hope in the light of their disillusionment, and turns them back towards Jerusalem. That is one of the essential messages of Easter: Whenever we are discouraged in our faith, whenever our hopes seem to be crucified, we need to go back to Jerusalem, that is, back to the dream and the road of discipleship that we had embarked upon before things went wrong.