All Saints’, Dorval
April 19, 2026
Anne Simpson and friends at the 2024 Christmas bazaar
And he said to them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” They stood still, looking sad.
What does sad look like? What does sad feel like?
When we’re first teaching children about their emotions (and other people’s emotions), the word comes up a lot. Johnny is sad because he dropped his toy in a puddle. Sarah is sad because Michael bit her. Mommy is sad because Grandpa died. Like “love,” it’s one of those words that we ask to cover a range from the trivial to the profound.
And it’s one of those words that we expect to describe an experience that’s similar from one person to another, when it really, really isn’t.
It took me decades to realize, and then to articulate, to myself and others, that I don’t experience – at least I haven’t yet – a separate emotion that I recognize as sadness. I feel upset, absolutely. Depressed, frustrated, disappointed, angry, gloomy, anxious, hurting – I’m very familiar with all those emotions. But even at the times of the greatest grief in my life, I didn’t respond with simple “sadness”. And I mostly didn’t cry. I cry from frustration, shame, or – on the other end of the emotional spectrum – when I encounter beauty in life or art.
I wish I could, sometimes. I wish I could give people I have loved, and those who loved them, the honour of tears at their deaths. I spoke at Anne Simpson’s funeral last weekend, dry-eyed, and hoped that my words conveyed a fraction of how much I love and miss her, as both her son Bob and her friend Ros teared up while they spoke a few minutes later.
So when Luke describes Cleophas and his companion as “looking sad,” I find myself wondering what they were actually feeling, what mishmash of complicated emotions they were experiencing, as they stood there in the road.
The Greek word in the original is skythropoi, which means, according to the Interlinear Bible, “angry-visaged; gloomy or mournful in appearance.” So even here, there is some acknowledgement that sadness can have many nuances, some of them more presentable than others.
The stories of Jesus’ appearances after he rises from the dead – especially in Luke and John, which include many more scenes from after the Resurrection than Matthew and Mark do – are full of complicated emotions described in very understated ways. They may not be obvious on the first reading, but if you live with these stories, live in these stories, you realize that they depict people pushed to the limits of what the human heart can bear, see-sawing between laughter and tears, grappling with experiences so far beyond their imagination that they almost break. There is a pervasive sense of exhaustion, of people functioning on the equivalent of several consecutive nights without sleep, who are vacillating between near-catatonia, and rushing around like chickens with their heads cut off not because they are trying to actually do anything, but because they don’t know what to do with the nervous energy.
“Sadness” doesn’t begin to describe it.
And yet, into each of these situations comes Jesus.
The two disciples, walking down the road talking over the horrors they have just witnessed and the wild hope they barely dare name.
The group in the upper room, listlessly snacking on leftovers and looking at each other as though to say, “I don’t know, what do you want to do?!”
Thomas, the stubborn holdout, going a whole week refusing to believe until he can see and touch the proof.
The fishermen on the beach, taking refuge in a familiar task.
To each of them Jesus appears, and in a surprising number of these stories he breathes on them – and he breaks bread with them.
He breathes, imparting the Holy Spirit. He breaks bread, the bread that he has just named and redefined as his body.
He breathes, helping them regulate those – again, as we say to small children – “big feelings”. He breaks bread, giving them a snack to avert a meltdown, just like you would with a tantruming four-year-old.
He breaks bread, nourishing their bodies as well as their souls. He breathes, with them and for them, helping them move the sadness – and the much more complicated emotions – through their bodies and back out into the world, so they can pull themselves together and go on.
And “going on” doesn’t involve not having emotions – they’re still going to have plenty of those, as Christ ascends and the Holy Spirit comes and the church begins to grow and spread like wildfire!
“Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road?” Cleophas and his companion ask each other. This, too, is emotion – complicated, consuming emotion. Enough to get them up and send them running back the whole seven miles to Jerusalem, where (just after the end of our passage today) they encounter the risen Lord again.
Sometimes our emotions make sense, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes our emotions are simple; sometimes they’re hopelessly tangled. Sometimes the way we express them corresponds with what people expect from us; sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes our emotions motivate us; sometimes they shut us down. Sometimes we feel them easily and then let them go; sometimes we need help to work through them so that we can keep moving and do what needs to be done.
I imagine you could find examples of every single one of those situations in the post-Resurrection appearances. And every single time, Jesus is there: breathing, nourishing, embracing, healing, and promising the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, as our companion and guide.
Four days after Peter – my son, that is, not the apostle – was born at home, his dad took him in for a bilirubin check and the doctors discovered that his blood oxygen was low and he was having episodes of apnea. I had stayed home, expecting the baby to be back within the hour, and so when they decided he needed to be admitted to the hospital, I had to get a ride and meet them there.
I will never forget walking into the exam room and seeing my tiny newborn on his back on the exam table, being worked on by two nurses, surrounded by syringes and tubing and discarded wrappers, screaming his head off – and I will also never forget that, as I burst into panicked tears, there was still a part of my mind that was standing back and observing, “wow, for once in my life I am having a completely normal emotional reaction.”
God doesn’t care whether our emotional reactions are normal or not. God doesn’t care whether “looking sad” for us means crying picturesquely, or grimacing ferociously. Whether we’re “cut to the heart” like Peter’s audience in Acts, suffering “grief and sorrow” like the speaker in the psalm, “astounded” like those who first heard the women’s message that Jesus was raised, or whether our hearts are burning within us with joy at seeing the risen Lord – Jesus comes to us, breathes on us, heals us, breaks bread with us, embraces us, comforts us, and gives us the strength to go on.
Amen.
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