Luke 24:36b-48
It was a Friday evening in April of 1993. My husband, Michael, and I had gone out to an early dinner and had plans to spend the rest of the evening at home in our teeny, tiny Seattle apartment. I don’t recall our dinner conversation, but I imagine that we had touched upon the future. Months earlier, I had been accepted into a Master of Divinity program in Connecticut which meant that our world would be radically changing that fall with a move across the country and all the exciting, unknown possibilities that would come along with that. But at the time life was much more mundane.
Upon arriving home after dinner, I was first to the door. I opened it, crossed the threshold and entered into the dark when all of sudden the lights came on and I saw a crowd of people jammed into our small place shouting at me. They were yelling, “Surprise!” I was completely dumbfounded. What was going on here? Surprise, for what? Well, it turned out that Michael had planned a party to celebrate my upcoming new life in divinity school. It was so kind and I treasure that memory. However, I found this experience of surprise to be so shocking that it took a good long while for this the unexpected reality of the evening to sink in.
“Startled and terrified,” is the way that Luke describes the disciples reaction when one moment they are talking amongst themselves and then the next Jesus is standing among them. If I was so thrown by an unexpected party, I can’t fathom how completely shocking it must have been for Jesus - dead Jesus, in their minds - to just show up as he did. “Startled and terrified” is probably an understatement!
Understandably, the disciples try to make sense of the situation. And the most rational explanation they can come up with is that they are seeing a ghost. But Jesus is having none of that. It’s of the utmost importance that they get that he’s with them not as a ghost, which if you believe in ghosts, is the spiritual presence of someone who is still dead, but that he’s there with them as someone who is alive. A new kind of alive. Here, he says, “Look at my hands and my feet...Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have." It must have taken some time for this unexpected reality to sink in and Luke gives us a hint to the disciples’ inner lives as he explains that, “in their joy they [the disciples] were disbelieving and still wondering.” Which prompts Jesus to offer more proof of his bodily presence by eating some broiled fish.
Jesus is alive in body, but it’s a new kind of body and a new kind of life. One that we call resurrected. It’s a life and a body that is not bound by old ways, old understandings, and old experiences. What Jesus is literally embodying is a new future, a new creation, a new way of life - not just for himself alone, but for us all. Because Jesus lives after death that means that all the deaths, all the endings that we might experience in this life they are not The End. Ultimately, all that has been taken, broken, mistreated, wronged, lost or forgotten, will be restored. Death has lost its sting. Because Jesus lives we, and all of creation, can live resurrected lives too.
But letting this new reality of resurrection sink takes time - a lifetime really. It is the repentance of which Jesus speaks in the gospel of Luke. For repentance is all about the changing of one’s mind. And as we, with the disciples, open our minds to Jesus’ resurrection it is forgiveness that naturally flows - the restoring of relationships with God, with others, with the world. This is the new life we have in Christ full of exciting, unknown possibilities. And we are called to embody it in our own lives. To incarnate the good news in our very own flesh and bones. In the language of Jesus, we are to be “witnesses of these things.”
But how? How are we to witness and incarnate such lofty truths of resurrection life? Priest and author Henri Nouwen suggests that at the end of each day we ask ourselves these questions, “Did I offer peace today? Did I bring a smile to someone's face? Did I say words of healing? Did I let go of my anger and resentment? Did I forgive? Did I love? These are the real questions,” Fr. Nouwen reflects and then continues, “I must trust that the little bit of love that I sow now will bear many fruits, here in this world and the life to come.”
Incarnate, material, flesh and bones love really is the ultimate experience of and witness to the unexpected yet glorious reality of resurrection life. Instead of shouting, “Surprise!” what we get to proclaim with our words, our deeds, our very lives is something so much better, “Alleluia! Christ is Risen. The Lord is risen, indeed. Alleluia!”
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