In Nomine, etc..
Today's Gospel is the conclusion of the Resurrection appearances in Luke, chapter 24. Immediately preceding it is our Lord's appearance on the road to Emmaus, and following it is the promise of "power from on high" and the Ascension, where the Gospel ends.
There are two themes in today's Gospel, and in the chapter as a whole. The first: recognition; the second: understanding. Perhaps we are so familiar with these stories, that we do not notice the very striking methods that our Lord is using to help his disciples, firstly to recognize him, and secondly to understand him. Our Lord's methods can help us recognize and understand him as well.
We recall that on the road to Emmaus, Jesus meets two of his disciples, who do not realize who he is. He listens to their story, and then interprets the Scriptures for them. But only later, as evening approaches, when he breaks bread with them, as Luke tells us, "their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and he vanished from their sight!" The two disciples then join the others in Jerusalem, announce the Resurrection to them, and tell the story of their experience on the road.
"And he vanished from their sight!" Luke and the disciples express no astonishment at this, and apparently they don't mention it to the disciples in Jerusalem either. To me, at least, this is a very striking omission.
Today's Gospel begins, "while they were talking about this [that is, about the experience on the road and the breaking of the bread] Jesus himself stood among them...they were startled and terrified!" They were startled and terrified? Hadn't they just heard from the two on the road, that the risen Lord had been made known to them? Why didn't those two speak up? Probably, they reverted to their previous state of mind, their inability to see Jesus.Their eyes were opened in the breaking of the bread, but their new vision didn't last long. Jesus vanished from their sight, not because he had left the scene, but because the disciples were unable to perceive him for more than that brief moment. They had only begun to grasp what was happening. But soon our Lord leads them out of their blindness and fear, into recognition and understanding.
"Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself!" (The Greek here actually says, "because I myself am" or "because I am myself!") This points out something that we have already noticed: that no one recognizes Jesus by sight! On the road to Emmaus he is recognized in the breaking of the bread. Here our Lord is directing his disciples' attention, and ours, to his hands and feet!
I know that we have a saying: "seeing is believing!" but is it really? Not here, it isn't! Luke, and Jesus, are telling us something.
"Touch me, and see!" This is, surely, the oddest remark in the Gospel. But it brings the disciples, and us, around to how Jesus wants his disciples, and us, to recognize him. His hands and feet point to the reality of the experience he has been through. They, and we, recognize him in hands that bless and heal, break bread and share, feet that walk on the same earth that we do. The shared experience of work with our hands, staying grounded in reality, and accepting the suffering and the joys that come to us, are the means that Jesus gives us to recognize him. In today's Gospel, Jesus does not allow his disciples, or us, to be dazzled by a vision, perhaps, dare I say it, to be deceived by one. In fact, we know that vision deceives the disciples, because they think that they are seeing a ghost. This, I think, is another reason the disciples experienced Jesus’s disappearance as his own action. They are beginning to discern the meaning of their experience, when Jesus apparently vanished from their sight after the breaking of the bread. Jesus points us to his hands and feet, which bear the marks of the life and death he experienced, reminding us that there is no life without suffering, no risen life somehow separate from the life that we know. We see that the disciples are beginning to grasp what is happening to them when Luke says, "in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering!" So, to shake them from their disbelief, Jesus ensures that the disciples understand that there is no deceiving vision before them, but a real, physical being of flesh and blood, talking, allowing himself to be touched, eating, and also teaching as he had done before his Passion, "opening their minds to understand the Scriptures." Jesus leads his disciples to understand what we previously heard Peter say in Acts: "God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, that his Messiah would suffer." Jesus adds, "the Messiah is...to rise from the dead on the third day...and you are witnesses of these things."
We all think that we know how the world works. In our common sense understanding, we are born, we live, we die. The dead do not rise, no Messiah will come along to rescue us from an increasingly dangerous world, seeing is believing, and so on. I'm sure we can all list a host of notions that we carry around in our heads, that help us find our way through life. One notion is that we live in a world of cause and effect, that the same causes will always produce the same effects. We rely on this to keep our science and technology and daily life going. And it seems to work, most of
When Jesus is teaching his disciples to understand the true nature of the Messiah, he is announcing, to them and to us, that the common sense understanding of the world is not the whole story. Cutting across what we think we know, what we think we understand of how the world works, is the Resurrection. There is no cause that could have given rise to it, no natural process that could have evolved it, nothing in experience would have led anyone to expect it. Yet, there it is! God raises Jesus the Messiah from the dead, and shows us that the world is not what we think it is. All of a sudden, we see that we live in a world, a universe, in which Resurrection is possible. Then the world is not a closed system, begun in mystery and ending in death, but a world in which the free act of God opens up the possibility of eternity. In the light of this event, we see the world's true nature, and are empowered to live, not by a narrow common sense understanding of the way things are, but by all the possibilities that the power of God puts before us: life, freedom, love, creativity, and more. "You are witnesses of these things," Jesus says to his disciples and to us. We may understand ourselves as being in the place of the disciples, who "in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering!" Perhaps we “in our joy, are disbelieving and still wondering!” Let us allow ourselves to open our minds to understand the Scriptures! Let us live every day as witnesses of the Resurrection.
In Nomine, etc..
No comments:
Post a Comment