Witnesses of the Resurrection (Luke 24)

From the Gospel according to Luke, chapter 24, verse 48: You are witnesses of these things.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

     “You are witnesses of these things.” Jesus, in today’s Gospel, speaks these words to his disciples and the Eleven, just before his Ascension. They are almost the last words he speaks on earth, after his Resurrection. It is interesting that Jesus has to announce to his disciples that they are, in fact, witnesses, and he summarizes just what they are witnesses of: the fulfillment of everything written about him in the Scriptures (that is, the Torah, the prophets, and the psalms), that the Messiah is to suffer and rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness are to be proclaimed to all nations. Jesus repeats this to the disciples, because, only a few minutes before, they were “disbelieving and still wondering,” when he appeared among them, so he has to prod them into understanding, into remembering, what has happened, and what is happening before their eyes.

     The whole of the 24th chapter of Luke is about the reality of the risen Jesus, his reality to the women, to the disciples, and to the Eleven. At the beginning, the women who come to the tomb are told, apparently by angels, that Jesus has risen. They carry the message back to the Eleven and the other disciples, who don’t believe them. Peter apparently begins to believe. Then Jesus accompanies two disciples on the road to Emmaus, who recognize him late in the encounter, over a meal. Then Jesus appears to the Eleven in Jerusalem, who are slow to see what is happening.

     “They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost.” In our daily, commonsense understanding of how the world works, no one comes back from the dead, and in our imaginations, only zombies and ghosts come back, and we generally suppose that seeing them would be a terrifying experience. There are many movies and television shows, as we know, that play on this terror. (I think that our reaction to stories like this is beginning to wear off. I’ve noticed a commercial on television that makes fun of the zombie idea. We’ll have to start scaring ourselves with something else, probably.) So the reaction of the Eleven is totally under-standable.

     Jesus responds to this in good rabbinical fashion, by asking the obvious ques-tions: “Why are you frightened? Why do doubts arise in your hearts?” Why, indeed, do we often react to the new, to the totally unexpected, with doubt or fear? The old Adam, the old humanity, can’t let go, even when Jesus is present, or so it seems in our story. So Jesus makes himself known in a very physical way, to clear away their doubt and fear.   
     We remember that in the story of Jesus’s appearance on the road to Emmaus, he made himself known in the breaking of the bread. “Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight,” the Gospel says. This can be taken to mean that Jesus made himself disappear, but I wonder whether it can also mean that some uncertainty overtook the disciples, even at the very moment of recognition, so that they lost their spiritual sight, so to speak. It can also mean something quite different, of course, namely that once the disciples had recognized him in the breaking of the bread, they did not need to recognize him in any other way. In any case, some doubt persisted, because when the two took the story of their experience to the Eleven in Jerusalem, the Eleven were not convinced, and Jesus once more had to intervene, physically this time, in as unmistakeable a manner as possible.

     “Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see.” I’ve mentioned before, in another sermon, the oddity of this remark. Usually, we recognize people by their faces, or, if we see someone we know from a distance, by their profile or way of walking. But here is Jesus, standing before the disciples, saying, “look at my hands and my feet!” and, “touch me and see!” The hands and the feet we can understand, of course, as referring to his wounds. But “touch me and see?” I mentioned a minute ago that perhaps the disciples on the road to Emmaus had “lost their spiritual sight” at the moment of recognition. It is possible that the spiritual sight of the Eleven and the others in Jerusalem, while not exactly lost, was weak, and needed strengthening. Jesus, we know, heals sometimes by touch; it seems to me that perhaps there is a momentary spiritual blindness here, brought on by doubt or fear, which Jesus heals by inviting the disciples to touch him.

     In verse 41 it says, “While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’” This line shows the disciples finding their way out of their doubt and fear, but the change in them is not complete. They give Jesus a piece of broiled fish, which he eats. This completes their transition out of doubt and fear into belief, into confidence that they are seeing the real Jesus before their spiritually-opened eyes. The physical reality of a broiled fish brings them fully to themselves, to experience Jesus’s presence, free of doubt. The fish, we remember, was and is a common symbol for Christianity, since the word ‘fish’ in Greek, ‘ichthus’, is an acronym for the name and titles of Jesus: Iesous Christos, Theou Huios Soter, Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior. So the disciples act out their new-found awareness and acceptance of the reality before them, by handing Jesus a piece of fish, acknowledging, as it were, his name and role in salvation.

     So the disciples have got past their doubt and fear, and are now able to see Jesus for who he really is. But there is still more for them to do. “Then,” it says in verse 45, “he opened their mind to understand the Scriptures.” We remember that Jesus has done this before, on the road to Emmaus, with two of his disciples. It is interesting that the Gospel does not say who the two were. Evidently, they were not among the Eleven, who, we remember, are in Jerusalem. Jesus is letting out the full revelation of his role in salvation, in stages, first to those outside the Eleven. The angels reveal it first to the women at the tomb, then Jesus reveals it to the two on the road to Emmaus, and, finally, he reveals it to the Eleven. The Eleven, presumably, are his inner circle, yet they hear the revelation last. They have been with him from the beginning, and still they don’t fully grasp what he has been saying and doing for the past three years or so. So, for the last time, he reveals his nature and role in salvation, and, finally, there is no more uncertainty on the part of the disciples and the Eleven.

     The teaching here is that revelation is not the sole possession of the inner circle of Jesus. They hear the news last, and they are slow to grasp it when they do hear it. The news reaches the inner circle in stages, and even when Jesus appears among them, the news takes a while to penetrate their fear and doubt. This reminds us never to be too sure that we have the whole story, that we understand the whole story, no matter how much time we have spent with it or how much we think we understand. Jesus can always appear among us, and open our minds to understand the Scriptures, in ways that we don’t expect. Those of us who think that we have the whole story, that there is nothing new to learn, need to keep this in mind.

     This step-by-step revelation all through the 24th chapter, and its repetition in today’s reading, is not accidental. It is significant that the angels reveal it first to women, who act as their messengers to the apostles, as it says in verse 10. The plain teaching here is that women are important in the salvation of the world, and they may even be more important than men, since it is plainly true that in the Gospel, men are often rather slower to get the point than women are. This is an unmistakeable teaching to people of any time and place, who would subordinate women in the community of believers.

     “You are witnesses of these things.” Today’s Gospel is about the physical reality of the risen Jesus. The fact that the Gospel writer makes a point of emphasizing physical details, and the changing emotional states and receptivity of the disciples to the appearances of Jesus, all testify to the reality of these events for the people who witnessed them and recorded them. There is a tendency in our time to turn the story into a metaphor of nothing more than a new awareness of the power of Jesus’s teaching and his impact on people during his earthly life. But the Gospel writer is not presenting a metaphor, but a story about real people in a real place, recollecting actual events. The challenge for us, nearly two thousand years later, is to open ourselves to the reality of that experience. We do that by remaining open to the message of the Gospel writer, to respect what he is saying, without bringing presuppositions to it, about what is possible or not possible.

      “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day. You are witnesses of these things.”

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.