Third Sunday of Easter, Cycle B. Today’s readings: Acts 3:13-15, 17-19; 1 John 2:1-5a; Luke 24:35-48
Everyone loves a good ghost story, the kind you take turns to tell huddled around a campfire. Allowing for some odd facts and a good dose of fantasy stirred in, the one who tells the scariest story wins the night.
In so doing, without giving much thought to factual evidence, we are speaking about the deepest fears that haunt humankind. Ghost stories often deal with deaths without closure, the terror of putrefaction, fear of not finding peace even after death, and our abhorrence of ceasing to exist altogether, all told in the comfort of good company.
In today’s gospel, Jesus lets himself be seen by his disciples after his resurrection. For a moment they are hesitant. Might it just be their mind playing tricks on them?
It is striking how, in this particular passage, mundane life now seems to be woven seamlessly into the unique event of the resurrection that pervades the whole of creation.
The resurrection is not only Jesus’s, but in some way also his disciples’, insofar as they now see beyond death and perceive Jesus as he really is
The Risen Lord acknowledges his disciples’ doubts but he does not brush them away. Instead, he leads them to a deeper understanding. Jesus senses their difficulty to recognise him and shows them his wounds, in which they recognise their own wounds. To show them that he is not a figment of their imagination, he eats a baked fish in front of them.
With his resurrection from the dead, Jesus took the whole of creation to a different level. Underlying the whole of reality is new life about to spring forth. Our personal anguish, anxiety, and angst, and that of our age, perhaps best captured in Edvard Munch’s famous The Scream painting, is dispelled by Jesus’s death and resurrection. Suffering and death still remain part of reality. But they also transpire new life at the same time.
Just as a seed appears as though it is insignificant, inert or even dead, within it is a wellspring of life discernible only to those who adopt the eyes that are ready to catch a glimpse of this dynamic at work.
Wellspring of Worship, by Jean CorbonThis is why, as Jean Corbon notes in the Wellspring of Worship, the resurrected Christ does not “appear” to the disciples but instead he “makes himself known” and simply “stands in their midst”, as we read in today’s gospel. We might say that the resurrection is not only Jesus’s, but in some way also his disciples’, insofar as they now see beyond death and perceive Jesus as he really is.
I am struck by the words of the early Christian writer, Tertullian, who in his De Resurrectione Carnis sees in nature’s rebirth an analogy of our own resurrection with Christ’s. “The glory of the world is obscured in the shadow of death” writes the third century apologist from Carthage, “but yet it again revives, slaying its own death, night, opening its own sepulchre”.
The wounds that Jesus shows his disciples, the flesh and bones he speaks of, reveal that even our very real human limitations, indeed, what makes us human, unique, and vulnerable (vulnera is Latin for wound), is woven seamlessly into the resurrection, turning us to resurrected beings in-the-making. It is no coincidence that the risen Christ speaks of the forgiveness of sins while charging his disciples to be witnesses of his resurrection.
If Hannah Arendt was right that forgiveness is the act that allows a person to be released of past wrongs, not to be determined any more by them and to start afresh, then the resurrection can already be seen and hoped for even in our relationships.
As the 30th anniversary since the atrocious genocide in Rwanda is being remembered this year, they are not ghost stories that are now being told. Instead, stories of forgiveness and new life are now allowing us to catch a glimpse once again of the Risen One among us, wounds and all.