Text: Luke 24:36b-48
There’s so much to tell in the Easter story that even though today is the 3rd Sunday of Easter, in the biblical story we are still on Easter day. So much has happened!
If we combine the four gospel accounts, here’s what we know: The women have gone to the tomb. They have been shocked to find that it’s empty. Not only is it empty but the grave cloths have been left behind. Mary Magdalene has seen Jesus but didn’t recognize him until he spoke to her.
The disciples are locked in a room in Jerusalem in fear for their lives because, they reason, If Jesus was killed, won’t his followers be killed as well?
Two disciples, believing everything is over, have returned home to Emmaus, but something pretty amazing happened to them on the way. A stranger joined them, and he walked and talked with them, and they invited him to their home for supper. Then in the breaking of the bread their eyes were opened and they realized it was Jesus. They immediately rushed back to Jerusalem to tell the others what had happened on the road.
And that is where today’s story picks up.
We need to remember that Jesus just suddenly appeared in their midst. He didn't come knocking at the door. Although he had said that he would be raised and there had been a report of the empty tomb by the women, and the report by the two from Emmaus and one by Peter, they were not prepared to have Jesus just appear in their midst as they were talking with one another. Jesus hadn't given them any warning that he would show up right then in that place. Even though we have been through centuries of talking about and believing in Christ's resurrection, how would we react if he suddenly physically appeared right here in our worship service?
The disciples are "startled and terrified” because they think that they are seeing a ghost. The two verses in this story are probably the only places where the word pneuma, which means spirit is translated instead as “ghost.” In contrast to the popular notion of a comforting guardian angel, the presence of these divine beings in biblical stories produced great terror and fear in those who saw them. Except for coming to Jesus in the garden, every other time angels appear, they say, “Don't be afraid”—we remember that from the Christmas story.
So, the disciples have locked themselves in this room in fear, and Jesus just walks right in—I wonder if he walked through the door or the wall? Who wouldn’t be afraid?! And he says, “I am not a ghost!!”[1]
Imagine their joy at seeing him! But also imagine their disbelief. This is wonderful, but how can it possibly be?
So Jesus offers two proofs that he is not a ghost. First he shows them his hands and feet and lets them touch him if they need to, and then he asks for something to eat. Ghosts definitely don’t eat, so this resurrection thing has changed him in an amazing way! You might even say this is the new and improved Jesus! And I’m not being facetious. The resurrected Jesus is the same person his disciples knew and loved—who knew and loved them too—but he is also, now, so much more!
Encountering the risen Jesus is a powerful experience, and then, once he's done the very human, earthy thing of eating the fish, he does the same thing he did with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, a Bible study. The signs of breaking bread and eating fish combine with the Word of God to help the disciples (and us) to make some sense out of all this. "Jesus is not appealing to specific texts to prove his messiahship; he is not proof-texting. He is appealing to the pattern of scripture as indicated in the stories of Moses and the prophets. The prophets and the Messiah proclaim God's word and are always rejected, persecuted, and killed, and still God affirms them. That is the pattern of divine necessity."[2] The gospel tells us that the combination of seeing Jesus, of being with him, and the sharing of the Word together, opened their hearts and minds.
This new and improved Jesus, who is not the same and is also not a ghost but has been bodily resurrected, affirms that "the creature formed 'from the dust of the ground'[3] is indeed good and what God intended." Contrary to the beliefs of the early church and even modern culture, body and soul (or spirit) are not separate but combined into one living whole. Jesus’ resurrection demonstrates that. Many scholars observe that we are saved in our whole being, body and soul, and that somehow that salvation gets worked out here, on earth, in our bodies just as much as our souls.
The resurrection is "God's affirmation that creation matters, that love and justice matter, that humanity, in all its ambiguity and complexity, is still fearfully and wonderfully God-made."[4]
Our culture, with all its marketing messages, loves the idea of "new and improved." But this
"something new" represented in the resurrection of Jesus is so far beyond any advertised product, beyond anything we can get a handle on! It’s beyond our "current modes of thinking about nature—the way things are—as a fixed order of things"[5] God did and is doing something new in the resurrection of Jesus, and in a sense, God is doing something new each time we experience the risen Jesus.
But things are still familiar. When Jesus asks for something to eat, he brings table fellowship right back into the narrative, because it's still at the heart of our story and at the center of who we are. The experience of the early disciples who touched Jesus, put their hands in his wounds and heard his voice, fed his hunger and received his blessing, is the same experience of Christians today who feed the hungry, break bread together, hunger for God's blessing, and respond to the call to turn our lives toward God once again.
The new and improved Jesus also calls his disciples to action. They are to proclaim repentance and forgiveness of sins in his name. They are to start in Jerusalem—the center of things—and go out from there “to all the nations.”
The disciples experienced Jesus that day as being the way they remembered him and at the same time so different! He drew their attention to his hands and his feet, reminding them, I’m sure, of the ways the hands and feet of Jesus had been important in his ministry—healing people, breaking bread, traveling around with the good news—“They were wounded now…the hands that had joined him to other people and the feet that had joined him to the earth. They had holes in them, sore angry-looking bruises that hurt them to look at, only it was important for the disciples to look, because they had never done it before….He wanted them to know he had gone through the danger and not around it."
Through the danger, and not around it. Much of our time and energy is spent on finding a way around things, rather than living through them! We don't want to experience pain or danger, or even to come face to face with the suffering of other people, or the suffering of the earth. What can we do about all of that? And yet, we bear hope for the world because of that commission Jesus gave the disciples and the whole church long ago: "When that world looks around for the risen Christ, when they want to know what that means, it is us they look at. Not our pretty faces and not our sincere eyes but our hands and feet—what we have done with them and where we have gone with them"[6]
In the resurrection, God shows us that there is so much more—both for us and for the world. And with faith in the promise and fulfillment of the resurrection, we are called to be new and improved Christians! We are now the hands and feet of Jesus in the world! AMEN.
Endnotes
[1] Adapted from note #12906 from Brian Stoffregen to “Gospel Notes For Next Sunday” on Ecunet.
[2] Bernard Brandon Scott, New Proclamation, 2006.
[3] Genesis 2:7, NRSV.
[4] Cynthia Gano Lindner, The Christian Century, April 21, 2009.
[5] Stephen Cooper, Feasting on the Word.
[6] Adapted from http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/april-26-2009-third-sunday.html quoting Barbara Brown Taylor’s sermon "Hands and Feet" from Home by Another Way.
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