Easter Thursday, April 8, 2021

Luke 24:35–48

The disciples of Jesus recounted what had taken place along the way, and how they had come to recognize him in the breaking of bread. While they were still speaking about this, he stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.” But they were startled and terrified and thought that they were seeing a ghost. Then he said to them, “Why are you troubled? And why do questions arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you can see I have.” And as he said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While they were still incredulous for joy and were amazed, he asked them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of baked fish; he took it and ate it in front of them. He said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and in the prophets and psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures. And he said to them, “Thus it is written that the Christ would suffer and rise from the dead on the third day and that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, would be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” 

“While they were still speaking about this, he stood in their midst.” In St. Luke’s telling of the Resurrection, the Lord Jesus first appears to the Apostles together after he had appeared to the two disciples on their way to Emmaus.  He appears as these two disciples are describing his original appearance to them, as though to confirm their account.  He says to them all, “Peace be with you”, that is, Shalom.  While this was a standard greeting among the Jews, the Lord truly means for them to be at peace as well.  His appearance here and the use of the greeting mirror Luke’s telling of the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary at the very beginning of his Gospel.  The appearance is sudden and completely unexpected.  Instead of an angel, it is the Lord himself.  The greeting he gives them, Shalom, would have been the Hebrew greeting the angel gave to Mary, but which Luke rendered in the typical Greek idiom.  His greeting to them was no mere formality, but an exhortation or even an order.  And yet, “they were startled and terrified and thought that they were seeing a ghost.”  Now, the disciples who were going to Emmaus had told them how “they had come to recognize him in the breaking of bread”, but this has barely prepared them for the risen Jesus.  Thus, although the women disciples had told the Apostles what they had witnessed, and Jesus had appeared already to Peter, and now the two disciples had told them of their extensive encounter with him, the Apostles react in this way, and this on top of the fact that the Lord had spoken several times to them about his rising after his crucifixion and Death. Luke assembles these facts and reactions with an eye to the major objection the Greeks had to believing in the Lord: that he rose from the dead.  Luke himself would write of St. Paul’s address introducing the Lord in Athens that all went well until he mentioned this, at which point the Athenians shook their heads, got up, and left: “And when they had heard of the resurrection of the dead, some indeed mocked” (Acts 17, 32).  These Athenians were Epicureans and Stoics, followers of two philosophical schools of thought the founders of which were men of great intellect and renown, and whose writings relied on logical argument.  By emphasizing the initial disbelief of the Lord’s own followers, Luke shows that sympathizes with the objection of the Greeks, as a Greek himself, and so persuades them to continue reading.  

The Lord treats their fear calmly, without remonstration, and proceeds to show them in a very matter-of-fact way that he has indeed risen bodily: on the one hand, he is not the ghost that these superstitious Jewish people (as the Greeks thought of them) took him for; and on the other, he represents some entirely new reality, worthy of intellectual inquiry: “He asked them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ They gave him a piece of baked fish; he took it and ate it in front of them.”  Establishing his physical presence among them by this demonstration, he reasons with them calmly: “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and in the prophets and psalms must be fulfilled.”  The Greeks would have approved of this procedure and they would have felt curious to understand this phenomenon.  At the end of his opening the Scriptures to the Apostles together, the Lord tells them that the “repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, would be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”  The Greeks now hear of the reason for why people like Paul are among them, preaching.  What the Apostles believe is not exactly a philosophy, nor it is exactly a foreign cult, like that of Isis, popular at the time.  Rather, it is a reasonable belief system rooted in recent historical events and preached by those who witnessed the miracles and words of the One around whom it was centered, Jesus Christ.  Indeed, Luke records the Lord saying to his followers on this occasion, “You are witnesses of these things.”  These words remind his followers of the reality of what they had seen and heard and of their obligation to render testimony, and are meant for the Greeks to hear as well, that the ones preaching to them are authentic and authorized.  They are, indeed, “sent”.  This accounts for the presence of the Apostles in their cities as well as for their zeal, which is not motivated by any desire for personal gain but for the love of their Redeemer, whom they had known themselves.

We have the words of these witnesses in the Gospels, the Letters, and the other writings collected into what came to be called the New Testament, and we have the writings of those who knew these original witnesses, men like Luke and Ignatius of Antioch and Clement of Rome.  We too are witnesses of the Lord’s teachings, his miracles, his Death and Resurrection, and we too have a responsibility and the glory of bringing the Lord before the nations of our own day, in ways they can understand.