I AM struck by the range of responses from those that witness Jesus’s appearances after his resurrection. We can consider sight as our most reliable sense: “Seeing is believing”; “The camera never lies.” But this Gospel says that seeing shouldn’t be believing.
On Easter Day, Mary Magdalene had met Jesus within the garden, but thought that he was the gardener. When he called her by name, she recognised him. The same was true at Emmaus, where two disciples recognised Jesus within the breaking of bread. Now, he eats a bit of fish in front of them to reassure them that he shouldn’t be a ghost.
I’m wondering what it was that convinced the disciples that they were seeing the actual Jesus. Was it his eating the grilled fish? Or was it his reassuring, reasoning, reasonable voice? He tells them how you can make sure: “Touch me and see.” Luke uses the identical, rare word for touching when Paul preaches to the Athenians, speaking of how they’ve “felt for”, or “groped after”, God — like people who find themselves at midnight, or wearing blindfolds. Perhaps touch is a more reliable sense than sight.
What you can not tell from hearing only this a part of Luke’s Gospel is that it’s a continuation of the Emmaus story. That recognition “within the breaking of bread” (Luke 24.35) is the “this” of the primary sentence. So we cannot explain the disciples’ response to Jesus’s sudden appearance here by arguing that they were surprised at finding him alive.
Or can we? Even before Emmaus, we knew that the disciples weren’t yet in listening mode. The women had discovered the empty tomb, and had told the disciples about it, and about what the angel had said to them; however the disciples had dismissed that first report of the resurrection: “These words looked as if it would them an idle tale, and so they didn’t consider them” (24.11).
When the disciples hear the second report, this time from Cleopas and his companion, they do give it some attention. But they can not have heeded it fully, because, when Jesus makes a 3rd appearance, their response is fearful. Admittedly, that appearing happens suddenly. Luke doesn’t say that Jesus walked as much as them, but that he simply appeared of their midst. So it should have been a shock. Appearing out of nowhere is what “spirits” do, not humans.
I’m wondering why Luke tells it this fashion. One answer is that everybody who got here to consider within the resurrection did so only after they saw it for themselves. But, if that were the message, it could make faith unimaginable for many of us; for we cannot witness the resurrection for ourselves because the disciples did. Jesus’s ascension into heaven has brought the time of his human, earthly, presence to an end.
If this can’t be Luke’s meaning, we will fall back on last Sunday’s Gospel story of Thomas. It tells us what to depend on when making our own leaps of religion: “Blessed are those that haven’t seen and yet have believed” (John 20.29). There can also be the proven fact that, in his Gospel, Luke’s story of the resurrection is just just starting. We must remember how way more he has to inform, and look to his sequel, the Acts of the Apostles.
So, fear was the first response to witnessing the empty tomb. Jesus’s friends and followers have lost even the mortal stays of their loved one. They don’t understand what has happened. This condition of not knowing has intensified their fear. Yet, after they encounter the risen Jesus for themselves, their first response can also be fear.
This is a paradox: to fear death and yet be afraid to behold the dead alive. In the course of a lifetime, all of us endure multiple bereavements, and should find ourselves craving for a point of contact — nevertheless momentary, nevertheless vestigial — with those that have died. Fear does make sense for us, because this life is all that we all know, and in it there may be no contact between the living and the dead (Mark 12.27; Luke 16.26). All that stands between us and the grimmest type of grief — despair — is, first, prayer; then the known-unknown that’s Christian resurrection. “Just a little while, and you may now not see me, and again somewhat while, and you will note me” (John 16.16). It is enough.
