Jesus himself stood in the midst of his disciples
God, we have suggested, is in the midst of the sufferings of our world and day. Never more so, than in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ which shows us exactly that. What is of the greatest interest with respect to the essential Christian teaching of the Resurrection is that it is something which we learn from Christ. He comes into our midst. “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us.” That statement from 1 John 4.10 which we heard/ read in the Good Friday anthems (BCP, p.173) reverberates throughout Eastertide. Divine love conquers sin and evil. It is the life of the Resurrection in us but it has to be learned.
That is the point of the Resurrection appearances of Jesus to the disciples. It is about opening their understanding to see the principle and truth of reality in their very midst. It is a demonstration of the ultimate ‘lordship’ of Christ and it bears witness to Christ as true God and true man. The Lucan Gospel for Easter Tuesday is poignant and touching, even if touch is now persona non grata in our world. Yet there are ways of being touched by words, a kind of transmutation of the sensible into the intelligible.
Christ comes into our midst but the initial reaction is one of terror and fright even after Jesus’ first word of peace. “Peace be unto you.” They thought they were seeing a ghost. One of the important teachings of the Resurrection is that it requires us to think about the body in a new way or, perhaps, we might say, just to think about the body. For as something thinkable then it is already more than though not less than physical and material. Thinking after all is a kind of act of de-sensing; it removes things from simply the tangible. It is an act of abstraction, a necessary and critical feature of what it means to be human.
This is the power of Jesus’ response to their reaction. “Why are ye troubled, and why do thoughts arise in your hearts?” Thoughts that are negative and sceptical. “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me and see;” Jesus says, “ for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.” This is a strong testimony to the reality of the Resurrection. The humanity of Christ is not a chimera, a mere appearance. It is very real and yet its reality is more though not less than what we see and imagine. Why? Because of the way in which we are wedded to the world and to ourselves. We struggle to learn how to think about ourselves and our own bodies in their deeper truth as grounded in God’s will and purpose. We are more, not less than our bodies.
The body knows what the spirit knows, but the spirit knows that it knows. Something is known in the body but only knowingly known when it is grasped in the spirit, in the mind. The Resurrection stories go to great lengths to emphasize the bodily reality of Jesus, his hands, his feet, his wounded side, his eating a piece of broiled fish and a piece of honey-comb, etc. Such things all bear witness to the Resurrection as the redemption and transformation of our humanity. They affirm ultimately the uniqueness of the individuality of each of us, soul and body. Not one, the body, at the expense of the other, the soul, rather both together as belonging to the truth of our creation.
What we shall be in the life to come is unknown. All that we can say (and really what more is there to be said?) is that we shall be like what Christ is and we shall know even as we are known. How? By the opening of our understanding that we might understand the Scriptures. It all turns on a kind of learning, on the teaching of Christ. Here Jesus takes and eats and then feeds us with the words of eternal life. He explains through the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms, referencing the three parts of the Hebrew scriptures, all the things concerning him.
It comes down to this: his Passion and Resurrection, and our repentance and forgiveness. Such a metanoia on our part (a thinking upon these things) is our participation in Christ. He lives in us through repentance and forgiveness. It happens because he is in the midst of our lives and not in flight from our lives. Such is the redemptive love of Christ. We learn – which is what it means to be a disciple – by virtue of his being in our midst. For there he engages us in body and soul.
Jesus himself stood in the midst of his disciples
Fr. David Curry
Easter Tuesday 2020
Posted not preached owing to the Covid-19 outbreak