Easter
Thursday -
Even faced with the risen Lord the disciples are
still struggling to believe what they can see, hear and touch. The hypothesis
that somehow the disciples came up with the resurrection stories from their
faith in the resurrection does not hold up – what is revealed here is that the
disciples struggled to have faith; faith was born not from themselves but from
encountering the risen Lord and grew by grace.
The risen Lord shows that He is the same person they
knew by showing them His wounds. Here was the same body that had been crucified
two days earlier. So not only was His body missing from the tomb, but now they
can see the body with its wounds. So the evidence that He had risen is
incontrovertible for the disciples.
Of course there is something altogether different
about Him too! He is not a vision, nor a ghost. He is physically there. To
demonstrate His physicality He asks for something to eat, and they offer Him
broiled fish. Ghosts or visions do not eat.
So the picture is building of what the nature of the
resurrection is. The resurrected Lord is physically present with the body that
was crucified. The risen Lord talks and eats. Together with this is the fact
that He can appear to various people in different places (outside the tomb, on
the road to Emmaus, then in a locked room). He seems no longer subject to the
limitations of time, space and the laws of nature. He reveals therefore what
His glorified body is like, and thereby shows what our resurrected and
glorified bodies will be like.
Just as He had done for the disciples on the road to
Emmaus, so He does for the Apostles. He opens their minds to the meaning of
Scripture. So also for us, if we are to understand the Scriptures we must allow
Christ to teach us by the Holy Spirit through the Church’s teaching authority
(we cannot hope that personal interpretation will allow us to understand the
Scriptures rightly!).
Finally our Lord commissions the Apostles to go and
preach repentance and salvation to all people and nations. The Church dispenses
the blessings of the New Covenant through the preaching of the gospel and the
administration of the sacraments (see Mt 28:19-20 ‘baptism’, Jn 20:23
‘confession’).
The Lord wants the fruit of His passion, death and
resurrection to be shared with all people that they may turn away from the
fallen life and through the grace of Christ live the risen life in Him. The
capacity to do that comes through baptism, and our repeated failures to rise to
the new life are rectified through the Sacrament of Penance. Through the
Eucharist (if we receive it in a state of grace) our lives are increasingly
ordered to the risen life.
