This Week: Lent 3B
Gospel: Luke 24:36b-48
This is our second of two weeks of first meetings with the disciples. And in both, there is focus on the physicality of the resurrection. But the concerns of each story are clearly quite different.
Physicality as a construct of belief seems elementary, especially to John. But this is quite honestly subverted by the gospel’s approach—since blessed are those who believe without seeing (ie. proof). That story establishes the necessity of Jesus’s physical resurrection, but shifts the emphasis to belief.
The visit in Luke, by contrast, is a bit more direct. Or perhaps less esoteric. Even the fact that John’s Jesus could be read as insulting Thomas shows how easy it is to assume intent.
Luke’s depiction of Jesus doesn’t seem to care or mind that he’s telling people who don’t quite understand. He’s helping them get there anyway.
Here, Jesus just throws open his hands, seemingly to get it over with! Touch me. I’l eat something. What do I need to do to prove I’m actually here?
The focus on scripture
Jesus is focused on helping them to see. Not his flesh, but his presence in the scripture. And even more importantly, their presence in it.
This is what Jesus does with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. And he does the same here for the rest of them. Jesus is opening the scriptures and blowing their minds.
From here, he will direct them to wait for the Spirit. And their response is to camp out at the Temple, continuously praising God.
This doesn’t strike me as reflecting the evangelical zeal for the authority of scripture, but the authority of Jesus in the scripture. Which is an idea that feels even more significant to us in the present, when scripture and belief are what we have!
This puts pressure, not on the scriptures as a whole half as much as it puts on the presence of Jesus in our lives and scripture—an idea that forces us to focus on what Jesus actually says and does.
But there’s a twist.
In opening the scriptures to them, it changes the disciples from lovable morons to prophetic witnesses to both the humanness and divinity of Christ. Which is a big deal.
It also makes the ending of Luke (and all of Acts that follows) more potently about our witnessing Christ through them.
And what do the disciples do while they wait?
Spend all of their time in the Temple blessing God.
I mean, I don’t necessarily want to spend that much more time at church, my friends. But these cats are showing us how to respond to the resurrection. And we all could up our blessing God game.