May the words of my mouth and the thoughts of our hearts come pleasingly before you, O God. Amen, When people die, we often learn a great deal about them, their home life and work and civic involvement, and some of the special contributions they have made to our world. Survivors share their stories, their experiences, and together they paint a more complete picture of the one who is gone, as we have just seen with Great Britain's Prince Philip.
Scholars who study the scriptures tell us of the “pre-Easter” Jesus and the “post-Easter” Jesus; that is, what was believed of Jesus during his life contrasted with what was believed of him after his crucifixion and death. It’s not hard for me to accept that the disciples gradually grew to appreciate Jesus better after his death and resurrection. “You mean he cured the person possessed by demons?” “You're saying that he was cruelly beaten and mocked before his death, and he forgave everyone? I didn’t know all that; I was away on a business trip.” Knowing more about Jesus made the disciples care more about the whole world. Knowing him in this different way, they felt that they had a ministry to everyone.
Today’s gospel is definitely about the post-Easter Jesus, the risen Christ. He declares openly that he is the Messiah. It is no secret now. To my amazement, he is still concerned about the disciples, about us, and continues to relate to our earth-bound existence. “Look at my hands and my feet,” Jesus tells them (Lk. 24: 40). “Touch me and see that it is I myself. A ghost does not have flesh and bones.” Jesus was suddenly in their midst now. The disciples thought they were seeing a ghost. So do we at times. We experience the presence of the risen Christ in our lives, and we sometimes dismiss it as imagination, or just the memory of childhood faith. But Christ refuses to be dismissed as “just” anything! He says to us, “Touch me and see. Touch me in bread and wine. Touch me in another person, or in the gathered community, the Church. Feel the flesh and bones, the reality of faith.”
“Have you anything to eat?” asks Jesus. He asks it not just of long-ago disciples but of us today. Jesus asks if we have any spiritual supplies, any resources to draw on to live in these changing, challenging days, when we haven't passed the Peace to one another for over a year, or shared the blessed bread and wine. What do we say to him if he asks us? Is our ritual meal really the Body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven? If we say “yes,” what does that mean for us? For early Christians, it meant that God is not just pie in the sky, not just a ghost. God is in our midst. God is someone we take seriously, individually and as a parish, as we spend our money and prioritize our time and reflect on how we treat people and what we say when we pray.
Jesus opened their minds to understand the scriptures, says the gospel. Don’t you wish you were there? Don't you wish he was here, now, to open our minds to understand the scriptures? The bible, so central to our faith and worship, has been used to promote colonialism, genocide and war, racism, slavery and sexism, greed and hatred and disregard for the creation itself. Some find within it no redemption, and turn away. But we, guided by the Holy Spirit, and made one with the post-Easter Christ, find within it freedom and justice, truth and equality, and a world ruled by sacrificial love. We will either regard the Bible as some old relic or as the most precious pertinent thing in the world.
“You are witnesses to all this,” Jesus says. “Begin from Jerusalem to proclaim forgiveness of sins to all nations.” What might that mean? Begin from where we are. Begin right now. Realize that Christian faith is not just a lovely background to special moments of life like birth and marriage and death. Christianity is not merely an organization one joins. It is a spiritual relationship with one who reaches out to us and directs us into a purposeful, compassionate, and disciplined life; a Christ-like life. Our faith in Christ calls us to ministry and witness. We can’t keep it to ourselves, even in lockdown. So we say “Alleluia, Praise be to God" in the face of all that pulls us away from God. We sing alleluia, we say alleluia, and by the grace of God, we live alleluia.
Let us pray: Open the eyes of our faith, O God, that we may behold the risen Christ in all his redeeming work. May we who have been blessed to see him and to touch him give others the opportunity to do the same, so that the whole world may know your endless love for us. Transformed by your love, make us your real presence in this world. Amen.
