Third Sunday of Easter Reflection with Canon Robin Gibbons

Jesus Appears to His Disciples by Ilyas Baasim Khuurii Bazzii Raahi

April 14th 2024

In the words of the Apostles Creed, which is our baptismal affirmation of faith, we recite this formula:

"I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting".

There, in the penultimate phrase, is the statement about our own expectation of death and the transformation of our frailty into the resurrected life with Christ-as ourselves, integrated , whole, body and soul transfigured and resurrected as Christ himself is. The longer more theological formula of the `Nicene creed puts it this way: ' I believe in the resurrection from the dead and life everlasting', which to my mind is saying the same thing, bodies and persons are part of death, to live we need to be somehow present as ourselves, so eternal life is that invitation to be with the Communion of saints in the Kingdom as we are already, only fully transformed in Christ.

Perhaps we don't think about this as often as we should, yet this third Sunday in Easter, our scriptures point to that fact of bodily resurrection. It is implicit in our first reading from Acts;"The author of life you put to death, but God raised him from the dead; of this we are witnesses' (Acts 3:15) and throughout this season we hear proclaimed in the gospels the accounts of those witnesses who saw him and believed, as for example in this Sunday's account where Jesus reveals himself again to the disciples in human bodily form. Not only are they invited to touch him, he then eats with them. It is worth reflecting on this in detail because Luke's account gives us so much hope and challenges us to let go of other more complicated and confused notions of what the resurrection means for each of us as we journey on through the place and time we call home, that is our lives now lived on this poor earth:

"But they were startled and terrified and thought that they were seeing a ghost. Then he said to them, "Why are you troubled? And why do questions arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you can see I have."And as he said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While they were still incredulous for joy and were amazed, he asked them, "Have you anything here to eat?" They gave him a piece of baked fish; he took it and ate it in front of them". (Lk 24:37-42)

Reading that I know many of us might wonder how the aging process of our bodies, and at times the terrible ravages of sickness such as cancer can mean that we somehow become 'new' again? But isn't that just what our liturgy, scripture and the experience of the wise and holy men and women of faith all share with us?. The heart of the resurrection of Jesus is not about magic, but about a reality one hinted to us in that gospel I love so much of the Transfiguration. There we discover with Christ glorified on the mountain, that in God we are changed, transfigured, transformed, and what is frail and mortal takes on a new dimension of reality, immortality, where who we are becomes very clear.

Yes, our bodies matter, for they are matter, we are stardust, and to dust we return, but in the power of the Most High we become a new creation patterned on our old selves. Here it is Christ who shows us the way and in these Easter gospels his way is to show us peace, trust, hope and joy filled love, not as some amorphous disembodies spirit, but as really ourselves and in some manner recognisably so. I haven't arrived at that point and nor have any of you, but in my ministry as priest I have accompanied many to the gates of death and I hope helped them pass over the threshold. Never in any of these moments (or afterwards) have I seen death as a vile total ending of life. Yes, it is tragic in its loss, sad in the cutting off of a loved one from the rest who remain, but I never have discovered it as a final end. Instead, and this gets stronger as the years pass by, I sense it more as a 'going home' to those who I have known and loved and who have gone before me, but also to that great company of the unknown ones, and yes, the recognition of the face of Christ greeting me with accepting love.

How will I recognise Him or others? The answer lies in these accounts of the Risen Christ showing himself so clearly, pointing out though these voices and memories of the witnesses that he has indeed risen from the dead and where he is known as himself, and moreover, that one day, maybe sooner rather than later, He will come again to judge the living and the dead. I trust his words and believe in them, not in a simple incredulous manner, but because it begins to make sense to me in all I have known , seen and experienced. It helps me understand that the horrors of war, those dreadful acts of human violence, cruelty and destruction , of death itself can never be the final answer, that although human life is a mixture of joy and suffering, this is also a mystery which we can never truly fathom-except to know that through Christ , life is transformed, made good, made a new creation!

May the words of Jesus to us hold us close in His embrace to us this week: "Thus it is written that the Messiah would suffer and rise from the dead on the third day and that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, would be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things". (Lk 24: 47,48)

Lectio

Karl Rahner

Jesus himself said that he would descend into the heart of the earth (Matt 12.40), that is, into the heart of all earthly things. where everything is linked into one and where, in the midst of that unity, death and futility sit. In death he descended there. By a holy ruse of eternal life he allowed himself to be overcome by death, allowed death to swallow him into the innermost centre of the world, so that having descended to the primordial forces and the radical unity of the world, he might establish his divine life in it forever.

N T Wright

"The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it…What you do in the present-by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself-will last into God's future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it…). They are part of what we may call building for God's kingdom."

N T Wright, Surprised by Hope