FISH AGAIN

“And while they were still talking about these things, Jesus himself stood among them and said, “Shalom!” They shrank back in terror for they thought they were seeing a ghost. “Why are you so scared?” said Jesus, “and why so confused? Look at my hands and feet—it is really I!  Touch me and see; ghosts don’t have flesh or bones as you can see that I have.” But while they still could not believe it through sheer joy and were utterly bewildered, Jesus said to them, “Do you have anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of grilled fish and part of a honeycomb which he took and ate before their eyes.” (Luke 24:36ff.)

I love these Resurrection stories. They are so unlike what one would expect from a God in a Holy Scripture. Here is the Risen One, walking along a country road with a couple of his former followers who don’t recognize him, explaining the scriptures to them and pointing out that Deutero-Isaiah had it right about the Messiah; letting himself be persuaded to come into the inn with them and have a meal; disappearing as he said the Baruch Atta Adonai blessing over the bread and leaving them with “burning hearts”. Here he is again as they are telling that story to the others in Jerusalem: just standing among them and saying “Hello!” Staggered they are, as we would be. We know about ghosts: this has to be one. He shows them his hands and his feet – with ragged holes in them and traces of blood. OK, an apparition would have the right visual detailing. But no: he goes on and asks if they’ve any food. And lo and behold, there’s that grilled fish again, this time with a bit of honeycomb. I’ve never tried fish with honeycomb, though I like both; but that is obviously not the point here. The point is that he sits down and eats them, then looks at them with a grin and says “So -- do ghosts eat?”

The sheer beauty of this, of Jesus, is that combination of the absolute majesty that rises out of the tomb in huge silence on the one hand, and the down-to-earthness that comforts a woman delivered from stoning, that talks Zacchaeus down from his tree, that discusses Heaven in terms of vineyards and mustard-seeds, that goes to dinner with a collaborationist (un collabo, as the French called it, ‘someone who was wrong in the war’ as my parents used to say), and eats grilled fish on the beach or in a city apartment.

The other point, though, is that both here and on the road to Emmaus what he came to do was explain the Scriptures, i.e. the Old Testament. And as Benedict XVI points out in Jesus of Nazareth, what is it that he teaches them? Not that they should be good charitable progressive citizens: “No one would crucify a teacher who told pleasant stories to enforce prudential morality,” wrote C.W.F. Smith. Not that the Kingdom of Heaven will arrive like the eschaton, the End of Time, with a cosmic bang in the next few weeks or even years. No, what he teaches is that with him the Kingdom has come: that he is the regnum, the reign of God, literally incarnate. Not only does he explain the Word of God in terms of a mustard-seed, he himself is also the mustard-seed, which must die in the earth to rise and become the tree that shelters and gives fruit.

That thought is so stupendous that we tend to avoid it instinctively, either by not thinking about it or by accepting it easily in words and then, and thus, avoiding it. It makes us understand the force of “where two or three are together in my name, I will be there with them”; it makes us understand the power of the Real Presence in the Eucharist. There may or may not be pie in the sky when we die – it may, in fact, be grilled fish, get used to it --, but the Kingdom of God is right here whenever we seriously link, with heart and mind and soul, to the one who said, and says, “Shalom!”

                    Image: "Christ appears to the Apostles at Table" by Duccio di Buoninsegna (1255-1319). 
Note the bread, the fish, and the honeycomb in pots!