WALKING THROUGH WALLS

          

 

Now, after Easter, we are in the Resurrection Time – a limited period between Easter and the Ascension. The time when Yeshua is back, for a specific task: to explain to the disciples and the expanding community what his ministry, passion and resurrection have all been about, so that they will understand it as a coherent whole, an act of the Father’s love for his human children; and to set the community on its future path of realising the New Alliance between God and the expanded Israel that is the whole human race. 

            It is a strange time. One of the things Benedict XVI points out in his Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week is the fact that when the disciples closest to Yeshua meet him after the Resurrection, they do not recognise him. This is extraordinary. They have lived with him every day for three years ; and yet when they land their boats and see a man grilling fish on the beach who says “Come and have breakfast!” they do not recognise him at first. Likewise the two less close disciples walking to Emmaus, who were clearly among those who had listened to him, seen him, admired him and followed him, and who now spend a couple of hours at his side, listening to him explain the Scriptural basis for the Passion: they only recognise him when, at table in the inn, he breaks the bread with the Baruch atta Adonai prayer – at which point he vanishes. 

            It makes you wonder what his resurrection-body looked like, what it was. Rembrandt painted it, and when you compare it to his paintings of the living Yeshua (probably after one of his Jewish neighbours in Amsterdam), you can in fact see a very uncanny difference. I’m not sure anyone else has imagined it so well. But would he have been unrecognisable? One may also wonder what this resurrection-body in fact was. Was it a temporary one, taken on only for this time between Easter and the Ascension? It did have the stigmata of the Passion, as the story of Thomas shows. Or was it his definitive eternity-body which he still has today, sitting at the right hand of the Father? That’s not something even the boldest theologian can answer.

            Also, this resurrection-body walks through walls. The disciples are together in an upper room; the doors are closed and locked; suddenly there he is among them. Not a ghost: feel my wounds. But suddenly, there. At table in Emmaus: whoosh, he is gone. Now this reminded me of something Benedict does not mention, although I’m sure others have – nothing that can be thought about the Gospels has not been thought and written, usually many times. When Yeshua returns to Nazareth and at first the people are thrilled by him and then turn against him, they want to throw him off a local cliff: “They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.”(Luke 4:29-30). I have always found that astonishing in its serene calmness. This is an angry mob, the kind that stoned Stephen and would have stoned the woman taken in adultery. Few things are more terrifying and more dangerous. But he passed through the midst of them. 

            In other words, even in his entirely human mortal body there was something uncanny. A touch of the resurrection-body, one might say, was always already there. This was not one of his “miracles”: it was not done for someone else, and no fuss is made about it. He just wasn’t there any more. 

            So now, in this Between-Time, this Resurrection-Time, we might wish that he would still suddenly appear among us and have a bite of fish; but that’s not going to happen. The Ascension is past, and he is now in Eternity-Time. But still patiently waiting for us, as he was on that beach at breakfast. Would we have recognised him? Do we now? He did tell us where to look: in the child holding out a trusting hand; in the lonely old woman whose children never phone or visit; in the retired psychiatrist whose days not longer make sense; and in the entirely unexpected smile of a total stranger. Perhaps, apart from the gestures such incarnations call forth in us, the thing for us to do at this time is to think and learn and discuss as we would have in that inn at Emmaus, and so come to understand the coherence of the life, calling, death and resurrection of this most unlikely Meshiach.

Images: Rembrandt, "Head of Christ" and "The Risen Christ"

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!