Sometimes you need more than a vision.

Luke 24:36b-48

Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word,  I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.^[1]

 This is the beginning of the Gospel of Luke.  It is, in the writer’s own words, an orderly account.  He is reporting what has been told to him by those “who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.”  Luke wants you to know that he investigated everything carefully.  So if Luke tells you that shepherds watching their flocks at night heard angels singing and that an angel told them to go to Bethlehem to see a baby in a manger, Luke wants you to know that he is reporting the story exactly as it was told to him by at least one reliable person.

Luke likes details.  Luke locates the story of Jesus in history.  It began when Tiberius was emperor.  When Quirinius was governor of Syria.  When that first census was taken—you know, the one everyone hated so much because it stuck us with that annual tax of one denarius per person.  

Luke keeps things physical and human.  This gospel doesn’t spiritualize practical or justice issues.  For Luke, it’s “Blessed are the poor,” not “blessed are the poor in spirit.”  Yet Luke does emphasize the presence and work of the Holy Spirit—Jesus is conceived by the Spirit (1:35), and anointed with the Spirit (3:22; 4:1, 14, 18), people are filled with the Spirit (1:15, 41, 67) and inspired by the Spirit (2:25–27),  God gives the Holy Spirit to all who ask (11:13), and Jesus promises the disciples that they will be “clothed with power from on high”(24:49), which is clearly a reference to the Holy Spirit who will make a fiery appearance in the Book of Acts, which is really volume 2 of the Gospel of Luke—but for all that, the Spirit usually seems more practical than ethereal in Luke.

And then there’s the eating. 

Luke’s gospel seems to have an unusual interest in food.

In the Magnificat, Mary sings that the poor will be fed and in Luke’s telling of the Beatitudes, Jesus says those who hunger will be fed.  In Luke’s gospel, Jesus talks about table etiquette three times. There are five banquet parables.  Jesus is present at nineteen meals.  Five times he is criticized for eating too much and with the wrong people.  But it is after the resurrection that food plays its most important role in this very earthy gospel.

On the afternoon of the resurrection, the risen Jesus joins a couple of heartbroken travelers who are returning from Jerusalem to their home in Emmaus.  These two, let’s call them Mr. and Mrs. Cleopas, are two people who know Jesus well.  In fact, if Cleopas is the same person as Clopas mentioned in John 19 (and most scholars think he is), then these two Emmaus travelers might be Jesus’ uncle and aunt.   Tradition identifies Clopas as the brother of Joseph.  So they know him,  but as he walks with them and talks with them they aren’t aware of who he is.  Luke tells us “their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” It’s not until he sits down with them and breaks bread that they realize who he is.   Breaking bread—food shared at the table—becomes the sign of recognition.

Mr. and Mrs. Cleopas rushed back to Jerusalem to tell the disciples huddled in the upper room about their encounter with Jesus.  But just as they started to tell their story, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.”  

And here is where Luke, the realist, the reporter, is at his best.  He tells us, “They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost.”  Well you would be, wouldn’t you.  Startled. And terrified.  If you had seen someone killed in a brutal and horrific way and then entombed but suddenly that person was standing right in front of you, you would probably think you were seeing a ghost, too.  Or maybe you would question your own sanity.  

Before their minds could be totally blown or wander too far into the fog of speculation, Jesus brought them sharply to the reality of the moment.  “He said to them, ‘Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?  Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.’ And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet.”  

Once again Luke puts emphasis on the physical.  Touch me and see.  Luke is making a point.  A ghost does not have flesh and bones.  

Naturally the friends of Jesus, when suddenly confronted with his unexpected, risen presence, feel a tangle of emotions.  And once again, Luke is the realistic reporter.  He tells us they were joyful and disbelieving and wondering all at the same time.  So Jesus asks for something to eat and they give him a piece of broiled fish.  This is the physical proof that seals the deal and silences all doubts. Ghosts do not eat.

The realism is important here.  This is not merely a “spiritual” resurrection.  This is not merely a vision.  And this is certainly is not an elaborate mythic metaphor for springtime.  Luke wants to make it absolutely clear that this is flesh and bones Jesus returned to life, Jesus physically, bodily raised from the dead. 

Why does Luke make such a point of this and why does it matter for us?

In the original ending of Mark’s gospel, there are no post-resurrection encounters.  There is an empty tomb and a strange young man clothed in white who gives the startled women the cryptic message that “he has gone ahead of you.”  It has been suggested that the empty tomb in Mark symbolizes that ultimate love in our lives, the love of God, cannot be crucified or killed.  

Well okay.  That’s not a bad message as far as it goes.  It’s an easy idea to carry in your head.  It sounds somewhat sophisticated and enlightened.  But does it move your heart?  Can that symbolic interpretation carry the full weight of your hopes and fears when you’re faced with a crisis?

We are called to share the Good News of Christ risen, Christ alive, Christ with us, Christ at work in the world.   We are called to bring hope—a real hope that speaks to the real needs of the real people who live in real crisis in our real world.  Does “the empty tomb is the triumph of love in the midst of suffering” do that?

And again, that’s not a bad message.  It is part of our message.  But is it enough?

Twelve years ago when I was diagnosed with prostate cancer I found myself confronted by my own mortality.  I was more scared than I cared to admit because both my mom and my dad died of cancer.  Sometimes a diagnosis or a crisis can really sharpen your focus.  Things that had been theoretical either become the life raft you cling to or they get discarded.  I realized during that time that, while I’m willing to entertain and discuss all kinds of ideas and theories about resurrection, for me personally a psychological or philosophical or purely mystical  understanding isn’t enough to carry the weight of my hopes and fears.  I need something with some bones in it, some skin on it.  And I’m not alone in that.

I have seen a lot of death in my decades as a pastor.  I have accompanied people up to death’s door more than a few times and held their hand as they crossed the threshold.  I will tell you right now that, in my experience, those who believe in the resurrection of Jesus have been the ones who have departed most calmly, most readily, and most willingly.

I will also tell you that those I’ve known who can proclaim their faith with quiet conviction have also usually been those who have believed in the physical resurrection of Jesus.  Though I’ve read his words many times, Frederick Buechner’s statement of faith still moves me:

“I can tell you this,” he wrote, “that what I believe happened and what in faith and with great joy I proclaim to you here is that he somehow got up, with life in him again, and the glory upon him. And I speak very plainly here, very un-fancifully, even though I do not understand well my own language. I was not there to see it any more than I was awake to see the sun rise this morning, but I affirm it as surely as I do that by God’s grace the sun did rise this morning because that is why the world is flooded with light.”

The testimony of faithful people is a good and powerful reason to believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus.  That’s why Luke, at the beginning of his gospel, makes it clear that he is reporting events  just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.  

But there is also another good reason to trust the accounts of the physical resurrection of Jesus, a reason that’s both practical and theological:  something transformed the disciples of Jesus.  Something inspired this frightened band of misfits who had been timidly hiding behind locked doors to become apostles who carried an impossible message into an empire that was openly hostile to them.  Something gave them unbreakable courage.

Pinchas Lapide was a Jewish theologian and historian.  He was not a Christian, but he believed that God raised Jesus from the dead.  For him, the proof of the physical resurrection could be found in the changed lives of the disciples.  In his book The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective he wrote: 

“When this scared, frightened band of the apostles which was just about to throw away everything in order to flee in despair to Galilee; when these peasants, shepherds, and fishermen, who betrayed and denied their master and then failed him miserably, suddenly could be changed overnight into a confident mission society, convinced of salvation and able to work with much more success after Easter than before Easter, then no vision or hallucination is sufficient to explain such a revolutionary transformation.” [p. 125]

Jesus was a real physical person who was tortured to death in a first-century lynching.  The state and the religious authority colluded to crucify him, to physically destroy him and in so doing to destroy his opposition to their power.  His crucifixion was a political statement.  What they failed to see and understand, though, was that there was a power and authority in him that dwarfed any power and authority they imagined they had over him.  

For that reason,  nothing less than a bodily resurrection would do to nullify their violence and call their power into question.  It was his physical body they killed.  It would have to be his physical body that would proclaim their work undone.  

The power and authority of Jesus was rooted in his deeply loving relationship with the God he called Father, the God who raised him out of death into new life.  His resurrection was a victory of God’s dominion of love and life over the death-dealing oppression of empire.

The resurrection of Jesus was God’s way of saying that violence will not have the last word.  Pain will not have the last word.  Fear will not have the last word.  Anger will not have the last word. Disease will not have the last word.  Suffering will not have the last word.  Death will not have the last word.

The resurrection of Jesus was God’s way of saying that grace, forgiveness, faith, hope and love—these things will have the last word.  The resurrection was God affirming that Life will have the last word.  

Through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

^[1] Luke 1:1-4 NRSV