Luke 24:36-48 (NRSV)
While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. 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. While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence.
Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.
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"When Luke and John tell us that the risen Lord appeared with the visible wounds of his death, it wasn’t merely a way of identifying him as the same person, but a way of affirming that he was so much the same person, that, in the same way as that person was dead, so was he. But that death is nothing but a vacant form for God, something whose reality has been utterly emptied out, which can only be detected in the form of its traces in the human life story of someone who has overcome death.
"The marks, then, of Jesus’ death were something like trophies: it was his whole human life, including his death, which was made alive and presented before the disciples as a sign that he had in fact conquered death. This not only meant that he had personally conquered death, which he had manifestly done, but that, in addition, the whole mechanism by which death retains people in its thrall had been shown to be unnecessary.
"Whatever death is, it is not something which has to structure every human life from within (as in fact it does), but rather it is an empty shell, a bark without a bite. None of us has any reason to fear being dead, something which will unquestionably happen to all of us, since that state cannot separate us effectively from the real source of life. This can scarcely be said with more precision than it is by the author of the epistle to the Hebrews:
Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. (Heb. 2:14-15)
"Now I insist on this, since it is the central pillar of the Catholic faith. From the presence to the disciples of the risen victim, the crucified one risen *as crucified*, the lamb triumphant *as slaughtered*, everything else flows. Without that insight, nothing unfolds, no clear perception of God, of grace, of eternal life, about what we must do, how we must live. This means that eschatology is an attempt to understand ever more fully the relationship between those empty marks of death which Jesus bore and the mysterious splendour of the human bodily life which enabled them to be seen.
"What type of life is it that is capable not of cancelling death out, which would be to stay on the same level as it, but to include it, making a trophy of it, allowing it to be something that can be shown to others so that they be not afraid? It is about this that I wish to speak."
- James Alison, Raising Abel, pp. 29-30
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"Ultimately the resurrection narratives are commission narratives, narratives of sending and receiving, narratives that reveal the structure of being as “being given,” “being risen,” and “being sent.” Nearly every appearance story includes a word of command and commission. In Mark the women are commanded to “go, tell his disciples and Peter,” “so they went out” (16:7). In Matthew the eleven are told: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (28:19). And in Luke: “You are witnesses of these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised . . . and, lifting up his hand, he blessed them” (24:49,50).
"The empty tomb narrative in John includes Jesus’ instructions to Mary Magdalene to “go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” (20:17). As we saw above, her announcement to the disciples (“I have seen the Lord”) indicates a fundamental shift in her understanding, just as it did for the eleven. She has received a new self from the crucified-and-risen One who, in the midst of her grief and misunderstanding, calls her by name and directs her to the community of disciples who will embody him and extend his mission in the world: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (20:21). To Peter, Jesus says “feed my sheep,” “follow me” (21:17, 19).
"This connection between resurrection and apostolic mission is immediately evident in Paul’s self-understanding as well: “Paul an apostle sent neither by human commission nor from human authorities, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead” (Gal. 1:1). All of this shows just how intimately the church’s identity is bound up with mission, how being reconciled and being-in-community is, for the New Testament, “being sent” in the world as an agent for justice, reconciliation, and peace. Mission in proclamation and praxis is not a secondary movement of the church, coming as a consequence of an identity already established within itself, but as the very way that identity comes about."
- Brian Robinette, Grammars of Resurrection, pp. 114-15
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"So, ... we get the sense of the group working through what it is to become witness to this, that the Anointed One is to suffer, to rise from the dead, and the repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name. This, if you like, is what we are being turned into witnesses to. This is the purpose of having our minds opened. This is the purpose of him standing amongst us showing us his physicality. All of this is to make available for us as our doubting, troubled, questioning hearts deal with all this that one has come into our midst who was always going to come into our midst. It is he, he is doing these things, and he will take it forward and he's inviting us to undergo it beforehand so that we may be witnesses to it with him."
- James Alison, from video "Homily for Third Sunday of Easter, Year B" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgLRd8akBk0)
[Source of quotes from James Alison's Raising Abel and Brian Robinette's Grammars of Resurrection, and for extensive discussion and reflections on all of this week's lectionary texts, see: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-b/easter3b/]
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