Christ is Risen!
“What in the world is that?” That’s the question these astonished, or perhaps astounded, even better, confounded disciples, “startled and terrified” asked when from out of nowhere they were greeted with the words, Peace be with you. Luke tells us what they thought they were seeing—the Greek word is pneuma, the same word we translate as spirit, as in Holy Spirit—Luke tells us that they thought they were seeing a spirit. The New Revised Standard Version translates pneuma here as “ghost”—some of us are old enough to remember when we used to call the Holy Spirit the Holy Ghost. In the case of the Holy Spirit, the word pneuma is appropriate for he comes and goes like the wind, visible only in his effects. By contrast, the mysterious figure appearing to the disciples makes a point of showing them the wounds of crucifixion and while some were still in doubt, asks for and eats some broiled fish, expressly denying that he is a “ghost.” So that’s their question: what in the world is this confounding figure standing before them suddenly appearing in the closed room? What in the world is that?
It’s a pretty natural human question, isn’t it, which we put to unanticipated phenomena; when something new appears for which we don’t have ready categories with which to classify it, and thus comprehend it. That’s how human understanding works, by categorizing things, putting the unfamiliar into a general category or dictionary definition that masters the strangeness and gives us a way of approaching it. So when I was digging in the dirt around an old farmhouse on our property and noticed shiny, gleaming objects catching the sun, I asked, “What in the world is that?” The broken fragments didn’t immediately tell me what they were, but I understood when I recognized ceramic and glass, and said, “Aha, these are shards from pottery thrown out as trash in years gone by.” That’s how human understanding works. Our first question about something novel is, what in the world is that?
The ready category available to the first disciples was that of a spirit or ghost, because you know, dead is dead, buried in the tomb, end of story. What in the world is that? It’s a spirit, a ghost. Wrong! That is not the novelty here. Jesus does not first contradict the disciples’ supposition that what stands before them is a ghost. Rather, he wishes to change the question they are asking. They are asking, What is this? But the right question to ask is instead, Who is this? See, Jesus first asserts, It is I, and to verify his identity shows the scars on his body as the one who had been crucified. The one who is standing before you, in other words, is the very one who had been crucified. That is what is important to apprehend, not, that a dead person now appears—something we would ordinarily regard as a terrifying apparition—but rather that Jesus, friend of sinners, all the way to death, even death on a cross, presents himself with tidings of victory for them, Peace be with you. It is I.
Consequently in our Christian faith, the question who—who is God? Who is Jesus Christ? Who among the spirits blowing through humanity is the Holy One? Who, then, believes truly as a Christian?—the question who comes first and indeed it governs how we ask go on to ask the question, what? Only when we know that it is Jesus who is risen, Jesus who is the vindicated Son of his Abba Father’s love, Jesus who speaks to disciples victory peace and breathes on them his own Holy Spirit, only then can we begin correctly to think about what has occurred. Otherwise we will turn Easter into something ghostly and keep it at a distance when the crucified but risen Jesus rather would come into our midst to bring about a corresponding transformation of who we are.
In historical fact, the first great life and death struggle for the truth of the gospel in early Christianity had to do with some believers who insisted that the risen Jesus is a ghost. Our reading from First John today elsewhere refers to the deviant belief of those who deny that Jesus “has come in the flesh.” They think that the body with scarred hands and feet was at best a kind of masquerade that an otherworldly spirit temporarily adopted, only to discard the body like a shell when it was time for the spirit to go back to heaven. This false understanding of what the resurrection is, and as a result what our salvation brought by the risen Jesus is, happens when we let our natural question, What is it? overrule or disregard the plain text of the New Testament. As we have seen, however, Luke insists on first identifying who it is who is risen, the very One crucified for our sins, as Paul the Apostle would put it, in order that he be raised for our justification. Because we have no natural way of understanding what the risen Jesus truly is, we turn him into a ghost, and even worse, think that the salvation he brings would be for us also to turn into ghosts. But early Christianity rightly regarded this reasoning as a temptation. The salvation Jesus brings is, in the words of St. Paul, the redemption of our bodies. As an early Church Father put it, whatever of our humanity Jesus did not share in, that part would be without healing or salvation. Jesus, as Luther would put it, is and ever remains God deep in the flesh.
Consequently First John today similarly tells us, See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is [who] we are. See again the priority of the question who. Jesus is risen—so who are you? You are the beloved children of God! We are God’s children now... but what we will be has not yet been revealed. See? The question, what, is not yet answered. It lies in the future, so the letter continues. What we know is this: when he is revealed we shall be like him, for we will see him as he is—in his risen glory.
Likewise today after the healing of the crippled man in the name of Jesus, Peter preaches by telling who Jesus is, what his name stands for. He says, The God of our ancestors has glorified his servant Jesus, whom you handed over and rejected… you rejected the holy and righteous one, and you killed the author of life, whom God raised from the dead. See, this reversal of his destiny is the real wonder, mystery, and supremely good tiding of Easter, not simply that a dead one returns, however we might try to make sense of that, but instead that this particular one, Jesus, a man holy and righteous, a worker of healing and life, although rejected by this world of malice and injustice, has nevertheless been recognized, vindicated, honored, exalted, glorified by the Abba Father whom he trusted in death as in life. He does not die again, therefore, nor persist merely as a shadowy ghost but lives eternally to reign as one who has conquered real death not only for himself but for all who bodily identify with him and through him become beloved children of God.
Dear Christian friends, when we ask what we are, we can be tempted to pride or to despair. We are tempted to pride when we reduce the question about who we are to some attractive but false notion of what we are. I am a proud boy, boasting of my white supremacy. Or, what is the same, I am my ethnicity, my language group, my gender, in proud solidarity with others in my class of the oppressed. Either way, I abandon my concrete and actual personhood into some stereotypical definition of what I am or supposed to be. I surrender my mind to some herd mentality and my conscience to the dictates of group think. Closer to painful home in the loneliness of such pseudo-identifications, however, we are tempted to despair if and when we see truly what we are, as such identities fail us: weak, faltering, in the blunt but honest language of a Luther, all too plainly sinful and perishing. If we try to answer the question of who we are with some bogus notion of what we are, we wander in the darkness, evermore alone.
But everything, ourselves too, is bathed in new light, transfigured, if instead we ask whose we are, children of the Father’s love; no, it does not yet appear what we shall be when we see Christ in risen glory. That must wait. In the interim it suffices for the Christian life of imperishable joy already now to know who Christ is, who made all of us his own, even to death on a cross that we might all belong to Him now and forever. That is whose we are even as what we are is now destined for transformation to life eternal. Amen. Christ is Risen!