3rd Sunday of Easter

On this third Sunday of Easter, we hear yet another account of our Lord’s appearance to His unbelieving disciples.  Last week we heard John’s account, with the episode with Thomas.  The account we hear today comes from Luke’s Gospel, and it follows right on the heels of the story of our Lord’s appearance to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus and in the breaking of the bread.  Something that we see both in John’s account of Jesus’ appearance (from last week’s gospel) and Luke’s account (this week) is that Jesus shows His disciples the wounds in His hands and His feet as proof that it is He; that He has truly risen from the dead.

If you have not done so before, reflect for a moment on the fact that our Lord’s resurrected body still bore the wounds of the crucifixion.  We might expect that in this glorified body any trace of His sorrowful passion would be removed, that we might have a more “sanitized” or perfected version of the Lord, but this is not the case.  No, Jesus appears in this way, wounds and all, for a very simple reason:  it is the same body, not another body given to Him to replace the one that had been so abused.  The resurrection is, therefore, not just a metaphor for a new kind of spiritual life, as though Jesus was simply “alive in our hearts.”  Rather, His was a real, bodily resurrection from the dead.  To be sure, His body is changed somewhat.  It seems no longer subject to the laws of physics, for example, as He can apparently pass through locked doors and appear suddenly in the midst of His disciples, but it is a body nonetheless, and it is His body, the only one He ever had, the one He received from His virgin mother and the one in which He ascended to His Father.  But by showing His disciples the wounds of His crucifixion, Jesus removes all doubt about whether or not this is the same Lord and Teacher they had come to know and love.  In doing this, He also shows them the real meaning of the resurrection and reveals to them their own destiny, if they will but believe, take up their own cross, and follow Him.

The other fascinating thing about our Lord’s showing of His wounds to His disciples is just the paradox of it all.  Here He is, alive, but He manifests in His body the marks of His death; the mortal wounds that were dealt to Him.  And so, the wounds that just a few short days ago symbolized only sadness and death become now signs of joy, of hope, of life.  The Apostles’ reaction to these wounds a few days ago compared to their reaction to them now is also somewhat different.  Where before, at the sight of these wounds, they would have been filled with fear and shame, now they are given courage and are filled with the knowledge of God’s love.  Jesus says to them, “Why are you troubled?  And why do questions arise in your hearts?  Look at my hands and my feet, that it is I myself.  Touch me and see.”  His wounds become for the disciples the assurance they were looking for and now they are unbelieving not for fear, but for joy.  Luke uses this peculiar phrase.  He says they were “incredulous [or unbelieving] for joy.”  In other words, there is a sense that this is “too good to be true.” They are amazed, but they are beginning to believe. 

Then, just to really drive the point home, our Lord asks them for something to eat, even though in His glorified body He would no longer have need of physical nourishment.  They give Him some baked fish and He eats it.  The Lord, who had so often shared a meal with His disciples, knows that if for nothing else they will recognize Him in this gesture, just as the two disciples on the road to Emmaus recognized Him in the breaking of the bread.

All of this, the appearance of our Lord to His disciples after the resurrection and the showing of His wounds, should also have an impact on our lives.  Certainly it should bolster our faith in the bodily resurrection of our Lord and it should give us hope that we too, who have died with Him in baptism and who will physically die one day, will come to share in this resurrection. 

But there is something more for us in all of this.  As we contemplate the wounds in our risen Lord’s body, perhaps we should also reevaluate the suffering, the wounds (whether physical or emotional) that each of us have endured in life.  Perhaps we look upon past hurts, as the disciples looked upon the wounds of our Lord before the resurrection, only with fear and shame and sadness.  But in the light of the resurrection, and in light of the wounds of the crucifixion that still mark the body of the risen Jesus, maybe now we can look upon some of these past hurts and find genuine hope.  God has an uncanny way of taking that which brought only pain and death and transforming it into something that brings comfort and life.  The cross is evidence of this.  The sacred wounds of Jesus in His risen body are evidence of this.  And so, if this is true of these things, then why can it not be so with our crosses, our wounds?  Is there a way that they can be transformed so that they give life?  I believe that there is, but they must first be embraced and then given to Jesus, united to Him and to His perfect suffering.  They must be placed here on the altar.  Only then, will we find meaning, let alone life, in our trials.  But I believe it is possible. 

If we think of it, if we are members of the body of Christ, then our wounds are also Christ’s wounds, but His wounds are also our wounds.  Only now they transformed for us, because these wounds are not on some corpse sealed in a cold tomb somewhere, but are borne on Jesus’ resurrected and glorified body as a sign of hope for us all.

As we heard in Peter’s bold testimony in our first reading, we know that though the “author of life” was put to death, this was to bring “to fulfillment what he had announced beforehand…that [this] Christ would suffer,” but that He would also “rise from the dead on the third day.”  And so, we should not look upon our sufferings and trials (past or present) with a sense of finality, but with hope; hope that what were once the marks of defeat may, in the resurrected Christ, become marks of victory—like those wounds of the resurrected Lord.