But they were startled and terrified and thought that they were seeing a ghost. Them he said 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.”
Luke 24:37-39
Now this is the strangest thing. The disciples are celebrating the good news that “Jesus has truly been raised!” Yet when he appears to them in the middle of all this, they’re terrified. They think they’re seeing a ghost. What’s going on?
What’s going on is that Luke, writing some 50 years later, is patching together different traditions about the appearances of the risen Lord. It’s hard to put them into one consecutive narrative – like trying to sew together pieces of cloth that weren’t cut from the same garment. Each appearance sheds its own light on the resurrection, and we should let each speak its own message to us.
It’s striking that Jesus shows them his hands and his feet. Were the nail marks still there? (John, in his Gospel, is explicit that indeed they were.) The Jesus who rose is the Jesus who was crucified. But the wounds are no longer bodily flaws or deformities. They are now treasures, like coal becomes a diamond.
No one leaves this earth without wounds – wounds to the heart and to the body. We bring our own history with us. It is not erased, but becomes lustrous. The hurts of the past are transfigured into treasures.
Such is the grandeur of the resurrection…my wounds become gems.
 |