FROM THE PULPIT THIRD SUNDAY OF EASTER, YEAR B, REFLECTION: The Body of the Risen Lord.
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FROM THE PULPIT
THIRD SUNDAY OF EASTER, YEAR B
SCRIPTURE: Acts 3: 13-15, 17-19; Psalm 4; 1John 2: 1-5a; Luke 24: 35-48.
REFLECTION: The Body of the Risen Lord.
Fr. Benoit Mukamba, CSSp.
“You are witnesses of these things” (Lk 24:48). Being a witness requires a resolve to say the truth. Jesus commissioned the disciples to proclaim their experiences with him truthfully. The different stories we hear in the readings today are part of the witnesses of the apostles. The context of today’s Gospel story is the evening of that first day, the day of the resurrection. The two ladies had found the tomb of Jesus empty. Two male disciples went to the tomb, too and attested to the story and experience of the ladies. Their experience and story met a mixed feeling, joy, doubt and astonishment. The disciples were discussing among themselves their experience of the resurrection when that evening, Cleopas and another disciple returned from their journey to Emmaus; they told another amazing story of encounter with the crucified and risen Jesus.
The evangelist Luke today stresses that Jesus Christ has been raised with His physical body and yet different unlike that body of flesh before death. It is a body of glory. It is a spiritual body. It does not have flesh as we now have, but rather a glorious, a transformed body and thus has a state of transcendence as the Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:35-43. It is a body that can go inside even when the gates are closed in John 20: 26. Jesus’s new body can no longer feel neither hunger nor thirst. The risen body knows no boundaries of time and place; it is a body without limits of any kind; it is a body that belongs to eternal life. The new body of Jesus transcends time and geographic position. And it is the invitation to us who believe in the resurrection to abandon all that makes us slaves of selfishness and self-centeredness. Faith in the resurrection requires us to come out of our sinfulness and approach another with unconditional love. Everyone who believes in the resurrected Christ must abandon the life of being slaves to sin and selfishness. Jesus raised from the dead sees His disciples still filled with doubt and anxiety and fear, invites them to look and hold his hands and feet. The Resurrected Jesus is recognized not in facial appearance but by the scars of His hands and feet. The Risen Lord is recognized through sacrificial love at the Cross and the Altar. It is by his suffering and death we are redeemed. The Cross reveals Him that He is truly Love itself. It is perfect love that is the image of God we encounter in the Passover celebration.
The resurrection did not eliminate those scars of His suffering; the reality of the resurrection is reflecting God's love for mankind. And Jesus invites His disciples to touch and look upon them; it is an invitation to every follower of Christ that our lives may always reflect the love of Christ, reflecting the scars on his feet, hands, and side of Christ’s risen body. The symbol of a Christian or a believer in the resurrection is an unconditional love; it is a constant and self-giving love. Only the Evangelist Luke stresses over the body of the Resurrected Christ. So he says that the disciples were able to hold him after the resurrection and even eat with him and also see his body and bones. The Resurrected Christ is not a ghost but truly he is himself and has a body truly different from a ghost or hallucination. The Resurrected Christ has a glorified body and no longer as corrupt as our current bodies.
The disciples recognized the risen Lord in his teaching and the breaking of the bread. The Church as body of Christ needs to carry the marks of the crucifixion while witnessing to the risen Lord. And thus shall we be raised up on the last day. Our bodies will be transformed and resemble that of the risen Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:44), but while we live we are called to recognize Jesus in the suffering brother and sister and in those who suffer for the sake of wellbeing and salvation of other humans.
