Friday of the Seventh Week of Easter
So many people do not REALLY have faith in Christ or in his resurrection. They see Jesus as a nice guy who said good things like "Love each other" but the idea that Jesus rose bodily from the dead seems both a figment of imagination as well as an unnecessary part of the gospel story. Today's scriptures ask us to reconsider the significance of Jesus' bodily resurrection.
To see this, we have to first remember that today's gospel story (John 21:15-19) takes place in the context of the larger story of Jesus meeting his disciples on the beach and cooking them breakfast. We read that story on the Friday of the first week of Easter. (John 21:1-14) The shoreline where Jesus met his disciples is, not coincidentally, the place where he first called them to follow him and be his disciples. In this encounter on the beach after the resurrection, Jesus once again takes them fishing, and then afterward cooks up a nice, hot breakfast of grilled fish. Jesus’ body, post-resurrection, is not some ghostly figment of the disciples’ imagination. John points out that Jesus eats fish because it means Jesus has a body, and that body is real.
We read this in the first week of Easter, partly to begin to come to grips with what a bodily resurrection might mean. Partly it indicates that Jesus is Lord, no mere human, worthy of our worship. But it also gives a window into why people might bother to follow Jesus. If Jesus were some mere ghost, I have serious doubts that Christianity would have spread as far, or convicted as many people as it has. As a case in point: during this Easter season we've been reading about the exploits of the apostle Paul. It is always, always important to remember that Paul was not remotely interested in being Christian, but actively persecuted them. Yet he had a conversion, an encounter with the living Christ, which leads him to change his life around completely.
So it is no accident that in today's second reading, we are reminded of Paul’s complete conversion. Paul has returned to Jersualem, among the very same people he had once led in persecutions against the Christians! But now he is charged with inciting violence, disturbing the peace, and desecrating the temple and has been imprisoned for two years already. Festus (and Felix before him) are in charge of this largely Jewish province, and they want to keep the peace: that is their job. And so they do not release Paul, because they want to make nice with their constituents.
"I do not seek to escape the death penalty,” Paul says. This proclamation makes little sense if Jesus was simply a great person to emulate. Why bother dying for someone who says platitudes that anyone might say? But since Paul is convinced, utterly, of Jesus' life, death AND bodily resurrection, and that God is doing something radically new in this world by his death and resurrection, he's willing to submit to the death penalty.
To some extent, these past eight weeks of Easter have been about coming to terms with a difficult idea, that Jesus rose from the dead, and that his death and resurrection mean something. Jesus' life is far, far more radical than we might have understood if he had merely walked around and said things that sounded good, but died an ordinary death.
Jesus is no figment of the imagination. We are meant, like Paul, to be witnesses of Jesus, a Jesus whose body is real and present in our lives.
- Jana M. Bennett