This blog follows the daily bible readings of the Catholic Church. Would regular readers please accept my apology for yesterday when I got news that my brother-in-law was very ill, and went to see him in Troon.

 Reading 1, Acts 3:11-26

11 Everyone came running towards them in great excitement, to the Portico of Solomon, as it is called, where the man was still clinging to Peter and John.

12 When Peter saw the people he addressed them, ‘Men of Israel, why are you so surprised at this? Why are you staring at us as though we had made this man walk by our own power or holiness? 13 It is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our ancestors, who has glorified his servant Jesus whom you handed over and then disowned in the presence of Pilate after he had given his verdict to release him. 14 It was you who accused the Holy and Upright One, you who demanded that a murderer should be released to you 15 while you killed the prince of life. God, however, raised him from the dead, and to that fact we are witnesses; 16 and it is the name of Jesus which, through faith in him, has brought back the strength of this man whom you see here and who is well known to you. It is faith in him that has restored this man to health, as you can all see.

 17 ‘Now I know, brothers, that neither you nor your leaders had any idea what you were really doing; 18 but this was the way God carried out what he had foretold, when he said through all his prophets that his Christ would suffer. 19 Now you must repent and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, 20 and so that the Lord may send the time of comfort. Then he will send you the Christ he has predestined, that is Jesus, 21 whom heaven must keep till the universal restoration comes which God proclaimed, speaking through his holy prophets.

 22 Moses, for example, said, “From among your brothers the Lord God will raise up for you a prophet like me; you will listen to whatever he tells you. 23 Anyone who refuses to listen to that prophet shall be cut off from the people.”

 24 In fact, all the prophets that have ever spoken, from Samuel onwards, have predicted these days. 25 ‘You are the heirs of the prophets, the heirs of the covenant God made with your ancestors when he told Abraham, “All the nations of the earth will be blessed in your descendants”.

 26 It was for you in the first place that God raised up his servant and sent him to bless you as every one of you turns from his wicked ways.’

 Gospel, Lk 24:35-48

35 Then they told their story of what had happened on the road and how they had recognised him at the breaking of bread. 36 They were still talking about all this when he himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you!’ 37 In a state of alarm and fright, they thought they were seeing a ghost.

 38 But he said, ‘Why are you so agitated, and why are these doubts stirring in your hearts? 39 See by my hands and my feet that it is I myself. Touch me and see for yourselves; a ghost has no flesh and bones as you can see I have.’

 40 And as he said this he showed them his hands and his feet.

 41 Their joy was so great that they still could not believe it, as they were dumbfounded; so he said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ 42 And they offered him a piece of grilled fish, 43 which he took and ate before their eyes. 44 Then he told them, ‘This is what I meant when I said, while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses, in the Prophets and in the Psalms, was destined to be fulfilled.’

 45 He then opened their minds to understand the scriptures, 46 and he said to them, ‘So it is written that the Christ would suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, 47 and that, in his name, repentance for the forgiveness of sins would be preached to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. 48 You are witnesses to this.”

Stanley Spenser's material vision of resurrection

Both these passages are by Luke, the author of the Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. In their different ways they both emphasise Luke’s understanding of the resurrection.

 Luke, as much as Matthew, and certainly more than John or Mark, emphasises the bodily resurrection of Jesus. He wants the reader to believe that God has raised the crucified Jesus and that the risen Lord is not, as it were, a bit of Jesus, say, his soul or spirit, but the whole person, which includes the body. For Luke’s Jewish way of thinking a person is inconceivable without their body-it is as much part of a person’s identity as their mind. He is telling the reader the truth he has received from his sources: that the One experienced in the resurrection appearances, was identifiably Jesus, and not some vague spiritual manifestation. This shows us how to read his stories. The risen Jesus may well have eaten grilled fish, but Luke is not telling us this out of historical curiosity. He tells the story to show us that Jesus’ resurrection is bodily. This is for him the apostolic witness.

1. Although nobody, at the time of Jesus’ death, saw it as fulfilment of prophecy, Luke reports that the risen Lord has shown the believers how this is true. Here we have another feature of Luke’s storytelling. If the apostles believe that the risen Jesus has, over time, opened their eyes to the passages in scripture that foretold his death and resurrection, Luke dramatises this in a story about how Jesus did so: a long period of discovery is collapsed into one or two episodes. The appeal to the Jewish bible has first of all the purpose of locating Jesus within the only scriptures the early church knew. This allows Luke to deny that the new faith is a betrayal of Judaism and to affirm that it is a fulfilment of it. Indeed, as Peter’s speech emphasises, the betrayal is on Israel’s side, as the nation has rejected its true messiah, and handed him over to Rome for crucifixion.
2. In spite of this betrayal, God has raised Jesus, first of all for those who betrayed him! The risen Jesus is a sign of God’s forgiveness offered freely to those who did this terrible thing. Luke was writing in 85 CE, after the destruction of the Jewish Temple and the dispersal of the population by the Romans. We can see that even after all those years, Luke, and probably his church also, have not given up on the Jewish people. They still value the Jewish roots of the faith and the Jewish members of the church. They still hope that Jesus’ own people will turn to him.

 Bodily resurrection is a puzzling doctrine even to many church members. This blog is not the place for a thorough exploration of the doctrine, but it may help to direct readers first of all to 1 Corinthians 15, where many years before the Gospels, Paul sets out the helpful notion of a “spiritual body”, that is, a transformation of our earthly body into something more glorious that is still, nevertheless, “us.” Of course, as he says, he’s talking about a “mystery” something we cannot fully comprehend, in this life, but he wants to be faithful to what he’s been told about the risen Jesus, and what he has experienced, when “Jesus appeared to me.”

 The resurrection faith of Christianity does not permit us to see either Jesus’ earthly life, or our own, as a mere preliminary to eternal life. His earthly reality is not shrugged off and replaced by something greater. It is rather affirmed and transformed into something greater. The same will be true of us.