“Look at my
hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me and see, because a ghost does
not have flesh and bones as you can see that I have.”
Here as in
all the resurrection appearances, Jesus shows the disciples not only that he is
real flesh but that his relationship to time has changed also. If Jesus is not
a spirit but tangible flesh and bones, if he eats the same fish as the
disciples, then his time is not ghost-time either. What we have here is not
some fictitious appearance of duration, but time in the most genuine and real
sense possible.
Christ’s time, witnessed to by all this seeing, touching, hearing,
eating, and encountering, is not divorced from our time,
but is in an ordinary, straightforward way continuous with it. This is
immediately clear in the story of Emmaus. Recall how Jesus walks with and talks with the two disciples – the
alternation, succession and interweaving of words and actions between the three
of them. In Jesus' actions we see the eternal allowing itself to be drawn into time and going
along with it in genuine companionship. In the freedom of the resurrection
Jesus is able to move in the world of changing time without being subject to
it.
The time of
the forty days is thus genuine time, but no longer moving inexorably toward
death; time no longer as a burden, but blessed, open, spacious time possessing
the sovereignty merited by Jesus and bestowed by the Father. His manner of
being, revealed in the forty days, is the ultimate form of his reality.
In the
Eucharist and in the sacraments, Jesus existence and mode of duration is
therefore no different than that of the forty days. For the believer this means that receiving the sacraments allows the
risen and glorified Christ present in them to interact with him or her with the
same naturalness, spontaneity, freshness and sovereign freedom with which he
encountered and interacted with his disciples during the forty days. When we
embrace these in simplicity, Jesus is able to enlighten our minds and hearts
just as he does for the disciples in this morning’s Gospel.
Photograph by Brother Brian. Excerpts from Father Timothy's homily at this morning's Eucharist.
