3RD SUNDAY OF EASTER (B)

And that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, would be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.

Lk 24:35-48

The last episode of Luke's Gospel has a close resemblance to John 20:19-29, and in some manuscripts Luke's account has been amplified by interpolation from John. Both narratives agree that Jesus appeared in a bodily form not subject to ordinary, physical restrictions, but both are at pains to emphasize its solidly corporeal nature. 

There are four possible motives for this emphasis.

• For Luke the foremost reason was fidelity to his sources, for he had inherited from the Aramaic-speaking Church a tradition which spoke of Jesus eating and drinking with his disciples after he had risen (Acts 10:36-43).
• Underlying this tradition was the characteristic cast of the semitic mind. Whereas the Greeks tended to think of reality in terms of abstractions and universal truths, to the Jews reality was always particular and concrete, and it was inevitable that this concreteness should find expression in materialistic imagery. Thus the highly material splendors of the heavenly city in the Revelation are symbolic assurance that heaven is utterly real, a pIace not of rarefied spirituality but of “solid joys”. This means that to a Jew a disembodied spirit could only seem a ghost, not a living being, but a thin, unsubstantial carbon-copy which had somehow escaped from the dungeon of death.
• And since the authorities would certainly attempt to explain away the claims of the disciples by arguing that they had seen a ghost, an apologetic motive may be discerned behind Luke's story.
• Finally, we know that towards the end of the first century there grew up in the Church a: heresy called Docetism, which denied the reality of Christ's human life and asserted that the divine Christ descended upon the human Jesus at his baptism and withdrew again before his crucifixion. The Epistles and Gospel of John certainly con- tain polemical references to this heresy (I John 222, 42f., John 114, 653,2024-29), and it is possible that Luke too wanted, for this reason, to indicate the identity of the risen Christ with the flesh-and-blood Jesus.

The Old Testament instruction given on the road to Emmaus is now carried a stage further. Not only were the suffering and subsequent vindication of the Messiah integral to the divine purpose which was foretold or foreshadowed throughout the whole corpus of scripture; they were the divinely ordained means of dispensing forgiveness to the Gentile peoples. Accordingly the disciples are formally commissioned to undertake the missionary work of the Church. The stress on witness, the command to remain in Jerusalem (as against the tradition of Galilean appearances recorded by Matthew and implied by Mark), [the description of the Holy Spirit as power from on high promised by God through the prophets (Joel 2:28ff.), and the leave-taking on the Mount of Olives are themes that are taken up and expanded in the early chapters of Acts].