Commentary to the Third Sunday of Easter – Year B

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THE TEXT BELOW IS THE TRANSCRIPTION OF THE VIDEO COMMENTARY BY FR.  FERNANDO ARMELLINI 

“At that time, the two disciples (of Emmaus) recounted what had taken place on the way, and how Jesus was made known to them in the breaking of bread”.  

Happy Easter to all. 

To understand the text of today's gospel it is necessary to place it in context. We are on  Easter and Luke, as do the other evangelists, has narrated the visit to the tomb by the women.  What did the women find? In the Gospel text that we head on Easter night, Mark says they  have found the empty tomb and a young man who spoke to them. The evangelist Matthew  says that the women saw an angel coming down from heaven, that there was a great  earthquake and that he sat on the stone and then spoke to the women.  

The evangelist Luke says that the women found two men in white robes who spoke with  them. The number two, two men ... are two witnesses. Two witnesses were needed to certify  something as true. And here it is a truth that is communicated by two witnesses with splendid  robes. They are the images with which the evangelist presents the revelation that women  received from God. The white color affirms that the revelation they received, the words they  have heard, came from heaven. Are true. The tomb is empty and the voice that the women  hear is of these two witnesses of the truth who say to them: "Why do they seek the living  among the dead? He is risen. He is not here".  

And Luke says that the women went to announce to the eleven the message they had  received. The eleven do not believe the women. They say that what they had are  hallucinations. But Peter runs to the tomb, verifies that the tomb is empty, does not see anything else. He returns to his house full of stupor. Then Luke tells the meeting of the Risen  One with the two disciples of Emmaus, who return to Jerusalem to tell the brothers the  extraordinary experience they had had. And these two are informed by the eleven that the  Lord has manifested himself also to Simon.  

This is the context where the narrative is located we hear in today's Gospel text. There is  the community gathered. There are eleven, there are the two disciples who returned from  Emmaus, and this is what happens while this community is together.  

“While they were still speaking about this, he stood in their midst and said to them,  ‘Peace be with you.’ But they were startled and terrified and thought that they were seeing a  ghost. Then he said to them, ‘Why are you troubled? And why do questions arise in your  hearts? 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 I have.’"  

We can imagine this community gathered, radiant with joy at the revelation of the Risen  One, that the women and some of them have had. They are sharing with each other this  extraordinary experience when, says Luke, Jesus presents himself in their midst. Let's notice  well. It does not say that he "appeared" and then disappeared. He says that the Risen One is  in their midst. The Risen One never left his community. He has always been with them. But  the eyes of the disciples are unable to see him. And then, there comes a time when their eyes  open and are illuminated by the light of Easter and they are aware of his presence. That  presence that had always been there. It was their eyes that were not able to see him in their  midst. Now they become aware that He is alive. That her is with them.  

Here we have a first message for us. The experience of the Risen One in our midst, can  always be done when we, on the Lord's Day, meet with the brothers and sisters, united in  community to listen to the Word of the Lord and share the Eucharistic bread. In fact, let us  note the greeting of the Risen One: "Peace be with you". It is exactly the greeting of the  celebrant addressing the assembled community. It is on the Day of the Lord when we turn  our minds and our hearts away from worries that envelop us every day, and allow ourselves  to be enveloped by the light that comes from the Word of God and the gesture of breaking  the bread.  

Then, we become aware that the Risen One is not far away, He is in our midst. He has not  gone to the beyond ... he remains with us, but not as before—made of atoms and molecules— with the body, but the Risen One. His body is no longer material. Atoms belong to our world,  not to the incorruptible world of God. Therefore, we cannot see the Risen One with the  physical eyes or touch him with our hands. But we can see him with the eyes of faith. With  our hands we can 'touch' the Risen One in the sign of his presence in the shared Bread. And  we see that the disciples have a strange reaction: "Scared and trembling with fear, they  thought I was a ghost."  

As a chronicle, this fright is unlikely. The disciples are happy because some of them have  seen the Risen One. They have made this experience, and appear surprised as if nothing had  happened before. When the Risen One manifests, he cannot scare people away, but only  bring joy. Why does Luke speak in this way? What does he want to say to his readers? Let's  try to understand it.  

And for this we must keep in mind the cultural context when Lucas writes this text. He is  not talking to the Semites, who conceive the person as 'oneness'. He is speaking to the Greeks.  And the Greek culture had a dualistic view of the person ... Socrates, Plato ... They had this conception that we know very well: the distinction in the person of the soul and the body. It  was not a unit. The body was considered a prison of the soul. What Socrates says to his  disciples is that the soul must be freed from this prison and death is a liberation. Therefore,  for them, a complete resurrection of the person: body and soul was inconceivable. The  material, the body, did not enter into immortality, but only the soul.  

And the consequence, therefore, if these people of whom only the soul remained,  manifested themselves to the living ... what did the living see? What could they see of them?  A ghost! The shadow of these people. And, in fact, Greek and Latin literature are full of  writings of spirits of the dead that appear to the living. Thus, Ulysses finds the shadow of  Achilles, of Ajax, and of so many others. Aeneas sees Father Anquises, but it is only the  shadow of Anchises.  

The Greeks did not think that the Risen One was a real person, but only 'something' of  that person ... a spirit, a soul. They did not conceive that the person passed through death  remaining fully the same. It is precisely to put an end to this misunderstanding, that Luke  presents the reaction of the apostles as if they were frightened, as if they were seeing a ghost.  And Luke says: NO, he's not a ghost. He is not an ephemeral, inconsistent, diaphanous being.  And here we have a second message for us. It is very current.  

It is the danger of confusing the deceased, the resurrected ones, with a ghost. A danger  that exists also today. For example, what do we think will be left of us, of our history, of the  love we have built, of our life given for the joy of the brothers and sisters? What will remain?  Nothingness certainly scares us. Will there be only a vague memory—something evanescent  from our person? How do we imagine the loved ones who have left us? As 'souls' or as people  in the fullness of their human identity? People with whom I can relate, I can talk, people I can  reach with all my love, because they are completely real, they are in the fullness of their  existence. Maybe I should also ask them for my forgiveness for any fault committed to them  or forgive them them for any fault they have had. Am I convinced that we can continue to  dialogue with them or I think it's something ethereal, inconsistent?  

When entering the world of God there is not only a part of our person, only the 'soul'. It  is our whole person who is transfigured. In fact, when we invoke the saints: St. Antony, St.  Francis... we do not imagine them as souls, but we speak to them as people who are in the  fullness of their human reality. We must do the same with the loved ones who have left us.  This is why the evangelist Luke insists on the corporeality of the resurrected.  

They are not ghosts. They are themselves. But, attention not to confuse this 'corporeality'  of the Risen One with the 'material'. For a Semite, the body is the whole person. Here, as a  person clothed in a tangible reality. In the world of God the 'corruptible' does not enter but  the whole person is transfigured. It is to underline this fact that the Risen One shows his hands  and feet. "Observe my person."  

The Risen One is recognized, wants to be recognized, by his hands and feet. This invitation  seems curious, because we recognize people by their faces. Here, on the other hand, the  Risen One is recognized by the hands and feet pierced. They are the hands and feet that were  nailed to the cross, the sublime gesture of love, of the gift of life. About the hands we have  already spoken on the previous Sunday when we commented on the manifestation of the  Risen One narrated by John.  

Those hands are the hands of God, who have performed only works of love. And the feet.  Why does Luke insist so much on the feet? The feet of Jesus are the feet of God. They have  walked a lot. They have come from afar to make known the love of God for humanity. People  in love do not know distances. They are always present because they want to find the person they love. Our feet tell us that God has come from afar to embrace us. They came to us ...  they have walked beside our paths so that we could contemplate the face of God in the face  of Jesus of Nazareth. And these feet walked to Calvary. Did they stopped on Calvary?  

This is the invitation of the Risen One: Observe, contemplate, my feet. They continued  on their way. These are the glorious feet, the glorious wounds—the witness of love that we  can contemplate in the glory of God. Matthew narrates that when the women found the Risen  One, it is not that they have embraced him ... they embraced his feet.  

And here we have a third important and current message for us today: If we do not see  how far the feet of those who donate their lives for love reach, the vision that gives full  meaning to our life is lacking. If we do not follow the direction that those feet have followed,  we will end up in the wrong direction for our life. If we do not understand the reality of that  world where those feet arrive ... a world that is not material, we cannot have a complete  sense of our whole life, of all the causes, even the most noble ones, for which we strive: justice,  peace, help the poor. If, instead, we see where those feet of the one who has donated his life  for love are going, we will understand that our feet, following his own, will walk towards a  definitive world.  

And now Luke uses a material language that can also be misunderstood. Taken to the  letter, as a chronicle, it presents difficulty. And so as not to mistake the message, let us  continue to keep in mind the objective—about which I have insisted. Luke does not want his  readers to confuse the Risen One with a ghost, as we find in popular tradition. Let's listen to  what the evangelist says:  

"While they were still incredulous for joy and were amazed, he asked them, ‘Have you  anything here to eat?’ They gave him a piece of baked fish; he took it and ate it in front of  them."  

I think the language with such concrete images used by Luke, left us a little perplexed, a  little bewildered. A risen one does not eat ... does not digest ... Nor is it easy to find fish in  Jerusalem today ... What does Luke want to tell us? Certainly, this insistence on the corporeity  of the Risen One it is almost excessive; it's a realism that gives us a little trouble ... but all this  is to say that the Risen One is not a ghost. This is the message that Luke wants to communicate  to the members of his community of Greek origin, therefore, for that culture. And this very  concrete language is used by Paul when he says writing to the Corinthians in chapter 15, that  the Risen One does not have a material body made of atoms.  

It is a body that Paul calls 'spiritual', which does not mean ethereal but concrete ... but  not of this world. And he adds that what is corruptible cannot reach incorruptibility. He calls  fools to those who think that it is the material that enters the incorruptible world. Let us also  bear in mind that it is only Luke who uses this language and he also uses it in the Acts of the  Apostles when he puts these words on Peter's lips: "We have eaten and drunk with him after  his resurrection from the dead."  

Let's say it clearly: these are images used by Luke to talk about the reality of the Risen  One in a world where people thought that the resurrected were ghosts. The corporeal  resurrection does not mean material resurrection.  

Another important message for us today: when we imagine the lives of those who are  with Christ, the loved ones who have left us and that we believe that they are with Jesus, we  see them perhaps in a vague, fuzzy way ... NO. Their lives and their persons are very real and  very concrete. And communication with the resurrected it is not less real, but immensely truer because their bodies have overcome all the limits that belong to our material world.  This revelation, that the destiny of a life donated by love does not remain in the grave  but is in the world of God, it has been prepared in Scripture. And one cannot see where the  life of Jesus has come if the heart is not opened to the message of Scripture.  

"He said to them, "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that  everything written about me in the law of Moses and in the prophets and psalms must be  fulfilled. Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures. And he said to them, Thus  it is written that the Christ would suffer and rise from the dead on the third day and that  repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, would be preached in his name to all the nations,  beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things."  

Jesus begins to teach the disciples a lesson about Scripture. He had already done it with  the two of Emmaus. He had opened their hearts to understand the Scripture. Why this  insistence on the Word of God, of the Old Testament, on this light that should illuminate the  minds of the disciples? The reason is that they find themselves in front of a Messiah with his  hands and feet pierced ... What kin f of messiah were they waiting for? A messiah who walked  the world ... by all roads to conquer and subdue everyone. Those hands should use the  weapons to impose the power of the chosen people over the world and thus establish the  new world. But instead they were facing hands and feet that are the identity of the messiah  of God who contradicted all their expectations and hopes.  

What does the Risen One tell them? Read the Scripture and you will understand the true  design of God, who was not a messiah who would change the world with force, with power,  with dominion, but with love. This was the project of God; and Jesus has gone through the  events that for us appear as a defeat, a failure, while instead it was the project of God that  was realized through the greatest crime committed by people. But seeing this Lamb, they  understood that all of God's project presented, beginning with the Scripture, by the Old  Testament, led to the realization of a world that is love and only love. This is the new world.  

And the Risen One concludes, saying to his community, "You are witnesses of this".  Witnesses with the word and with your lives they embody this new world to which Jesus of  Nazareth, with his hands pierced and his feet pierced has began. Not the world of the  dominators, but to the world of those who donate their lives for love. Of this, says the Risen  One today, you are witnesses.  

I wish everyone a good Easter and a good week.