The disciples were gathered together (except Thomas) discussing the amazing events that happened to Cleopus and his unnamed friend on the road to Emmaus when Jesus appeared in their midst. He greeted them, saying, “Peace be with you.” While this was a pretty standard greeting for the day, it does seem somewhat ironic, considering they must have been feeling far from peaceful. They had just been through the emotional wringer of Palm Sunday, the Passover meal with Jesus, His betrayal and arrest, His trial, His crucifixion and death, His burial, news of His resurrection and now are talking about yet another sighting and conversation with this Man-Messiah. I’d think they were feeling not peace, but confusion and excitement and fear and wonder and uncertainty and simultaneous depression and elation. Peace? Not so much.
Notice their reaction when Jesus greets them: they are afraid. Even after all the resurrection appearance stories of the last couple of days, they think He is a ghost.
Jesus does not get angry, though there is, perhaps, a tinge of disappointment or frustration when He says, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? 39 Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.” He is having to say again – after having already said it and proven it repeatedly - that He is who He has said He is. He is having to remind them again that He told them these things would be happening. And now He is with them, standing among them and they don’t even believe it what their own eyes reveal. Instead, they fear He is a ghost. So Jesus points out the wounds, encourages them to touch Him and recognize that He is really flesh and blood and bone, not a ghost or apparition.
Once they come to believe despite their continued amazement, they become overjoyed. They haven’t even had time to register completely this miracle before their very eyes, but the Jesus is moving on to more practical matters, like dinner. “Do you have anything here to eat?” He asks.
I don’t know how you all grew up, but my mother was and is the queen of hospitality. Practically the first words out of her mouth when a guest arrives are offers of food, drink, and rest. This sense of hospitality was part of her family tradition and also that of my father’s family, and is pretty much part of my own patterns of behavior, as well. So I cannot imagine not offering food and drink without being asked, but the disciples didn’t even think of it. Then again, I can’t imagine the Resurrected Lord appearing to me in flesh and blood, so perhaps I’d be a bit off my game, too. Even so, once a request was made, I’d sure be pulling out all the stops to try to please Him with whatever delicacies I could drum up. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m thinking that if the resurrected Lord Himself has shown up where I am after being dead three days, has encouraged me to notice the wounds in His hands and feet to prove that He is, indeed, the same One who was crucified, dead, and buried and now lives again in fulfillment of the Scriptures, I’m thinking if He asks me for something to eat I’m not going to just hand Him leftover broiled fish. After all, that’s almost all you ever hear of Jesus eating besides bread and wine. I’m sure there was fish when He called the fishermen, there were those fish with the loaves, there was the parable of drawing in the net of fish, and all that time around the Sea of Galilee probably involved a whole bunch of fish dinners…. Broiled fish again? Really? But it could just be me….
Anyway, He eats the fish, the point being not so much what He eats as that He eats. After all, ghosts don’t require nourishment. Also, good Jews would not eat in the presence of those who were considered unclean or too sinful, so for the Lord to eat with them was a sign of His acceptance of them as worthy companions, just like when He ate with tax collectors.
After dinner, it’s time for storytelling. Jesus reminds them of the Scriptures, the prophecies about Him. He tells them how they are fulfilled in Him and then He opens their minds to understand. That phrase often refers to teaching, and we know from the Gospels that Jesus often used parables, or stories to explain the Scriptures. So it’s after dinner story time – but a story that carries a message.
As storytime comes to a close, Jesus turns the story on them. This story doesn’t end with “and they lived happily ever after.” Jesus teaches, “The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, 47 and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. 48 You are witnesses of these things.” Jesus doesn’t just leave them with proof that He is who He says He is, He gives them a job to do – to be witnesses. Witnesses, like any good Law and Order junkie knows, have the job of testifying. A witness who refuses to testify is no use at all. So Jesus gives the disciples the job of testifying to His death and resurrection. He gives them the job of preaching repentance for the forgiveness of sins in His own name. He gives them the job of testifying and share the Gospel not only with those already known as disciples but with all nations, beginning in Jerusalem and going on from there. “The believers were not being sent into the world to share their own personal experiences but to share the truths of the Word of God.”[1] It’s quite a job, and the disciples must have felt ill-equipped. They couldn’t even come up with anything better to feed the Risen Lord than leftover broiled fish – again – and now they’re supposed to testify and preach what they can barely believe themselves? How in the world will they do that?
They will do that with the power of God’s own Holy Spirit. Jesus tells the disciples that He will equip them for this great task by sending “what [His] Father has promised,” meaning the Holy Spirit. This time, it truly will be a ghost of sorts that comes to the, but not a frightening or spooky one. Instead it will be the Holy Ghost, the presence of God indwelling in them. From this Holy Spirit, they will receive all they need to be prepared to testify, preach, and spread the good news. But Jesus doesn’t grant them this gift immediately. Instead, He tells them to wait in the city until they “have been clothed with power from on high.” Jesus doesn’t want the disciples to go out and just get run down by trying to do the impossible. They can’t do it on their own. They must wait until they have been equipped, strengthened given Holy power rather than just trying to forge ahead on human power. They have to be patient and await God’s time for His miraculous work to be done. His timing is always perfect.
That is not unlike Abraham and Sarah from our Old Testament story today. They’d been promised something – that God would make from Abraham a great nation, meaning He would given Abraham many offspring. Well, Abraham and Sarah had gotten rather long in the tooth waiting for this blessed event to occur. They’d tried their own human ways to make this happen, utilizing the services of Hagar as a sort of surrogate mother. That didn’t go too well. But they were supposed to be patient and wait for God’s time, a time that came long after any reasonable expectation, just as did the call to the disciples to go out and preach the good news of salvation in Jesus the Christ. For Abraham and Sarah, the wait was longer than the human fertility cycle. For the disciples, the wait was longer than human life. They had to wait till after Jesus died to preach the good news that He was the Messiah. Remember all the times He told them to keep the secret, but now, after all this time, He’s saying they are supposed to tell.
I wonder if any of the disciples felt like laughing under their breath, as Sarah did. I wonder if any of them were so amazed as to actually disbelieve their very eyes. I wonder what we’d do when faced with incontrovertible evidence of the power of God to do wondrous things that science cannot explain. Not science of the time and not science of today. We say we believe in God, we say we accept the Scriptures, but do we live that way? Do we live like we really believe God can cause a barren woman to bear a child? Do we live like we believe that God is truly raised from the dead? Do we feel the power of the Holy Spirit living and moving in us and sending us out into the world to preach the name of Jesus to all nations? Our lives are as much a part of our testimony as our words and the Holy Spirit has already come, so there’s no need to delay. Do we feel ill-equipped? It does seem like the disciples had the advantage of traveling with Jesus and actually seeing Him in flesh and blood. “We today cannot touch and feel the Lord Jesus, nor is it necessary that we do so; but we can rest our faith on the Word of God (1 John 1:1-5).”[2] Sure the disciples had first-hand experience of the bodily presence of the Lord, so they had some advantage, but then again, the disciples didn’t have two thousand years of Christianity and well-phrased confessions and a published Bible and the safety of religious freedom to preach the Word of God. If they could do it, so can we. We didn’t personally witness the resurrected Lord in our midst in bodily form. We haven’t had the invitation to probe His wounds, haven’t cooked Him dinner – even if it was just leftover fish. But we have the Word of God collected over the centuries, with footnotes and commentaries, explanations and handbooks, concordances and even the Internet to help us get it done well. We aren’t so bad off in the equipped for ministry department, so we, too need to spread the good news.
God can and does do miracles. Jesus is the Savior, the Messiah, the Way, the Truth and the Life. The message isn’t so hard to spread. We don’t have to go to the corners of the world. We can start in our own back yards. He doesn’t even ask that we pull out all the stops and prepare a feast. Jesus was perfectly content with
- Bible Exposition Commentary – New Testament.
- Bible Exposition Commentary – New Testament.