15 th April: 3 rd Sunday of Easter: Luke 24.37

‘They thought they were seeing a ghost’

A parish ministry team that I was new to was having its weekly meeting. One of my colleagues reported that Mrs Evans had seen her husband Jim standing in the kitchen, looking through the cutlery drawer. ‘What’s so remarkable about that?’ I asked. ‘He’s been dead six months,’ said my colleague. ‘I took his funeral.’

In time I heard several similar stories in that part of the city, less so in other places where I’ve ministered. They often happened in emotionally charged circumstances, like the grief that followed a loved one’s death. I wonder whether this reported ‘appearance’ of Jim, and others like it, tells us more about the world of the dead or the living.

This week’s gospel is set in the volatile atmosphere of Passover. Jesus’ closest followers are stunned by his execution. Only days earlier, their friend had been arrested, hauled before the high priest and the Roman governor, and then crucified just as the sabbath was about to start. Women from their group were the only ones brave enough to stick around and see where Jesus’ body was buried. When they went to his tomb to anoint him once the sabbath was over, they discovered that his resting place had been disturbed; his body, alarmingly, missing.

The women returned to the rest of the disciples claiming that angels had told them that Jesus had been raised from the dead. ‘An idle tale’ was the response they received, until Peter went to the tomb and saw its emptiness for himself. Well after dark that same day, two other disciples arrived back in Jerusalem from their home a few miles away in Emmaus, breathless with the story of a stranger they’d met on the road. He had their minds racing when he used their Scriptures to shed light on what they knew of Jesus, including his crucifixion. When they invited him to eat with them, he said grace over the meal just like the Jesus they remembered. And then he disappeared.

By the time these two disciples are back in Jerusalem, Jesus has appeared to Peter too. As these puzzled and excited disciples share their extraordinary stories, Jesus appears and greets them: ‘Shalom’. But they are terrified, not pacified by this unexpected presence. ‘They thought that they were seeing a ghost’ (Luke 24:37), a figure from the world of the dead.

Mrs Evans may have seen Jim rifling through the cutlery drawer months after his death, but as far as I know he didn’t sit down and have a meal with her. Neither did he invite her to touch him. That’s not what we expect of ghosts. But it’s what Jesus does in this Easter story, and in similar accounts at the end of John’s gospel too (John 20:19–29; 21:9–14).

What do his closest followers make of this figure who seems to be physical, yet not like he once was? He can still be seen, touched, heard. He engages in conversation, eats a meal and even speaks of the future. But now he appears and disappears equally mysteriously. Not surprisingly they find this puzzling, unnerving, frightening. It’s too much for them, as the shame of their crucified friend envelops them like a dark cloud. Why would they want to see him again?

Familiarity plays a big part in what we see. After my father died, I saw him everywhere, even in places I knew he’d never visited. I saw him in the town I now live in, more than two hundred miles from his home. Only it wasn’t him. It took only a second or two to realise that I was seeing men who looked like him, especially from the back—similar appearance, height and hair (or lack of it). My brain was matching the patterns stored in my memory to people who resembled my dad. What I saw said more about my world than his.

How much was this true of what the disciples saw once that Passover-tide sabbath was over? Jesus appeared in places he and they knew in Galilee and Jerusalem. He did familiar things. Yet for all that their memories hold, the disciples are genuinely shocked to see him. They are as confused in Luke’s account as they are in the other gospels, their excitement flowing in and out of terror as they wonder whether to believe or doubt. What was it that eventually convinced them that their minds weren’t playing tricks, merely matching patterns in their memories? How did they come to realise that the mysterious figure they saw belonged to the world of the living, not the dead?

The abandoned tomb makes a limited impression at this stage. Peter could make no sense of it (Luke 24:12). The Scriptures clearly played a vital role in convincing the disciples that what had happened to Jesus lay within God’s purposes. Luke has Jesus mentioning them twice (24:26–27, 44–47), and they drive the narrative forward in his second volume, as today’s reading from Acts shows (Acts 3.18). But how long did it take before the penny dropped, so that the disciples could see their Scriptures converging on one whose life had ended so shamefully?

Luke suggests that it is food that has the power to convince disciples that the figure they see belongs to the world of the living, not the dead. The eyes of the disciples from Emmaus are only really opened when Jesus says grace over the bread they share with him (24:30–31). In Jerusalem he asks for food and the disciples give him cooked fish (24:41–43). Luke’s bread and fish remind us of the sea-side breakfast in Galilee that ‘the Lord’ shares with seven of his disciples (John 21:9–13). Food belongs to the world of the living, not the dead.

After Pentecost, food is also part of the continuing impact of Jesus through the Spirit-led community in Jerusalem, where the hungry are fed (Acts 2:46, 4:34), though not always as fairly as they might have been (Acts 6:1). Feeding and healing bodies (the healing of a paralysed man forms the backdrop to Peter’s address in Acts 3:12–19) in the name of Jesus belongs to the world of the living, not the dead.

In its Friday food pantry ministry, the Episcopal Church of St Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco distributes food to 800 families each week. The inspiration came from the journalist Sara Miles, who as a dedicated atheist walked into the church off the street in 1999, received the bread and wine of the Eucharist, and was converted there and then. In her words, ‘the mysterious sacrament turned out to be not a symbolic wafer but actual food—indeed, the bread of life’. ¹

Emmaus, Jerusalem, and San Francisco share a common witness to the converting power of food associated with Jesus. Food belongs to the world of the living. No ghost can feed the bodies and souls of the hungry.