Proclaimer Blog
Exegetical reflections on Luke ch.24, part 3
The final section, vs.36-53:
Three rather odd things happen here, and I think that working away at these, in the way Luke has described them, gets us heading in the right direction:
1) When Jesus appears to the disciples (v.36), they’re all startled and frightened and think he’s a ghost. Yet only moments earlier they had seemed convinced of his resurrection (v.34)! The repeated language of ‘ghost’ (vs.38-39) suggests what’s going on: they are not fully convinced of the complete physical reality of the resurrection. After all, at the meal-table with Emmaus Two it seems that he disappeared before anything was actually eaten (vs.30-31).
2) The climax of Luke’s account of Jesus providing the disciples with evidence of the reality of his resurrection is… he eats a mouthful of fish while they watch (vs.40-43). Rarely has such a mundane act had such theological clout! But see this as Jesus’ response to their thinking he’s a ghost, and Luke’s point begins to emerge: the climax of the evidence of the resurrection is the demonstration that the risen Christ was as fully human as he was before his death.
That’s not often a key point that folks like us have drawn from the resurrection, but it does seem to be Luke’s. In his resurrection, and then at his ascension, Jesus left no part of his humanity behind. We who are in him can be confident of heaven, because (among other reasons, of course) one human being has blazed the trail and gone there ahead of us.
3) In vs.50-53 it is rather clear that the Father took Jesus up into heaven while he was part-way through blessing them. Why didn’t he wait just a few minutes for Jesus to finish his blessing?! Wouldn’t that have been an encouragement for the disciples?
It’s a strange thing. Is Luke’s point that Jesus is continuing to bless his disciples from heaven, even though he is not with us physically – that his unfinished blessing is unfinishing? That fits, I think, with his promise to clothe them with power from on high (v.49). His physical disappearance does not end the blessing of his presence with them; actually it allows for it to continue in a much more powerful way.
I feel I have only scratched the surface of Luke 24. But again I’ve been reminded that working away hard at what Luke has actually said, and trying to stick with the question ‘why has he chosen to say this?’, yields rather more fruit than I see when I first read through such familiar verses.