As they were talking about these things, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace to you!” But they were startled and frightened and thought they saw a spirit. Luke 23:36-37
Those two guys on the way to Emmaus—we never found out why they were going there. But we know they didn’t stay. “And they arose that same hour and returned to Jerusalem.” They left Jerusalem in gloom; they return to a buzz of excitement: “The Lord has risen indeed, and he’s appeared to Simon!” Everybody’s talking: explaining, expositing, theorizing, speculating, repeating themselves over and over like TV pundits after big breaking news: Unbelievable!
Then Jesus shows up, and it really is.
Luke is sometimes unintentionally humorous—or it just may be that he writes this piece of the story with a smile. Here they are, babbling on about the Lord’s appearances, and when he actually appears, they think he’s a ghost! Or a “spirit”—something profoundly uncanny. What were they expecting?
He probably looks different—perhaps something a little beyond human—but whatever the appearance, there’s enough of Jesus to recognize, yet something more to fear. Not a tame lion, as we’ve heard tell of another character in Christian lore. This is not the man they knew, who tramped the hills with them and broke bread with them and talked with them for hours on end. It’s not (quite) the man who suffered and sighed and bled and died.
And yet it is that man—times infinity.
They couldn’t believe because they had never seen anything like this before. No one had. This was entirely new.
And yet . . . in a way it wasn’t. That seed, planted in the virgin about 33 years ago, that microscopic marriage with a human egg—this unimaginable union of God and man they see before them–started back then. But no—
Those interminable genealogies, those tedious “begats,” casting the bloodline back through the centuries: from Joseph to Heli to Matthal to Levi to Melchi and so on, all the way back to Adam. It must have started then. But no—
Remember when Got bent down and breathed life into a mound of clay, “and man became a living being.” Surely it started then. But . . .
Even farther back, Spirit broods over potential; a word trembles on the brink. The Word. Time and place have yet to be; all is joy and bliss and glory, filling the infinite. The Glory has something in mind, and even though there’s no word for it now we’ll call it all things: each particular, various, after-its-own kind animal, vegetable, and mineral. In His mind, they are made of particles so tiny that learned men in the far future, with all their subtle instruments, will not be able to track them. But somewhere in the mind of the Maker, he draws a line at the frontier where the universe will begin.
With a “Let there be,” the future Son of Man crosses that line and brings forth all things.
“Touch my hands and feet; it is myself. Touch me and see. For a spirit—as you understand spirit—does not have flesh and bones as you see I have.”
And flesh and bones—as we’ve always experienced it—doesn’t live forever. But this flesh and bones will.
We have to go back in order to go forward So he takes them back, maybe as far back as “man became a living being.” Then forward through the Law and Psalms and Prophets, and they begin to see that in him, all things hold together.*
Soon, Spirit will cross another line. Luke ends his story with a ragtag group of followers returning to Jerusalem, to be “clothed with power from on high.” With wind and fire the Spirit will rush upon them, as upon Samson and Saul in the old days, not to work God’s will through them but to be God’s will in them. But that’s getting ahead of the story—which, we see now, doesn’t really end.
The Father speaks, and light appears;
the Son enters a human egg and incarnation happens;
the Holy Spirit pierces a wall of flesh, and indwelling begins.
He loves a good story, they say. By crossing that line at the birth of time, he began the greatest one of all. And it goes on . . .
*Col. 1:17
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For the original post in this series, go here.