Lk 24: 35-48
Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.
While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.”
And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence. Then 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, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.”
Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.
New Revised Standard Version, copyright 1989, by the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. USCCB approved.
Share the Gospel with the World
Jesus was teaching the apostles constantly for three years and they never understood. Even at this resurrection appearance the apostles are terrified and believe Jesus to be a ghost. Yet it was at the realization that he still had flesh and bones, and that he literally died and came back to life, that they gained understanding. It was in the action of Christ’s love and loss that truth was finally able to be conveyed. For all of the lectures given in our world, nothing will ever teach us quite like the action of love. Our world has a lot of people who say that they have the right answers, but likely less who actually demonstrate it. Let us go forward and share the Gospel not with reason alone, but even more so with the stories and wounds we carry that tell of our own redemption.
—Alex Hale, SJ, is a Jesuit scholastic from the Midwest Province studying philosophy at Loyola University Chicago.
Prayer
Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words if necessary.
—Commonly attributed to St. Francis of Assisi