"Peace be with you."
But they were startled and terrified
and thought that they were seeing a ghost.
They had been wrong about this before. When he came across the waves to their boat during a storm they also "thought it was a ghost and cried out" (see Mark 6:49). But from this we might surmise that it wasn't just the fact on the presence of Jesus that startled and terrified them. On the lake he had been terrifying specifically because the event was revelation of his divinity, a theophany. So too here. He had crossed the greater stormy sea of death to return once more to his frightened flock in the little vessel of his Church. His risen humanity, now glorified, was now, in some mysterious way, transparent to his divinity. What Peter, James, and John, saw briefly during the transfiguration was now normalized. It wasn't that his old human aspect was gone. It was rather more like a new dimension of reality had opened up around him. No wonder people needed his graced assistance in order to recognize him. They could stare at him directly but not see his familiar humanity because of the blinding light of his divinity. No wonder, too, then, that this was not an experience that was given immediately to the whole world, but rather to chosen witnesses. These witnesses were able, eventually, to correctly interpret what they had seen because they had been with him the whole time. They had known the human Jesus. They were the ones who could understand that he was not some glorious angelic being or phantasm, but rather than same Jesus whom they had known. What was the ultimate link that definitively proved that the one they had known before was the same one whom they now beheld? It was his wounds.
Look at my hands and my feet, that it is I myself.
Touch me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones
as you can see I have."
And as he said this,
he showed them his hands and his feet.
As he had done for the disciples on the way to Emmaus so now he opened the minds of the others to understand the Scriptures. Specifically they came to understand the way that he was at the center of everything. Not only was he the one predicted in the obviously messianic passages of the prophets, but the law of Moses and the psalms as well ultimately found the true fulfillment of their deepest meaning in him as well. Although Jesus said so, it was not obvious to the untrained mind that it is written in the Old Testament "that the Christ would suffer and rise from the dead on the third day and that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, would be preached". But once one saw it, he could not unseen it. Jesus was sacrificed in the figure of Isaac, offered as the lamb by Moses, prefigured as the suffering servant in Isaiah, shown as persecuted but eventually triumphant in the psalms of David, just to name a few examples. Even as recently as Vatican I prophecy was affirmed as an important external "motive of credibility" (motiva credibitatis) that makes the act of faith rational (see Vatican I, Session III, Ch. 3). We can see in our recent readings that prophecy has always been considered a vital part of the witness of the Church. Fulfillment was the foundation of Peter's message today in our reading from Acts, including fulfillment of the words of Moses and Samuel, and of God's promise to Abraham. But what is the eventual result of this conviction supposed to be, or what do we become as a consequence? Jesus tells us:
You are witnesses of these things.
Peter understood this, as we can see in the reading from Acts, when he says "of this we are witnesses". But do we understand it? Are we persuaded that all of human history finds its fulfillment in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ? And if so, how can we help but proclaim it?
O Lord, our God, how wonderful your name in all the earth!
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