A Meditation on Three Post-Resurrection Appearances
As we near the conclusion of the Easter season, I’d like to invite you to join me in considering a few of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances in the gospels. Each of the scenes shown below are excerpted from the same detailed 19th-century Russian icon.
In an attitude of meditation, consider these post-resurrection appearances and the images that depict them alongside a portion of the prayer of St. Francis that helps to frame them. That prayer begins this way:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light,
and where there is sadness, joy.
The three italicized lines describe the post-Easter situations in which the disciples find themselves.
Where there is injury, pardon
In John 21, Peter announces to some of the other disciples that he’s going fishing. They accompany him, and the next morning, they see the resurrected Jesus standing on the shore. No sooner does Peter recognize the figure on the shore than he throws himself overboard and swims toward him.
This icon shows a scene that isn't actually described in the text: Jesus, waiting on the shore, extends a hand to Peter to draw him out of the water.
Following a breakfast with the disciples, John 21 famously recounts an exchange between Jesus and Peter, during which Jesus repeatedly asks Peter, “Do you love me?”
After Jesus asks the question for the third time, the text says Peter is “hurt.” When Peter meets the resurrected Jesus in this scene, he does so without having recovered from the self-inflicted injury caused by his pre-crucifixion denial of Jesus. The pain from the original offense has not dissipated; it has only deepened.
Despite the relational rift that Peter undoubtedly perceives, Jesus’ welcoming posture in the icon suggests that his eagerness to reconcile matches that of his soaked, disheveled companion. Having helped Peter to shore, Jesus invites him to dry off by a fire that looks for all the world like the one beside which Peter stood when he first denied him.
Consider the sea-deep guilt from which Jesus lifts Peter; consider the outstretched hand, unmistakably Jesus’s, yet somehow more human than any he has clasped in the past, as the fullest assurance of pardon Peter could have dared to hope for.
Where there is doubt, faith
In John 20, the disciples have locked themselves away in fear, and Jesus comes offering peace.
The fearful disciples tell Thomas, who had been absent upon Jesus’ first visit a few days prior, “We have seen the Lord.” Thomas famously responds, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.”
We might hear Thomas’s “unless I see, I will never believe” as an expression of doubt and incredulity. . However, we might also hear in this announcement a hint of desperation, akin to a cry for help: “The current has pulled me under. I am drowning, and the only hand that can pull me up is nail scarred.”
(It’s worth noting that to focus too much on Thomas’s doubt is to let the cowering disciples off the hook too easily).
Perhaps not unlike Peter swimming determinedly toward the shore, Thomas knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that only one outstretched hand will do. In this way, Thomas is worthy of imitation.
This portion of the icon is a common depiction of the resurrection that shows Jesus grabbing Adam, the first man, by the wrist. Jesus, trampling upon the gates of hell, lifts Adam from the depths, thus illustrating Christ’s rescue of sinful humanity from the grip of death.
Read alongside the post-resurrection appearance in John 20:24-25, we might see the stooping Adam as a prefiguration of Thomas as he leans in for a closer look at the nail marks in Jesus’ hands.
If we lean in close enough in imitation of the figure, we might even see ourselves. The hand that bears us up all at once saves us from drowning in whatever depths of doubt threaten to swallow us.
Regardless of the identity of the figure, make no mistake: he can’t pull himself up by dint of hard work or reason—he has to be rescued.
Where there is despair, hope
In perhaps the most breathtaking of the post-resurrection appearances, Jesus appears to two disciples as they travel the road away from Jerusalem. The disciples, Luke tells us, kept from recognizing Jesus, “stood still, looking sad” (Lk 24:17).
The conversation that ensues contains nothing less than an interpretive key to the whole of scripture. Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, Luke tells us, the stranger interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. After their discussion of the scriptures, the disciples invite their companion to share a meal. Fittingly, all passages lead to the table.
On the left side of the depiction of this scene, we see Jesus walking alongside the disciples toward Emmaus. The right side captures the instant the bread is broken and offered, the pregnant moment just before, as Luke aptly has it, “their eyes were opened.”
As you study this scene, consider the mystery that permeates this all-important moment of recognition. How much of eternity is housed in the holy juncture between the opening of the disciples’ eyes and the disappearance of the one they had hoped for, this last stranger in Jerusalem unaware of the things that have taken place there?
Perhaps they recognize him in the moment when he breaks and shares the bread with a characteristic flourish—a familiar flick of the wrist, say; his gentle, almost playful way of offering it; or some other barely perceptible yet unmistakable connection to meals they were told they’d do well to remember, beat by beat.
Or consider that the disciples, reaching for the bread in their despairing state, harboring deep wounds of their own, are primed to recognize Jesus precisely because of the wounded hands with which he breaks and offers it.
Perhaps only bread offered by scarred hands can fill those who have lost hope altogether.
Touch me and see
All three of these post-resurrection depictions show Jesus extending a hand to those to whom he's appearing.
To Peter, he extends a hand to lift him from the water. In so doing, he’s restoring a relationship that had been fractured by Peter's denial. Where there's injury, he's sowing pardon.
To Thomas, he opens a hand to show the marks where the nails were driven in. Jesus reaches out his hand in invitation so that Thomas, along with all before and after him, might come within the reach of his saving embrace. Where there's doubt, he's sowing faith.
To the disciples on the road to Emmaus, he offers bread from a wounded hand. In so doing, he's revealing his presence among them in the very place they assumed he was absent. Where there's despair, he's offering hope.
In imitation of Jesus, we are to reach forth our hands in love. We're to do so in a way that costs us, that stretches us, in a way that's patterned after the one who stretched out his arms to be crucified.
To offer ourselves for the sake of others is countercultural. When we do so in imitation of Jesus, it might not make sense to the watching world. However, it’s precisely in those moments of offering ourselves on behalf of others that Christ in us becomes recognizable.
Just as Jesus becomes recognizable when he offers the bread to his disciples and they see his wounds, he becomes recognizable each time we offer our lives to others in vulnerability.
Olivia Jahnke created this work of art based upon another post-resurrection appearance of Jesus to the disciples from Luke’s gospel. The inscription, “It is I myself,” comes from Luke 24:39.
Consider the possibility that the hand offering peace shown here is not only he hand of Jesus, but also our own hand. The inscription, then, takes on a deepened meaning: each time we reach out our hands to offer peace in imitation of Jesus, it is as if he’s saying all over again, “It is I myself.”
In the same way, we are recognized as Jesus’ disciples in the moments when, with our vulnerability on full display, we reach forth our hands in love. In imitation of the risen Lord, we can take part in post-resurrection appearances of a different sort.
Lord Jesus, you stretched out your arms of love upon the hard wood of the cross
that everyone might come within reach of your saving embrace.
So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching forth our hands in love,
may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you
for the honor of your name. Amen.