Jesus Of Nazareth Part Two

by Pope Benedict XVI

  The narratives, on the other hand, do not feel bound by this juridical structure, but they communicate the whole breadth of the Resurrection experience. Just as there were only women standing by the Cross—apart from the beloved disciple—so too the first encounter with the risen Lord was destined to be for them. The Church’s juridical structure is founded on Peter and the Eleven, but in the day-to-day life of the Church it is the women who are constantly opening the door to the Lord and accompanying him to the Cross, and so it is they who come to experience the Risen One.

  Jesus’ appearances to Paul

  A second important difference, by which the narrative tradition completes the creedal formulae, lies in the fact that the risen Lord’s appearances are not only confessed but described in a certain amount of detail. How are we to picture to ourselves the appearances of the Risen One, who had not returned to normal human life, but had passed over into a new manner of human existence?

  To begin with, there is a marked difference between, on the one hand, the appearance of the risen Jesus to Paul, described in the Acts of the Apostles, and, on the other hand, the Gospel narratives concerning the encounters of the Apostles and the women with the living Lord.

  According to all three accounts of Saint Paul’s conversion in the Acts of the Apostles, there were two elements to his encounter with the risen Christ: a light that shone “brighter than the sun” (26:13) together with a voice that spoke to Saul “in the Hebrew language” (26:14). Whereas the first account says that the people accompanying Saul could hear the voice but “[saw] no one” (9:7), the second account says, conversely, that they “saw the light but did not hear the voice of the one who was speaking to me” (22:9). The third account says of the people accompanying Saul only that they all fell to the ground with him (cf. 26:14).

  This much is clear: there was a difference between what was perceived by the people accompanying Saul and what Saul himself perceived. Only he was the direct recipient of a message involving a mission, but the people with him were also in some sense witnesses of an extraordinary event.

  For the one who actually received the message, Saul/ Paul, the two elements belong together: first, the blinding light that recalls the Tabor story—the Risen One is simply light (cf. Part One, pp. 309-10), and second, the words by which Jesus identifies himself with the persecuted Church and entrusts Paul with a mission. While in the first and second accounts Paul is sent to Damascus, where he will receive more precise instructions for his mission, in the third account a detailed and quite specific mission statement is communicated directly: “Rise and stand upon your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and bear witness to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you, delivering you from the people and from the Gentiles—to whom I send you to open their eyes, that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me” (Acts 26:16-18).

  Despite all the differences between the three accounts, it is still clear that the apparition (light) and the word belong together. The risen Lord, whose essence is light, speaks as a man with Paul in Paul’s own language. His words serve, on the one hand, as self-identification, and this includes his identification with the persecuted Church, and, on the other hand, they serve to communicate a mission, whose content will be further explained in what follows.

  The appearances of Jesus in the Gospels

  The appearances that we read of in the Gospels are manifestly different. On the one hand, the Lord appears as a man like other men: he walks alongside the Emmaus disciples; he invites Thomas to touch his wounds, and in Luke’s account he even asks for a piece of fish to eat, in order to prove his real bodily presence. And yet these narratives do not present him simply as a man who has come back from death in the same condition as before.

  One thing that strikes us straightaway is that the disciples do not recognize him at first. This is true not only of the two in the Emmaus story, but also of Mary Magdalene and then again at the Lake of Gennesaret: “Just as day was breaking, Jesus stood on the beach; yet the disciples did not know that it was Jesus” (Jn 21:4). Only after the Lord has instructed them to set out once again does the beloved disciple recognize him: “That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, ‘It is the Lord!‘ “ (21:7). It is, as it were, an inward recognition, which nevertheless remains shrouded in mystery. For after the catch of fish, when Jesus invites them to eat, there is still a strange quality about him. “None of the disciples dared ask him, ‘Who are you?’ They knew it was the Lord” (21:12). They knew from within, not from observing the Lord’s outward appearance.

  This dialectic of recognition and non-recognition corresponds to the manner of the apparitions. Jesus comes through closed doors; he suddenly stands in their midst. And in the same way he suddenly withdraws again, as at the end of the Emmaus encounter. His presence is entirely physical, yet he is not bound by physical laws, by the laws of space and time. In this remarkable dialectic of identity and otherness, of real physicality and freedom from the constraints of the body, we see the special mysterious nature of the risen Lord’s new existence. Both elements apply here: he is the same embodied man, and he is the new man, having entered upon a different manner of existence.

  The dialectic, which pertains to the nature of the Risen One, is presented quite clumsily in the narratives, and it is this that manifests their veracity. Had it been necessary to invent the Resurrection, then all the emphasis would have been placed on full physicality, on immediate recognizability, and perhaps, too, some special power would have been thought up as a distinguishing feature of the risen Lord. But in the internal contradictions characteristic of all the accounts of what the disciples experienced, in the mysterious combination of otherness and identity, we see reflected a new form of encounter, one that from an apologetic standpoint may seem rather awkward but that is all the more credible as a record of the experience.

  A help toward understanding the mysterious appearances of the risen Jesus can, I think, be provided by the theophanies of the Old Testament. I would like to mention briefly just three types of such theophanies.

  First there is God’s appearance to Abraham at the oak of Mamre (Gen 18:1-33). Three men present themselves at Abraham’s home. And yet Abraham knows at once, from deep within, that it is “the Lord” who wishes to be his guest. In the Book of Joshua, we are told that, lifting up his eyes, Joshua suddenly sees standing before him a man with a drawn sword in his hand. Not recognizing him, Joshua asks: “Are you for us, or for our adversaries?” He receives this reply: “No, but as commander of the army of the Lord I have now come. . . . Put off your shoes from your feet; for the place where you stand is holy” (Josh 5:13-15). The stories of Gideon (Judg 6:11-24) and Samson (Judg 13) are also significant. In each case the “angel of the Lord” appearing in human form is recognized only at the moment of his mysterious withdrawal. Both times a flame consumes the food-offering as the “angel of the Lord” disappears. The mythological language expresses, on the one hand, the Lord’s closeness, as he reveals himself in human form, and, on the other hand, his otherness, as he stands outside the laws of material existence.

  Admittedly these are only analogies. What is radically new about the “theophany” of the risen Lord is that Jesus is truly man: he suffered and died as man and now lives anew in the dimension of the living God. He appears now as true man and yet as coming from God—as being God himself.

  So two qualifications are important. On the one hand, Jesus has not returned to the empirical existence that is subject to the law of death, but he lives anew in fellowship with God, permanently beyond the reach of death. On the other hand, it is important that the encounters with the risen Lord are not just interior events or mystical experiences—they are real encounters with the living one who is now embodied in a new way and remains embodied. Luke emphasizes this very strongly: Jesus is not,
as the disciples initially feared, a “ghost” or a “spirit”: he has “flesh and bones” (Lk 24:36-43).

  What a ghost is, what is meant by the apparition of a “spirit” as opposed to the apparition of the risen Lord, can best be seen in the biblical account of the medium at Endor, who at Saul’s behest conjures up the spirit of Samuel from the underworld (cf. 1 Sam 28:7-19). The “spirit” that she calls forth is a dead man dwelling among the shadows in the underworld, who from time to time can be summoned forth, only to return to the realm of the dead.

  Jesus, however, does not come from the realm of the dead, which he has definitively left behind: on the contrary, he comes from the realm of pure life, from God; he comes as the one who is truly alive, who is himself the source of life. Luke underlines quite dramatically how different the risen Lord is from a mere “spirit” by recounting that Jesus asked the still fearful disciples for something to eat and then ate a piece of grilled fish before their eyes.

  Most exegetes take the view that Luke is exaggerating here in his apologetic zeal, that a statement of this kind seems to draw Jesus back into the empirical physicality that had been transcended by the Resurrection. Thus Luke ends up contradicting his own narrative, in which Jesus appears suddenly in the midst of the disciples in a physicality that is no longer subject to the laws of space and time.

  I think it is helpful here to consider the other three passages in which the risen Jesus is presented participating in a meal.

  Immediately before the text just mentioned is the Emmaus story. It ends with Jesus sitting down to table with the disciples, taking the bread, giving thanks and praise, breaking the bread, and giving it to the two of them. At this moment their eyes are opened, “and they recognized him; and he vanished out of their sight” (Lk 24:31). The Lord sits at table with his disciples as before, with thanks and praise and breaking of bread. Then he vanishes from their outward view, and through this vanishing their inner vision is opened up: they recognize him. It is real table fellowship, and yet it is new. In the breaking of the bread he manifests himself, yet only in vanishing does he become truly recognizable.

  In terms of their inner structure, these two meal narratives are quite similar to the one in John 21:1-14: the disciples have spent a fruitless night, and not a single fish has been caught in their nets. In the morning, Jesus is standing on the shore, but they do not recognize him. He asks them: “Children, have you any fish?” When they respond in the negative, he instructs them to set out once again, and this time they come back with an abundant catch. Yet Jesus, who already has fish cooking on a charcoal fire, himself invites them: “Come and have breakfast.” And now “they knew” that it was Jesus.

  Particularly important and helpful for an understanding of the risen Jesus’ participation in meals is the last account, found in the Acts of the Apostles. In most translations, admittedly, the singular significance of this text is not brought out. The Jerusalem Bible corresponds to the conventional type of translation when it says: “For forty days he had continued to appear to them and tell them about the kingdom of God. When he had been at table with them, he had told them not to leave Jerusalem” (1:3-4). Through the period after the word “God”, which the sentence construction requires, an inner connection is concealed. Luke speaks of three elements that characterized the time spent by the risen Jesus in the company of his disciples: he appeared to them, he spoke to them, he sat at table with them. Appearing, speaking, and sharing meals: these three self-manifestations of the risen Lord belong together; they were his ways of proving that he was alive.

  For a correct understanding of the third element, which like the first two extends over the “forty days”, the word used by Luke—synalizômenos—is of great significance. Literally translated, it means “eating salt with them”. Luke must have chosen this word quite deliberately. Yet what is it supposed to mean? In the Old Testament the shared enjoyment of bread and salt, or of salt alone, served to establish lasting covenants (cf. Num 18:19; 2 Chron 13:5; cf. Hauck, TDNT I, p. 228). Salt is regarded as a guarantee of durability. It is a remedy against putrefaction, against the corruption that pertains to the nature of death. To eat is always to hold death at bay—it is a way of preserving life. The “eating of salt” by Jesus after the Resurrection, which we therefore encounter as a sign of new and everlasting life, points to the risen Lord’s new banquet with his followers. It is a covenant-event, and in this sense it has an inner association with the Last Supper, when the Lord established the New Covenant. So the mysterious cipher of eating salt expresses an inner bond between the meal on the eve of Jesus’ Passion and the risen Lord’s new table fellowship: he gives himself to his followers as food and thus makes them sharers in his life, in life itself.

  Finally, it is helpful to recall here a saying of Jesus from Saint Mark’s Gospel: “For every one will be salted with fire. Salt is good; but if the salt has lost its saltness, how will you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another” (9:49-50). Some manuscripts add, with reference to Leviticus 2:13: “and every sacrifice will be salted with salt.” The salting of sacrifices was similarly intended to add spice to the offering and preserve it from putrefaction. So different meanings come together here: covenant renewal, the gift of life, and purification of one’s own being for self-offering to God.

  When Luke summarizes the post-Resurrection events at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles and makes reference to the risen Lord’s table fellowship with his followers by means of the expression “eating salt with them” (1:4), on the one hand, the mystery of this new table fellowship remains. On the other hand, though, its essential meaning is made clear: the Lord is drawing the disciples into a new covenant-fellowship with him and with the living God; he is giving them a share in real life, making them truly alive and salting their lives through participation in his Passion, in the purifying power of his suffering.

  What this table fellowship with the disciples actually looked like is beyond our powers of imagination. But we can recognize its inner nature, and we can see that in the worshipping community, in the celebration of the Eucharist, this table fellowship with the risen Lord continues, albeit in a different form.

  3. Summary: The Nature of Jesus’ Resurrection

  and Its Historical Significance

  Let us ask once more, by way of summary, what it was like to encounter the risen Lord. The following distinctions are important:

  — Jesus did not simply return to normal biological life as one who, by the laws of biology, would eventually have to die again.

  — Jesus is not a ghost (“spirit”). In other words, he does not belong to the realm of the dead but is somehow able to reveal himself in the realm of the living.

  — Nevertheless, the encounters with the risen Lord are not the same as mystical experiences, in which the human spirit is momentarily drawn aloft out of itself and perceives the realm of the divine and eternal, only to return then to the normal horizon of its existence. Mystical experience is a temporary removal of the soul’s spatial and cognitive limitations. But it is not an encounter with a person coming toward me from without. Saint Paul clearly distinguished his mystical experiences, such as his elevation to the third heaven described in 2 Corinthians 12:1-4, from his encounter with the risen Lord on the road to Damascus, which was a historical event—an encounter with a living person.

  On the basis of all this biblical evidence, what are we now in a position to say about the true nature of Christ’s Resurrection?

  It is a historical event that nevertheless bursts open the dimensions of history and transcends it. Perhaps we may draw upon analogical language here, inadequate in many ways, yet still able to open up a path toward understanding: as already anticipated in the first section of this chapter, we could regard the Resurrection as something akin to a radical “evolutionary leap”, in which a new dimension of life emerges, a new dimension of human existence.

  Indeed, matter itself is remolded into a new type of reality. The
man Jesus, complete with his body, now belongs totally to the sphere of the divine and eternal. From now on, as Tertullian once said, “spirit and blood” have a place within God (cf. De Resurrect. Mort. 51:3, CCSL II, 994). Even if man by his nature is created for immortality, it is only now that the place exists in which his immortal soul can find its “space”, its “bodiliness”, in which immortality takes on its meaning as communion with God and with the whole of reconciled mankind. This is what is meant by those passages in Saint Paul’s prison letters (cf. Col 1:12-23 and Eph 1:3-23) that speak of the cosmic body of Christ, indicating thereby that Christ’s transformed body is also the place where men enter into communion with God and with one another and are thus able to live definitively in the fullness of indestructible life. Since we ourselves have no experience of such a renewed and transformed type of matter, or such a renewed and transformed kind of life, it is not surprising that it oversteps the boundaries of what we are able to conceive.

  Essential, then, is the fact that Jesus’ Resurrection was not just about some deceased individual coming back to life at a certain point, but that an ontological leap occurred, one that touches being as such, opening up a dimension that affects us all, creating for all of us a new space of life, a new space of being in union with God.

  It is in these terms that the question of the historicity of the Resurrection should be addressed. On the one hand, we must acknowledge that it is of the essence of the Resurrection precisely to burst open history and usher in a new dimension commonly described as eschatological. The Resurrection opens up the new space that transcends history and creates the definitive. In this sense, it follows that Resurrection is not the same kind of historical event as the birth or crucifixion of Jesus. It is something new, a new type of event.