Trey Benfield
Luke 24:36-43 may be my favorite passage in the Bible. I have always been fascinated that, according to Luke, after Jesus rises from the dead Jesus appears to His disciples, ask if they have any food, and then eats some broiled fish.
Some of my earliest memories are of fish fries at my grandparent's house on Lake Norman. My grandfather and father loved to fish and I grew up fishing for crappie and bass and catfish. I hope to pass that on to my own children. They go out with me quite often and I tell them stories about fishing with their grandfather and great- grandfather.
Once, a few years ago, I decided I needed to get away. I took a ferry to a deserted island off the coast of North Carolina. During the day I would surf fish on the beach and then at night cook what I caught over my campfire. I imagine the disciples doing something similar preparing the fish in much the same way over their campfire on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.
However, this passage is more than just a superfluous detail given for the benefit of anglers like myself. You see Jesus' resurrection had not gone according to the script. Resurrection was a hope many Jews shared, but it was not supposed to happen this way. Resurrection was supposed to happen to everyone all at once, not to one person ahead of everyone else. Paul spends a lot of time explaining this deviation, and in his great chapter on resurrection in 1 Corinthians, calls Jesus the firstfruits of the resurrection.
Everything we know about what the resurrection is like is from the details of Jesus' appearances after Easter Sunday. Our entire dataset consists of an n of one. So what do we learn then about the resurrection from Jesus' post-resurrection appearances? I think we learn two things from this passage both of which have important implication for how we think about our world today.
First, Jesus shows the disciples his hand and his feet in order to show that He is still human and not a ghost. Presumably they would have seen the crucifixion wounds and recognized exactly who he was. What this means is that the resurrection is not a redo like a video game. Instead there is some kind of continuity between the old world and the new, resurrected life. This means that what we do now has importance. This life is not just a trial run.
Second, Jesus eats fish. Jesus is not a disembodied spirit. Jesus is still firmly participates in creation. Jesus is still enjoying creation. That means after we die, we don't simply float on clouds playing harps the way I grew up imagining heaven. Before I understood what this passage meant, the afterlife sounded like some eternal choir practice and I hated going to choir practice. What Jesus shows here in Luke is that the resurrected life means we can enjoy eating broiled fish.
The implication of both these points are much bigger than how great it is to eat fish. Both these points should change the way we think about our present life and our relationship with the world. The point of Easter is not to escape from this world to some sort of ethereal, spiritual plain. The resurrection is an affirmation of the creation. The resurrection means that God does not abandon creation, but instead God rescues creation.
This makes resurrection not an abstract doctrine, but one that changes the way we live and act in this world today. It means enjoying creation is not a guilty pleasure. It means caring for creation is not pointless. It means giving of ourselves to others is not a futile act. Instead we show the world the hope of resurrection by working for the new world in the present. This is our mission then - to practice resurrection.
