On Easter morning, Mary Magdalene encountered the resurrected Lord in the garden outside His tomb. She didn’t recognize Him and took Him for a yardworker.
The evening of that same day, two of the Lord Jesus’ disciples, walking from Jerusalem to the village of Emmaus seven miles off, met a Stranger Who walked and talked with them. Though their “hearts burned within as He opened the meaning of the Scriptures,” they didn’t know Who He was.
After those first days, the disciples returned to Galilee, their homeland. Again and again they saw Him, but didn’t recognize Him.
Yet, when the Lord spoke Mary Magdalene’s name, when He blessed and broke bread at the Emmaus Inn, when He called to His disciples from the shore of the Galilean lake, they did know Him. They knew who He was, not by how He looked, but by what He did.
They didn’t recognize Him because He looked different. His body was changed. Not by the scourging and nails, the bruises and cuts, but by His Resurrection. The Lord’s body was no longer subject to cuts and nails and bruises. His transfigured body was the body of the New Adam, the First-born from the dead. The Lord Jesus emerged from the tomb with the body He had so long before intended for us—for Adam and Eve—an immortal body, no longer in the clutch of suffering or death. “Jesus took a body subject to decay,” wrote St Athanasius the Great, “that our decaying bodies would be clothed with immortality.”
When Adam chewed the pomegranate (or ate the proverbial apple) from the Tree of Good and Evil, he forfeited the chance to eat from the Tree of Life. Both his body and soul, made for immortality, began to change. Having turned from perfect communion with God, the thing for which he was created, Adam unwittingly chose decay, suffering and death. It’s the choice every son of Adam and daughter of Eve (excepting one), has made ever since.
Christ took our nature to change our nature. Again, St Athanasius: “He became like us to make us like Him.” He took our mortality to give us His immortality.
That immortality is not a “spiritual” immortality, a ghost-like survival of the soul after death. The Creed is insistent: “I believe…in the resurrection of the body.” Your body. Mine. We aren’t souls trapped in bodies, as Buddhists believe; in us, the spiritual and earthly meet. It’s that way on purpose. God made us that way. He intends for us an immortality of body and soul. It’s what God meant for us all along. Adam and Eve, and you and I, flubbed it. So God became one of us, to lift us to Heaven. The upcoming feast of the Ascension is a feast of the lifting up of our humanity to God.
Christ’s body changed after His Resurrection. He is now, as St Paul says, “the man of Heaven.” His Resurrection transfigured His body from an earthly one to a heavenly one. One day, pray God, your body—and maybe even mine—“will be changed—in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye” to be like His. No longer will we be subject to suffering or pain, but that’s the least of it. We’ll be changed to what we were intended to be, not what we’ve made of ourselves. And the Gospel truth—the Gospel Joy—is this: on that Day, we’ll see Him, and recognize Him, and know Him as He is—and He will call us by name, because He knows us, too.—Fr Gregory Wilcox
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