Over the years, one of the most puzzling aspects of the narratives
of the Resurrection for me was that none of Jesus’ disciples
recognized him after the Resurrection. I oftentimes thought that,
if Jesus did rise from the dead in his body, surely those who were
closest to him—Mary of Magdala, Peter, and John—would have
recognized him immediately. But, they didn’t.
In my mind, that raised the question: Why not?
That question was answered when I read the book, The Prophets,
by Abraham Heschel. In that book, Rabbi Heschel discussed the
Hebrew word “nabî”—to
see—and how ordinary Jews saw things differently from how the Jewish
prophets saw things.
For the Jews—and for many of us—we “see what we know,”
Rabbi Heschel wrote. That is, we learn something (for example, we
read a psychology book) and impose that knowledge upon the world
around us. We interpret reality by imposing what we know upon it,
as it were, upon the world “from without.” If we don’t know
something, then we cannot see it because we don’t know what that
reality is.
The prophets, however, “know what they see.” That is, prophets
enter into reality itself and allow its meaning to unfold before
their very eyes, as it were, “from within” the world.
Unencumbered by what they know, the prophets experienced the reality
before them as it was and as it unfolded before their very eyes.
They
“know what they see.”
Perhaps somewhat more concretely, all of this may have to do with
the aphorism we’ve
all heard,
“Seeing is believing.” That is, what the disciples were looking for
after the Resurrection wasn’t what they saw and, hence, they not
only couldn’t see, but they also couldn’t believe.
For example, when the disciples went to the tomb that first Easter
morning, I’d think they probably didn’t want to take a look into the
tomb. After all, why would any of them want to reawaken and recount
all over again those tragic events of Good Friday? Why in the world
would they want to take another look at the bruised, battered,
beaten, broken, and now decaying body of the one they had called
“Teacher”?
Yet, what the disciples expected to see—what they knew—didn’t happen
to be what God in His Divine Providence had in store for them to
see: an empty tomb. So, the disciples believed once again what
they knew, that is, what they had been told:
“The body of the
Lord has been stolen.”
They
were blind to what all of this meant—they
couldn’t enter into the reality God had placed before them—because
they saw what they knew.
I’d propose that many of us engage in this behavior quite a bit. We
set out to see something—to see what we know and have already
decided we want to see—and end up being blind. We hear of
someone’s
reputation before we even meet that person and we use that
information to judge that person. Someone wrongs us and,
because of that, we see nothing other than what we know through our
personal experience. We categorize individuals, robbing them
of their distinctive identity by attributing a group’s
characteristics to particular individuals within that group.
All the while we are blind to the reality before us.
About this
behavior, the commentator of the Prairie Home Companion,
Garrison Keeler, once noted: “Sometimes, you look reality in the eye
and deny it.”
John Berger also discusses this all-too-common behavior in his book,
Ways of Seeing, asserting that there is an “unsettled
relation” between what we see and what we know. Berger writes:
Each
evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is
turning away from it. Yet, the knowledge, the explanation, never
quite fits the sight.
In
this sense, what the disciples saw when they beheld the Risen
Lord—after all, he had promised them that he would rise on the third
day—didn’t fit what they knew—the explanation they already
had in their minds.
The obvious spiritual problem all of these images present—prophets,
Garrison Keeler, and John Berger—is how—like Jesus’ disciples—we
impose what we know upon what we see which, in turns,
makes us blind to what God has prepared for us to see.
What might that be?
It
has to do, I think, with the unexpected rather than the
predictable. Jokes, for example, make us laugh because we didn’t
expect the punch line. When the UPS delivery man comes with an
unexpected package containing a gift from someone, our spirits
soar. When an unexpected severe illness or death occurs to a family
member, we find ourselves at a loss and find it difficult to regain
our bearings.
The unexpected has great power to affect us.
Easter Sunday—the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead—is one
of God’s most unexpected surprises, one that threw Jesus’ disciples
for a loop. Yes, they believed that Jesus’ was the Son of God,
having become a human being, sharing in their joys and sorrows, and
teaching them of God’s love, forgiveness, and mercy. Yes, they
had witnessed Good Friday, the unexpected and cruel death of Jesus
at the hands of those who had proclaimed him “King” just seven days
earlier. Yes, they knew Jesus had been buried in the tomb. The
disciples were very well-prepared to “see what they know.”
But, even though Jesus had forewarned his disciples of what God had
in store for them, his Resurrection from the dead was completely
unexpected. And, when the Risen Lord appeared to his disciples,
they didn’t know what they saw. Their inability to enter into the
Resurrection and to allow the Risen Lord to reveal to them who he
truly was indicates that what Jesus’ disciples knew very little, if
anything at all, about God.
How could this be?
The disciples were incapable of knowing what they saw. They
feared allowing themselves to venture beyond what they knew and to
enter into the mystery of God’s power to turn the effects of sin—the
greatest of these being death—in new life. They knew the power
of death. They knew nothing of God’s
power to “turn mud into diamonds.” In short, the disciples
were incapable of knowing what they saw when they beheld the Risen
Lord.
All of us have experienced failure in our lives. Looking back upon
those experiences, perhaps we find ourselves ashamed, wondering
“How
could I have done that?” It
is also
not
unusual that, by entering into that failure and contemplating it a
bit, we can also recognize that good oftentimes has come out of our
failure. We may have learned something new about ourselves, turned
a corner that we needed to turn, or found an unexpected blessing
emerge from a terrible mistake. It may be that illness or
disability led us to discover an unexpected new strength. It may
have led us to turn away from seeking our happiness in things that
possess little value or to become more serious about our
relationship with God. Or, perhaps more unexpectedly, it may be
that we forgave someone who wronged us.
When it comes to our dealings with God, Easter Sunday reminds us not
to see what we know by interpreting what is before us
from “without.”
Instead, the events of this day remind us know what we by
interpreting what is before us
from “within” as
we
expect the unexpected and remain vigilant for those surprises which
include our sorrow being transformed into joy, our suffering being
transformed into triumph, our emptiness into fulfillment, and our
death into eternal life.
Pope Benedict XVI has described this ideal in “The Nature of Jesus’
Resurrection and Its Historical Significance” in Jesus of
Nazareth Part 2: Holy Week—From the Entrance Into Jerusalem to the
Resurrection (Ignatius Press, 2011). The Pope writes:
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….[The resurrection] is a historical event that nevertheless
bursts open the dimensions of history and transcends it… something
akin to a radical “evolutionary leap,” in which a new dimension of
life emerges, a new dimension of human existence. (pp. 272-273)
“Is
not this the truly divine way?” the Pope asks. “Not to overwhelm
with external power, but to give freedom, to offer and elicit love.
And if we really think about it, is it not what seems so small that
is truly great?” (p. 276).
How your family
might celebrate the Easter Season:
Easter is so important that it cannot be celebrated in just one,
single day. To celebrate Easter appropriately, the Church
takes fifty days (forty days leading to the Ascension and ten days
leading to Pentecost Sunday, fifty days that culminate on what used
to be called "Quinquagesimea Sunday"). These are the days that
constitute the entire "Easter Season."
Here are four
simple ways you might celebrate the entire Easter Season with your
family:
1. Place a white pillar candle in the
center of your kitchen table. Each night before dinner, assign
a member of your family to light the candle and to recall
what a person said or did that day to reveal the Risen Lord.
As part of the blessing prayer, give thanks to the Lord for the gift
of that person.
2.
Take a daily walk around the neighborhood. Identify one sign
of new life each day. After completing the walk, sit down
together as a family in the living room or family room and relate
each sign to the new life that God has given all of us in the
resurrection of His only begotten Son.
3. Invite an estranged family member,
relative, or friend (or a family member, relative, or friend who
hasn't been to visit for a while) to dinner each of the Sundays of
the Easter season. Before the prayer of blessing over the
food, read a resurrection appearance where Jesus says to his
disciples, "Peace be with you." Following the blessing of the
food, offer one another the sign of peace before partaking of the
meal.
4. In preparation for the Solemnity
of Pentecost, have each member of the family on Easter Sunday write
down on a piece of paper a gift of the Holy Spirit that he or she
needs in order to become a more faithful disciple. Fold and
place these pieces of paper in a bowl in the center of the kitchen
table. At dinner each evening, pray the "Prayer of the Holy
Spirit" to send for these gifts upon the members of the family so
that your family will become a light to the world. Then,
before the prayer of blessing over the dinner on Pentecost Sunday,
burn the pieces of paper to call to mind that the gifts have already
been given in the Sacrament of Confirmation. The challenge is
now to live out those gifts in the ordinary time of our daily lives.
Easter is an event that
happens each and every day. During the fifty days of the
Easter season, in particular, you and your family can prepare to
make Easter happen each and every day of your lives by "practicing"
these simple exercises which connect Jesus' risen life to yours as
well.
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