THE TEXT BELOW IS THE TRANSCRIPTION OF THE VIDEO COMMENTARY BY FR. FERNANDO ARMELLINI

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“At that time, the two disciples (of Emmaus) recounted what had taken place on the way, and how Jesus was made known to them in the breaking of bread”. 

Happy Easter to all.

To understand today’s gospel, it is necessary to place it in context. We are on Easter, and Luke, like the other evangelists, narrates the women’s visit to the tomb. What did the women find? In the Gospel text on Easter night, Mark says they discovered the empty tomb and a young man who spoke to them. The evangelist Matthew says that the women saw an angel descending from heaven, that there was a great earthquake, that he sat on the stone, and that he spoke to the women. 

The evangelist Luke says the women found two men in white robes who spoke with them. The number two, two men … are two witnesses. Two witnesses were required to certify that something was true. And here it is, a truth communicated by two witnesses with splendid robes. They are the images the evangelist uses to present the revelation women received from God. The white colour affirms that the revelation they received, the words they have heard, came from heaven. Are true. The tomb is empty, and the women’s voice is of these two witnesses of the truth who say to them: “Why do they seek the living among the dead? He is risen. He is not here”.

 And Luke says that the women went to announce the message they had received to the eleven. The eleven do not believe the women. They say that what they had were hallucinations. But Peter runs to the tomb, verifies that it is empty, and sees nothing else. He returns to his house full of stupor. Then Luke tells of the Risen One’s appearance to the two disciples of Emmaus, who return to Jerusalem to tell the brothers about their extraordinary experience. And these two are informed by the eleven that the Lord has manifested himself to Simon. 

This is the context of the narrative in today’s Gospel text. There is a community gathered. There are eleven, and there are the two disciples who returned from Emmaus. This is what happens while this community is together. 

“While they were still speaking about this, he stood in their midst and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ But they were startled and terrified and thought that they were seeing a ghost. Then he said to them, ‘Why are you troubled? And why do questions arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you can see I have.’” 

We can imagine this community gathered, radiant with joy at the revelation of the Risen One that the women and some of them have had. They share this extraordinary experience when, as Luke says, Jesus presents himself in their midst. Let’s notice well. It does not say that he “appeared” and then disappeared. He says that the Risen One is in their midst. The Risen One never left his community. He has always been with them. But the eyes of the disciples are unable to see him. Then, there comes a time when their eyes open and are illuminated by the light of Easter, and they are aware of his presence. That presence that had always been there. It was their eyes that could not see him in their midst. Now, they become aware that He is alive. He is with them. 

Here is the first message for us. The experience of the Risen One in our midst can always be done when we meet with the brothers and sisters on the Lord’s Day, united in the community to listen to the Word of the Lord and share the Eucharistic bread. Let us note the greeting of the Risen One: “Peace be with you.” It is precisely the celebrant’s greeting to the assembled community. It is on the Day of the Lord when we turn our minds and hearts away from worries that envelop us every day and allow ourselves to be surrounded by the light that comes from the Word of God and the gesture of breaking the bread. 

We then realize that the Risen One is not distant; he is among us. He has not gone beyond—he stays with us, but not in the same way as before, made of atoms and molecules with a body. His body is no longer physical. Since atoms belong to our world and not to God’s uncorrupted realm, we cannot see or touch the Risen One physically. However, we can see him through faith and ‘touch’ him symbolically through the shared Bread, which signifies his presence. 

And we see that the disciples have a strange reaction: “Scared and trembling with fear, they thought I was a ghost.” As a chronicle, this fright is unlikely. The disciples are happy because some of them have seen the Risen One. They have made this experience and appear surprised as if nothing had happened before. When the Risen One manifests, he cannot scare people away but only bring joy. Why does Luke speak in this way? What does he want to say to his readers? Let’s try to understand it. For this, we must remember the cultural context in which Lucas wrote this text. He is not talking to the Semites, who conceive the person as ‘oneness.’ 

He is speaking to the Greeks. Greek culture had a dualistic view of the person … Socrates and Plato … held the conception we know very well: the distinction between the person of the soul and the body. It was not a unit. The body was considered a prison of the soul. Socrates tells his disciples that the soul must be freed from this prison and that death is a liberation. Therefore, a complete resurrection of the person, body, and soul was inconceivable for them. The material, the body, did not enter into immortality, but only the soul. 

And the consequence, therefore, if these people of whom only the soul remained manifested themselves to the living … what did the living see? What could they see of them? A ghost! The shadow of these people. Greek and Latin literature is full of accounts of spirits of the dead appearing to the living. Thus, Ulysses finds the shadow of Achilles, Ajax, and many others. Aeneas sees Father Anguishes, but it is only the shadow of Anchises. 

The Greeks did not think that the Risen One was real, but only ‘something’ of that person … a spirit, a soul. They did not conceive that the person passed through death, remaining fully the same. To end this misunderstanding, Luke presents the apostles’ reaction as if they were frightened, as if they were seeing a ghost. And Luke says: NO, he’s not a ghost. He is not a temporary, inconsistent, diaphanous being. And here we have a second message for us. It is very current. 

It is the danger of confusing the deceased and the resurrected with a ghost. A threat that also exists today. For example, what do we think will be left of us, our history, the love we have built, and our lives given for the joy of the brothers and sisters? What will remain? Nothingness certainly scares us. Will there be only a vague memory—something evanescent from our person? How do we imagine the loved ones who have left us? As ‘souls’ or as people in the fullness of their human identity? People with whom I can relate, talk, and reach with all my love because they are authentic; they are in the fullness of their existence. Maybe I should also ask them for forgiveness for any fault I may have committed against them, or for any fault they may have had. Am I convinced we could continue to dialogue with them, or do I think it’s something ethereal, inconsistent? 

When entering the world of God, there is not only a part of our person, but also the ‘soul.’ It is our whole person who is transfigured. When we invoke the saints, St. Antony and St. Francis… we do not imagine them as souls, but we speak to them as people who are in the fullness of their human reality. We must do the same with the loved ones who have left us. This is why the evangelist Luke insists on the corporeality of the resurrected. 

They are not ghosts. They are themselves. But do not confuse this ‘corporeality’ of the Risen One with the ‘material.’ For a Semite, the body is the whole person. Here, as a person clothed in a tangible reality. In the world of God, the ‘corruptible’ does not enter, but the whole person is transfigured. It is to underline that the Risen One shows his hands and feet. “Observe my person.” 

The Risen One is recognised and wants to be identified by his hands and feet. This invitation seems curious because we recognise people by their faces. On the other hand, the Risen One is recognised by the hands and feet pierced. They are the hands and feet that were nailed to the cross, the sublime gesture of love, of the gift of life. About the hands, we spoke about on the previous Sunday when we commented on the manifestation of the Risen One narrated by John, 

Those hands are the hands of God, who have performed only works of love. And the feet. Why does Luke insist so much on the feet? The feet of Jesus are the feet of God. They have walked a lot. They have come from afar to make known the love of God for humanity. People in love do not know distances. They are always present because they want to find the person they love. Our feet tell us that God has come from afar to embrace us. They came to us … they have walked beside our paths so that we could contemplate the face of God in the face of Jesus of Nazareth. And these feet walked to Calvary. Did they stop on Calvary? 

This is the invitation of the Risen One: Observe, contemplate, my feet. They continued on their way. These are the glorious feet, the glorious wounds—the witness of love that we can contemplate in the glory of God. Matthew narrates that when the women found the Risen One, they did not embrace him … they embraced his feet. 

And here we have a third important and current message for us today: If we do not see how far the feet of those who donate their lives for love reach, the vision that gives our lives full meaning is lacking. If we do not follow the direction that those feet have followed, we will end up in the wrong direction for our lives. If we do not understand the reality of that world where those feet arrive … a world that is not material, we cannot have a complete sense of our whole life, of all the causes, even the most noble ones, for which we strive: justice, peace, help the poor. If we see where the feet of the one who has donated his life for love are going, we will understand that our feet, following his own, will walk towards a definitive world. 

And now, Luke uses a material language that can also be misunderstood. Taken to the letter as a chronicle, it presents difficulty. And so, to avoid misinterpreting the message, let us continue to keep in mind the objective about which I have insisted. Luke does not want his readers to confuse the Risen One with a ghost, as popular tradition does. Let’s listen to what the evangelist says: 

“While they were still incredulous for joy and were amazed, he asked them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ They gave him a piece of baked fish; he took it and ate it in front of them.” 

I think the language, with its concrete images, used by Luke left us perplexed and a little bewildered. A risen one does not eat … does not digest … Nor is it easy to find fish in Jerusalem today … What does Luke want to tell us? Indeed, this insistence on the corporeity of the Risen One is almost excessive; it’s a realism that gives us a little trouble … but all this is to say that the Risen One is not a ghost. This is the message Luke wants to communicate to the members of his community of Greek origin, and therefore to that culture. This very concrete language is used by Paul when he writes to the Corinthians in chapter 15 that the Risen One does not have a material body composed of atoms. 

It is a body that Paul calls ‘spiritual,’ which does not mean ethereal but concrete … but not of this world. And he adds that what is corruptible cannot reach incorruptibility. He calls fools to those who think that it is the material that enters the incorruptible world. Let us also bear in mind that only Luke uses this language, and he also uses it in the Acts of the Apostles when he puts these words on Peter’s lips: “We have eaten and drunk with him after his resurrection from the dead.” 

Let’s say it clearly: these are images Luke uses to convey the reality of the Risen One in a world where people believed the resurrected were ghosts. The corporeal resurrection does not mean material resurrection. 

Another important message for us today: when we imagine the lives of those who are with Christ, the loved ones who have left us, and that we believe that they are with Jesus, we see them perhaps in a vague, fuzzy way … NO. Their lives and their persons are very real and very concrete. Communication with the resurrected is no less real but immensely truer because their bodies have overcome all the limits that belong to our material world. 

This revelation that the destiny of a life donated by love does not remain in the grave but is in the world of God has been prepared in Scripture. One cannot see where the life of Jesus has come from if the heart is not opened to the message of Scripture. 

“He said to them, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and in the prophets and psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then, he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures. And he said to them, ‘Thus it is written that the Christ would suffer and rise from the dead on the third day and that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, would be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.’”

Jesus begins to teach the disciples a lesson about Scripture. He had already done it with the two of Emmaus. He had opened their hearts to understand the Scripture. Why this insistence on the Word of God, of the Old Testament, on this light that should illuminate the minds of the disciples? The reason is that they find themselves in front of a Messiah with his hands and feet pierced … What kind of messiah were they waiting for? A messiah who walked the world … by all roads to conquer and subdue everyone. Those hands should use the weapons to impose the power of the chosen people over the world and thus establish the new world. Instead, they were facing hands and feet; that is the identity of the Messiah of God, who contradicted all their expectations and hopes. 

What does the Risen One tell them? Read the Scripture, and you will understand the true design of God, who was not a messiah who would change the world with force, with power, with dominion, but with love. This was the project of God, and Jesus went through the events that for us appear as a defeat, a failure, while, instead, it was the project of God that was realised through the greatest crime committed by people. But seeing this Lamb, they understood that all of God’s projects presented, beginning with the Scripture of the Old Testament, led to the realisation of a world that is love and only love. This is the new world. 

And the Risen One concludes, saying to his community, “You are witnesses of this.” Witnesses with the word and your lives embody this new world to which Jesus of Nazareth, with his hands pierced and his feet pierced, has begun. Not the world of the dominators but the world of those who donate their lives for love. Of this, says the Risen One today, you are witnesses. 

I wish everyone a good Easter and a good week.