Sermon for the 3rd Sunday of Easter: Laying the Ghost – preached at the Eucharist, Sherborne Abbey, on Sunday, 14 April 2024 by Canon Charles Mitchell-Innes. (Acts Ch 3: v 12 – 19; Luke Ch 24: v 36b – 48)
Words of the risen Jesus to his disciples, who were “startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost”:
“Why are you troubled? … Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have” (N.I.V. trans of Luke Ch 24: v 39)
I wonder if any of you have seen or heard a ghost. If so, I’d be interested to know whether you found it an alarming experience. I never have encountered one myself; but in the course of my ministry I have been contacted now and again by parishioners and others who have had such an experience, often connected with houses they have moved into. In those circumstances, I have always been grateful for the ministrations of those priests – one or two in each diocese – appointed by their bishop to look after this area of ministry, in addition to their ordinary duties.
Now the thing about ghosts, as Jesus points out, is they do not have bodily substance. You might be able to see or hear them, but you cannot touch them: their existence is not material. That is why the gospel writers, Luke and John in particular, lay such emphasis on Jesus’ actual, solid existence after his resurrection: this was no ghost. I imagine that Luke, a cultivated Greek speaker, knew Homer, and may have had in the back of his mind Book Eleven of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus describes his visit to the Land of the Dead, beyond the River of Ocean. The souls of the dead approach, but they are faint, feeble or feckless, and cannot engage with him until they have had a draught of the blood of the animals he has sacrificed. Even then, they are not as they were in life, and live in a gloomy, twilight world. What greater contrast could there be with the solidity of body and sharpness of mind evidenced by the risen Christ on those glorious days after the first Easter morning! It was indeed a proper resurrection. And that is the lynch-pin of our faith, and the Christian Church’s foundation.
John Updike, perhaps an unlikely visionary, makes just such a claim in the first three of his “Seven Stanzas at Easter”:
“Make no mistake
If he rose at all
It was as his body;
If the cells’ dissolution did not reverse,
The molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
The church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as his spirit in the mouths and
Fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles;
It was as his flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
The same valved heart
That – pierced – died, withered, decayed, and then
Regathered out of his Father’s might
New strength to enclose.”
It was of vital importance to those eleven Jewish apostles that Jesus’ appearances to them could not be explained away (by the authorities or by doubters in their own ranks) as visions of a spectre. That is why Jesus himself and the gospel writers placed particular emphasis on his desire and ability to eat and drink. Ghosts don’t do that. As the commentator G. B. Caird wrily points out, “To a Jew a disembodied spirit could only seem a ghost, not a living being, but a thin, unsubstantial carbon-copy which had somehow escaped from the filing system of death.”
This does not mean, however, that Jesus returned entirely to his status quo ante mortem, as he was previously. After all, he had undergone the most astonishing of miracles by divine power, and now, although fully bodily present, he was able, for instance, to appear and disappear at will. He was in some ways preparing his disciples for the time when he should leave them and return to his Father, But that is a story yet to be told: we’ll just have to wait for it – have patience!
For us, Jesus’ physical and real rising from the tomb is crucial to our faith – certainly not just a diverting theological puzzle which we might take or leave according to taste. It opens out for us the whole amazing vista of life beyond our death and guarantees our own resurrection in Christ, when we shall wake to find everything that we value most – in perfection. And I sense, though I cannot of course know for certain in this present life, that there will be a joyful jolt of recognition: yes, of course, I somehow always knew it would be like this – coming home, where Christ has gone before. Some lines, to end, of the 17th century priest Richard Baxter:
“Come, Lord, when grace hath made me meet
Thy blessed face to see:
For if thy work on earth be sweet,
What will thy glory be?
My knowledge of that life is small;
The eye of faith is dim.
But it’s enough that Christ knows all;
And I shall be with him.”