Peace be with you

A word for the week

He stood among them and the first thing he said was peace. They were hiding behind locked doors, frightened, their world in pieces, half-believing the wild reports that he was alive, and suddenly he is there in the room, and the word he leads with is peace be with you. Not, where were you when I needed you. Not, why did you run. Peace. That is the first word of the risen Christ to the friends who had failed him, and it is the word he keeps saying, to them and to us: peace, be still, it is all right, it is me.

But they are not comforted, not yet. Luke is honest about it: they were terrified, and thought they were seeing a ghost. A spirit, a phantom, some trick of grief. And Jesus does the most down-to-earth thing imaginable to prove he is not a ghost. Look at my hands and my feet, he says. Touch me. A spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you can see that I do. He lets them handle him. He is there, solid, the same person, with the marks still in his hands.

And then, the detail that is almost too homely for the moment, and is exactly why we trust it: while they still cannot believe it for sheer joy, he asks, do you have anything here to eat? They give him a piece of broiled fish, and he takes it and eats it in front of them. The risen Lord of heaven and earth stands in a locked room and has a bite of fish, to settle their pounding hearts, to say without a word: I am really here. You are not imagining this. Ghosts do not get hungry. Whatever the resurrection is, it is at least a body, a man who can share your supper.

This matters more than it might seem, and it is the ground the whole faith stands on. Our hope is that he is alive, bodily, personally, near enough to eat at a table. Lesser hopes are on offer, that his teachings survived him, that his spirit lingers in the good he inspired, and the faith has never settled for them. It rests on an empty tomb and a man who asked for fish.

Then he opens their minds to understand the scriptures, showing them that all of it, the suffering and the rising, was the shape it was always meant to take. And he tells them what comes next: that they are witnesses of these things, and that they should wait for the power he will send. And the story turns immediately outward, into a people sent to carry the news that death did not win.

So this is where the Gospels leave us: a locked room thrown open, fear turned to joy, a man eating fish among his friends, and the word peace hanging in the air. That is the hope the whole faith is for. Not that he was, but that he is: present, and near enough, even now, to share a table with.