Luke 24:36 - 43

 Luke 24:36 - 43

Few things are more universally feared then meeting a ghost. In almost every culture and at every point in history people are afraid of meeting a ghost.  Even if one doesn't believe in ghosts, meeting one is terrifying. The disciples are in conversation with the two witnesses from Emmaus when as suddenly as Jesus left them at Emmaus He appears in the room in Jerusalem. This sudden appearance produces fright,  trouble in heart and doubt.

How Jesus responds to their emotional reaction is too important to miss. He doesn't teach a lesson on the nature of spirits or if ghosts are real. Nor does He castigate them for their failed belief systems. What He does is to emphasize the reality of the Resurrection. This resurrected person really is Jesus, the same one they have known for these past years. This resurrected person is a physically real person, with scars, and teeth, and a belly that wanted to eat. This resurrected person was everything human and more, with the ability to appear and then be gone instantly and all the while remaining fully tangible and human. A ghost is and does none of these.

Ghostly fears are not just the terror of apparitions.  We find these hauntings of our own lives and mortality to be reminders of the realization that some day we will die and what we are will be no more.  Or worse, we have the ghostly fear that we will be something  worse than nothing, we will be a ghost. The answer to the terror of a ghostly fear is not the denial of the supernatural but to embrace the resurrection of Jesus and then find in His resurrection the hope for our Resurrection. After all, what could frighten the one who has been resurrected? We can live free from every fear by living in the hope of what we shall be in the resurrection.

“Lord, grant that today I will live in the hope of the resurrection. AMEN”