The Light Revealed

The following reflection by Jeanne Kocher was given at the hymn festival hosted by Midland Lutheran College on January 11, 2009 at the Rock of Christ Chapel. The festival’s theme, “The Light Revealed,” focused on epiphany.

The gospel writer Luke gives an account of Christ’s appearance after the crucifixion that depicts the drama of an epiphany. The death of Christ has left his followers with an overwhelming sense of loss. Further, their understanding of this loss is limited. They have not gotten what Christ has been telling them during his life: that after he has been handed over to authorities and crucified, he will rise again. This last part is so foreign, it is incomprehensible.

When two women find Jesus’s tomb and return after the Sabbath to find the body gone, they are “utterly at a loss.” Of course they are. They have no experience that prepares them to understand the absence of the body. The women at the tomb are even more baffled when two men appear in dazzling garments and say, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again” (24:5-7) .

Understandably the apostles do not believe the women when they report what they have seen, as they too have had no experience, no mental or emotional equipment to comprehend this foreign concept of the dead not dead, of the dead rising again.

In the second appearance of Christ, two apostles are walking to Emmaus when a stranger appears and begins to visit with them. Unlike everyone else in the Jerusalem area, this stranger is utterly ignorant of Jesus, ignorant of his death after being handed over to authorities by their own chief priests and rulers (24:19-21). The apostles then tell the stranger of the post-crucifixion appearance seen by the women. At this point, the stranger, who is actually Jesus, is fed up with the ignorance of the apostles who have been given multiple opportunities to understand that Jesus lives after death. Having lost his patience, Jesus tells them, “How foolish you are and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!” (24:25).

In Jesus’s outbursts, he clarifies for us the notion that understanding of this new vision of life after death is not only a matter of intellect—more importantly it is a matter of the will and of the heart. Finally, the apostles recognize Jesus after he breaks bread with the apostles.

In fiction, this moment is referred to as a recognition scene, the moment when a story turns dramatically. Janet Burroway explains in Writing Fiction the dramatic turn occurs when the readers recognize that the character we thought was an FBI agent is actually an informer for the Russians, or the child’s doll we thought was trivial actually holds the clue to the murderer’s location, or the killer we thought was the villain is actually the savior of a kidnapped child (Burroway 38).

According to novelist James Joyce, this moment is an epiphany. “Epiphany as Joyce saw it is a crisis action in the mind, a moment when a person, an event, or a thing is seen in a light so new that it is as if it has never been seen before; at this recognition, the mental landscape of the viewer is permanently changed” (Burroway 38).

And this is what happens to the followers of Jesus who finally recognize him in the act of breaking bread. Christ’s appearance after his death changes their mental landscape so that they understand that life and death are not only physical states but more importantly, they are spiritual states of being.

We understand also that Christ will appear again and again in our lives, epiphany after epiphany. We may be foolish, we may be slow of heart to recognize Christ, but he appears to us daily.

Works Cited
Burroway, Janet. Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. 4th ed. New York:
HarperCollins, 1996.
Holy Bible. New Revised Standard Version. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan,
1990.