The Touch

In Luke's Gospel, when Jesus rose from the dead, chapter 24, he appeared to the disciples and tried to convince them that he was not a ghost or a fantasm of their imagination. He ate some cooked fish and invited them to touch him. Why all this? Well, the pagan Greeks believed in the immortality of the soul. Something of us lived on. But this does not defeat death. Paul and Christians believe that death was the result of sin and Jesus came to free us up from the power of death, the power of our own faulty lives to defeat us. If the body does not rise after dying, than death wins out. Jesus reveals that nothing is going to beat God, not even death. So Jesus' rising is a body rising, not the exact same constitution as the body we lug around now, but our own body transformed by grace. We only get this eternal body if we let the one we got now die. It is better than trading in your old car, or getting new body parts from the orthopedic surgeon. Those new things can crash and burn, or wear out. The beyond death body has lifetime guarantees, eternal lifetime. Death is big and scary and so final when faith is small and full of doubts.