We’re in a locked room in Jerusalem, with the disciples and their companions in today’s Gospel reading. Their world has been turned upside down not once, but twice. First they’d lost Jesus, when he was dragged away to be crucified and, when he was dead, some of them had seen him buried in a stone tomb. But now rumours are spreading that he is alive again. People are saying they’ve seen him, that the tomb is empty. Two of his followers have come rushing in saying he’d walked with them to their home village of Emmaus, but that it was only when he broke bread that they recognised him. And then, suddenly, there he is in the room in front of them. It was all completely beyond them, overwhelming and surreal.
They stand there, stunned into silence, while Jesus tries to talk to them. In the end he gives up trying to make them understand, and says…“Have you got anything to eat?” They have, as it happens, broiled fish, so that’s what they give him. It’s as if he showed up in our own front rooms today, standing among us in all his shimmering glory, and announced “You know, I could murder a nice cup of tea…”
It all sounds a bit banal. What’s broiled fish got to do with the vanquishing of death, the opening of the gates of glory, the life everlasting and the new creation? Broiled fish are so mundane. But I think that is just the point. Resurrection is mundane; mundane literally means to do with this world, with the reality we see and know.
Our first reading was all about the real and the physical too. It’s an account of the aftermath of the healing of a man who had been lame from birth. Peter and John had come across him begging at the gate of the Temple. He asked them for money, but they had none. Instead, they offered him healing, something which would liberate him from his dependency on the charity of others as well as relieving his physical pain and disability. Straightaway he jumped to his feet, praising God. We don’t know what happened to him after his healing – did he join the disciples, or just melt back into the crowd? – but in real physical terms his life was transformed, and that seems to have been what mattered most to Peter. The life of Jesus, who he calls the Author of Life, life itself, had overflowed into this man’s life and brought about a change that was real and tangible.
Of course, we tend to come to stories like these – of resurrection and miraculous healing – with a lot of sceptical baggage. With our post-Enlightenment understanding, we often get completely stuck on their impossibility and can go no further with them. But we need to recognise that our viewpoint – and our problems – wouldn’t have been shared by those who first heard and told these stories. People of the first century, and many centuries before and after didn’t think resurrection or miraculous healing were intrinsically impossible, even if these weren’t things they expected to see happening. They believed the world was ruled by the will of God. If he wanted to heal or raise from the dead, he could. I don’t know what we would have seen if we had been there on Easter Day or at the Temple gates with a video camera. The people who wrote these accounts weren’t trying to answer our questions. They were just trying to express their own experience, that somehow Jesus was alive, and that his resurrection changed everything. God was at work in their midst, not trying to scoop them up out of the physical world, but within it, redeeming and transforming it.
We often think of Christmas as the great feast of the incarnation – God becomes flesh in the child of Bethlehem. But actually, for the early Christians Easter was just as much about incarnation as Christmas, and perhaps even more so. It too was all about a body; a body that lived and breathed, when no one would expect it to, a body that bore the scars of what had happened to it, a body that ate and drank. “You shall call his name Emmanuel” says the Angel Gabriel to Mary before he is born – God with us, in Hebrew. It is a fitting title for the baby in the manger, but in some ways, it’s even more appropriate for the risen Christ. God is with us, says the Resurrection, even though we have tried so hard to send him away into the shadows of death. God is with us, in the person of Jesus, raised from death, different in some ways, but unmistakeably flesh and blood too as he eats that piece of broiled fish, something you could smell and taste, with bones you had to pick out from between your teeth, and juices you had to lick off your fingers, as real as it gets. God is with us, and at work in the nitty-gritty things of life, just as committed to his world , in all its messy physicality, as he had always been.
The resurrection, just like Jesus’ birth, is a message that our vulnerable, fallible bodies aren’t some kind of prison for the far more noble spiritual material of our souls, prisons which we should look to rise above and long to be delivered from. They are a gift from God, who made the world and all that was in it, who looked at it and called it good, and not only came into it once as a baby in a manger, but came back to it in the risen Jesus, to bless and heal it.
That mattered to the early Christians, whose words we are reading when we read the New Testament. They didn’t have the physical presence of Jesus among them anymore, but they were still convinced that he was very much there. They believed that they met him first and foremost in one another, as they formed new communities, drawing together Jew and Gentile, slave and free, men and women. They were the body of Christ. Living as that body wasn’t about mysterious rituals or complex liturgy or abstract theological ideas, but about serving those around them in tangible, physical ways; washing feet, sharing their possessions, feeding the hungry, giving dignity to those who were most vulnerable.
The Bible says very little about life after death, and a great deal about life before it, about everyday justice, everyday hope, everyday acts of loving kindness. If our faith doesn’t touch our lives on Monday mornings, in daily work, in friendships, in family life, in the way we speak to the person at the supermarket checkout, then it is not a faith worth having, not a faith that will ever convince anyone else that it is worth seeking. We discover and proclaim Jesus in the “broiled fish” of life. It is the small things, things which might not seem important, which usually turn out to change everything. Who knew, when they bought that fish at the market, and built the fire over which it was cooked, what a role it would play, that it would be the sign that God really was present and at work?
So this week, I wonder what the “broiled fish” will be for us, the places where God will suddenly appear, if we have eyes to see him, the ways in which we will discover, and proclaim, the love of God, still with us, still at work, still bringing the hope and healing we all need?
Amen
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