I simply have to admit, I don't understand our culture's fascination with the macabre and the paranormal. Take the fixation this past decade on vampires and zombies. What's the point? Where is the attraction? And I wonder how many young people grow up these days thinking these characters of fiction are in fact real?
Still, when you stop and think about it, there is nothing new about this fascination and it is certainly something we see in the folklore of most cultures. Jewish culture is no exception. Take for instance the dybbuk, described in one source as "an evil spirit which enters into a living person, cleaves to his soul, causes mental illness, talks through his mouth, and represents a separate and alien personality." Jewish folklore is replete with stories of dybbuks. The same applies to the golem, a creature made by someone expert in the mystical Jewish art of kabbalah.
If we turn to the Old Testament, we even find the story of a seance. In 1 Samuel 28, King Saul asks a medium to bring the spirit of the Prophet Samuel back to give him advice. Samuel's spirit appears -- unhappily -- and give Saul bad news ("...tomorrow you and your sons will be with me"). The story of Saul's downward spiral takes precedence, so we rarely notice this surprising foray into spiritualism, but there it is, in vivid detail.
So we should not be surprised if the disciples, upon seeing the risen Jesus, might first and foremost assume he is, indeed, a ghost. If Jesus had been born in the 1980s and crucified this year, the main impediment to belief in his resurrection would have been the cult of science and of reason that dominates our culture. But in the First Century, quite a different impediment existed. People were so immersed in belief in the spiritual world that they would have sooner believed the risen Christ to be a specter than a real, risen body.
Realizing this, Jesus Christ does what he so often does: he accommodates the weakness of our understanding.
Imagine the scene: Jesus has appeared to his followers in a locked room. To say this must have caused a
So Jesus immediately tries to calm his followers by sharing the words of greeting still common today in Judaism: Shalom aleikhem, "Peace be upon you." He then asks them, somewhat rhetorically, why they have fears and why they have doubts. His point is that he has tried all along to make them understand what would happen, how he would conquer death and return, but only now can they begin to understand. For proof, he offers up his own body as evidence that he is, indeed, real and material. "A ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have." Going further, he shares a meal with them. He wants there to be no mistake; he is no ghost.
The act of resurrection on its own does not prove the divinity of Christ, as other people in the Bible are resurrected. What it does do is prove that Jesus' claim about himself is true. God the Father, to show that this is indeed His son, raises him from the dead, proving that he is indeed who he has claimed to be all along.
We serve a risen savior. He is not a ghost, and he is not merely an idea, either. Modern secular society would have us believe that Jesus was a man, and Christ a myth. But no, the Bible is not a fairy tale; it is a book of truth. And among its truths is this: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.
