Post-Resurrection Eating and Real Presence

3 Easter Sunday B April 18, 2021

Acts 3:12-19 Psalm 4
1 John 3:1-7 Luke 24:36b-48

In several of the post-resurrection appearances of Christ,  there is food involved.  On the road to Emmaus, Jesus explained the Scriptures and when he sat down to eat with two disciples, his presence suddenly became known.  In our appointed Gospel today, the Risen Christ asks to eat fish to prove to the disciples that he was not a ghost.  In the Gospel of John, he prepares a fish breakfast for the fishermen disciples.

The Risen Christ is associated with eating, and this is not by accident.

I again remind you of the reverse "chronology" of the writings of Paul and the writing of the Gospels.  The early church leaders believed that they had the mind of Christ.  They believed that they could speak in the name of Jesus.  In fact, the Gospels words of Jesus gives his followers permission to speak in his name.  So the early Christians were what I call, "oracles" of Christ.  They channeled the words of Jesus because they believed that they attained a spiritual identity with Christ, so that the words they spoke could be regarded as the words of Jesus.  Many of those oracle words were written down as red letter words of Jesus in the Gospels.

What was the practice of the early churches?  They gathered around eating.  They had meals called Agape meals or love feasts and the Eucharist was often connected with this communal eating.  Communal Eating was an important symbol of the early fellowship.  While we associate the Eucharist with the bread and the wine, the Agape meals included foods of a common meal which certainly would have included bread and fish.

The early church believed that something happened when they gathered as a community, for prayer and for eating together.  When the two or three gathered with the intention of being identified with Jesus, they believed that they experienced in some way another presence, a real presence of Christ.

Paul in his churches practiced communal eating and Eucharist as a liturgical and mystical way of realizing the presence of Christ.

So how was this custom of the knowing the presence of Christ in communal eating which was the liturgical practice of Paul and earliest gatherings of the Jesus Movement, how was it presented in the Gospels, which were written after all of the liturgical practices of the Jesus Movement had been in practice?

We make a difference between meanings which come from the five senses, and the meanings which come from the interior senses, like feeling and intuition, dreams, visions and interior events like love, joy, peace or fear, anxiety and sadness?

We know that what we see with our eyes is meaningful; but we also know what we experience in terms of things like love and joy are also meaningful.

A scientist might say that what can be seen, measured, controlled, repeated and predicted is more meaningful than the events which happen inside of us like love, joy and dreams, hopes and fear.  The stuff inside of us cannot always be controlled and it can be messy.  But just because the inside world cannot be controlled like a scientific experiment does not mean that they don't have equal true meaning.

If we understand the meaningful truths of what happens inside us; then we can appreciate the post resurrection appearances of Christ and food.

The Gospels present the physical life narrative of Jesus of Nazareth as a way to show the members of the early church that their spiritual experience of the Risen Christ is equal in truth and meaning to the actual physical life of Jesus.

The presentation of the Risen Christ eating fish was a message to the Christian community that the experiences of Risen Christ have equal truth status to the physical encounters with Jesus of Nazareth.

The physical is used as a metaphor of substantiality for the spiritual.  When Jesus is quoted as saying unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no part of me, this is precisely the use of physical as a metaphor for the substantial experience of Christ in the gathered Eucharistic churches.

We live in the age of the resurrection and the departure of Jesus from this world; but we live in the age of the many, many multiplications of the kinds of resurrection encounters of many people with Christ through spiritual or inward experience.

The Gospel writers were trying to say: your post resurrection experiences of Christ through inward events are as substantial as the actual eating of food.

I do hope that we do not forget to be poets and scientists at the same time when we read the New Testament.  Our inward spiritual lives have equal substantial significance to our physical lives.  And this is what the account of the fish-eating Risen Christ is meant to teach us today.

And every account of the post-resurrection appearances of Christ were written after the early Christians were in the regular practice realizing the presence of Christ in the Agape meal fellowship and in the Holy Eucharist.  These presences of the Risen Christ, are true and meaningful even though they are different from the presence of Jesus of Nazareth in his own time.  

Let us be affirmed today by the Gospel to accept the true meanings of our inward experiences of the Risen Christ which result in the genuine practice of love, peace and justice.  Amen.