NOTES for Luk 24:1-12

At the end of his Gospel, the Evangelist brings together three short accounts of how the disciples learned the most important news of their lives: that Jesus is alive. These three accounts, very different from one another, may show different stages in coming to this realization. In the first passage, for example, we do not even see Jesus. In His place there is a strange and incomprehensible message that He is not dead: “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” The heavenly messengers invite the women to remember earlier days, when Christ said that death would not be able to stop Him. Before seeing the Risen One, they must remember this prophecy, this promise, and believe His word. Faith opens to the women disciples the possibility of experiential knowledge of the Resurrection, and this is the path of all who have not seen the Risen One with their own eyes, but believe the incredible: He is alive!