NOTES for Luk 24:36-53
For many people today, the question of resurrection recedes into the background, while questions about the afterlife, the immortality of the soul, rewards and punishments after death, heaven and hell come to the fore. Yet the Bible says very little, if anything, about all this. Evidently the biblical authors were concerned not with what often concerns us today, but with something entirely different, which they called resurrection from the dead.
At first glance the difference may seem inessential: ultimately, it is still about life after death, and the details are not so important. In fact, however, the difference between the immortality of the soul and resurrection is very great. What is the immortality of the soul? What kind of life, what kind of afterlife could one speak of in that case?
From a biblical point of view, the afterlife awaiting a person appears rather bleak: it is not a full life, but its pitiful likeness, which can hardly satisfy anyone. There is no question of a person’s complete disappearance after death, yet what awaits him after death can be called life only with great difficulty. All that remains of a person is a shadow; he loses feelings and thoughts, almost loses the memory of his own life and of the world of the living, becoming a shadow in which only a remnant of consciousness barely glimmers.
It is no accident that when the apostles saw the risen Jesus, they thought the Teacher’s shade had emerged from the tomb: none of them expected any other afterlife, and an encounter with a shade, even the shade of someone close, could bring the living nothing good. The Bible tells us nothing about a blessed afterlife or a posthumous recompense like those mentioned in Egyptian or Greek myths.
But it does speak of resurrection, and the figure of the risen Jesus clearly demonstrates the difference between the afterlife and resurrection. Resurrection is not the preservation of the pitiful remnants of life after the body’s death, but a return to life in all its fullness, a fullness that requires the transformation of human nature itself.
Such is the transformed humanity of the risen Jesus: on the one hand, He can pass through a locked door, which is no longer an obstacle to Him; on the other, He can eat the same ordinary earthly food that any of us eats. He is not a shade; He deliberately lets the disciples touch Him so that they may be convinced of this. He is a man of flesh and blood, although this flesh and blood live by laws different from those by which we live.
And He enables the apostles to understand that He has not merely returned to life, but has conquered and overcome death, which no longer has power over Him. Nor does it have power over the life of the Kingdom that He brought into the world and offers to each of us.