Resurrection Good News

Read Luke 24:36-50

Luke 24:38
He said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds?

They say, “Seeing is believing”. However many things remain unbelievable even when we have seen it. Such is the experience of the disciples when Jesus appeared to them in his resurrected body.

In his resurrected body, Jesus could appear and disappear in thin air in a moment. He could walk through doors and YET he could eat and drink. The physical matter remains and so do the new altered resurrected form. It is so out of this world and almost seems like a page from the “X Files”.

This account is important because it brings together the whole doctrine of Jesus’ redemption for the world. In Revelation, there is this vision of the New Heaven and New Earth coming together as one.

Far from our traditional reading where the new heaven is a space up in the air, of ‘life after death’, God’s vision is that in the final days, all of earth’s corruption will be renewed and fused with the new heaven of God coming down. Jesus’ new resurrected body is the first taste and fulfilment of that grand vision.

On that final day our decaying sin-ridden body will be restored to its best and given a new dimension. The earth and heaven coming together will be a fusion of the matter and spiritual. There will be no more sin, no more pain and no more sorrow and no more death (Read Rev 21).

In this final scene in Luke, Jesus told the disciples not to doubt but believe. His resurrected body embodies the resurrection good news – that sin is defeated, forgiveness is now freely given and they are to now bring this glorious good news to the world.

The world needs such a message. Where sin, decay, division and unrest still plague the earth, the resurrection offers good news.

Just as the disciples were told not to doubt Jesus then in His new resurrected body form, so we his disciples must not question the resurrected message now commissioned to us. We are the carriers and messengers of the good news of the Resurrection, of hope, forgiveness and restoration.