What does it mean to profess faith in the resurrection? What does it mean for the the eleven to proclaim, "That the Lord has truly been raised and appeared to Simon?"
First it means that we profess faith in the real power of God that is not limited by the laws of nature. It is power that truly liberates.
In the resurrection Jesus has not just returned from the dead like some sort of animated corpse. He has not been called back to earthly life like the widow' son of Nain or Lazarus.
The resurrection is not an overcoming of clinical death.
As believers we still must taste death, but we do not die.
In the resurrection the finality of death is dead. In the resurrection we celebrate new life.
The resurrection is a beginning of a new reality that is beyond our senses. Jesus after the resurrection no longer belongs to the world of senses and thus this explains why he is not recognized but only can be seen by those to whom it is granted.
Jesus is alive but it is a new kind of life because there enters the world a new kind of love, a love that is stronger than death, a love that is death to death itself.
This new kind of love seen in Jesus brings a new reality into the created world.
Jesus thus becomes accessible in a new way, no longer by way of the senses but through the sense and beyond them and this is why He is made known in the breaking of the bread.
The Eucharistic presence now stands as the testimony in time to this new life that is made possible by that love that is stronger than death. Thus, God makes possible the request, "stay with us Lord...so he went in and stayed with them."
In the Eucharist, Jesus comes in to us and stays with us and makes present in our time this new life and this new love that has entered the world by the creative word of God himself.
Faith in the resurrection is a profession of the real existence of God and that real existence is made present in the breaking of the bread.
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