After having their eyes opened to recognize that it was Jesus who had been communing with them, revealing Himself to them from the Scriptures, the two disciples who had just arrived in Emmaus immediately arose and returned to Jerusalem to share with others what they had discovered: Jesus really was alive! Arriving back in Jerusalem…
Immediately after their eyes were opened to recognize Jesus, Luke says that He “became invisible from” (literal) the two disciples whom He had joined up with on the road to Emmaus. They didn’t at first recognize Him in His manifestation to them in His eternal, glorified, resurrected body that was spiritual in nature. But their…
On the afternoon of Resurrection Sunday two of Jesus’ disciples were debating the events of Jesus’ crucifixion, the discovery of the empty tomb that morning, and the report of an angelic vision saying He was alive. Although they wanted to believe, it made no sense how His battered body drained of its life fluids could…
On the road to Emmaus the risen Jesus has just joined two of His disciples as they were debating the recent events about Him. As with Mary Magdalene just earlier that morning, they didn’t recognize Him, for their eyes were holden (KJV) in this physical realm from seeing into the realm where it was plain…
On Sunday morning, Jesus’ resurrection from the dead was announced first by an angel to Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and then by two angels to another group of women who arrived shortly later. But because His body was missing, and the reality of the angelic visions faded like a…
Although God made clear first thing Sunday morning—the day of first-fruits—that Jesus had risen from the dead as the first-fruits of the resurrection (cf. Lev 23:10-11), it took time for His disciples to actually believe it. For thinking only in terms of the physical resuscitations from the dead they had seen, they had yet to…
Although we tend to equate the discovery of the empty tomb and the appearance of angels at daybreak on Sunday morning with Jesus’ resurrection, in fact it didn’t immediately add up that way for the women who had come to complete the burial custom for Jesus’ corpse. The singular nature of the angelic vison quickly…
Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joseph were the first to discover the empty tomb, but that didn’t immediately equate for them into our present understanding of Jesus’ resurrection. While they understood from Lazarus’ example that mortal life might be restored to one who had died, it was difficult for them to…
Because of our familiarity with the resurrection of Jesus and its central importance to our faith, as we read the resurrection accounts we tend to focus only on the happy ending and forget that the disciples’ understanding of the resurrection happened in stages and was not what they were expecting at all. Although the tomb…
We might imagine that the visions of angels announcing Jesus’ resurrection from the dead would be so dramatic that the women who had seen them could never come to doubt them. And yet, precisely because their experience was so singular and outside of the normal course of events, that is exactly what they did. For…