“Recognizing Jesus”

Luke 24: 36 – 53

Makemie Presbyterian Church

April 11, 2010, Sunday after Easter

Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “peace be with you.” They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost.

Jesus said to them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.”

And when he had said this, he showed  them his hands and his feet. While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence.

Then he said to them, “these are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you – that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.”

Then he opened their minds to understanding the scriptures, and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. ⁴⁹And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”

⁵⁰Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. ⁵¹While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. ⁵²And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; ⁵³and they were continually in the temple blessing God.

How do we recognize Jesus? Well, I thought we could start with how do we recognize each other? Usually a person looks at another person & voila, we can tell in an instant if we know them. Really, just a moment & we know. So it is through our senses, through sight in this case, that we know another person.

Of course there are all the studies of human mothers that show we can pick out our baby’s cry in a room full of crying babies. Most of us have had the experience of being over at a friend’s house with a lot of toddlers for a play date. The mom’s talking & one of the children start to cry, the mom attached to this baby immediately knows if it is hers. You just do.

And then there is smell, that drinking in of a baby’s scent. You just can’t help it. That warm slightly peppery nectar that even after the kids are grown you find yourself snorting it in with every baby you are lucky enough to hold. And human attraction is based a large part on how we smell to each other.

But we hardly ever go to recognize another person, by looking at say a shoulder or a calf or say a foot. So one of the most peculiar things about Luke’s resurrection story is the way Jesus identifies himself to his friends.

“Look at my hands and my feet,” he says to the frightened doubtful disciples. They are shaking in their sandals. They are wondering if they are having a groups hallucination when he offers them four sure proofs that he is who they think he is: two hands and two feet, ten fingers & ten toes, which could belong to no one else but him. It is the wounds he wants them to see, but isn’t it a peculiar way to identify himself?

 Why not say, “Listen to my voice” or, “Look at my face?”

Could we identify someone by hands & feet alone? I can see it now: FBI posters at the post office with hands & feet on them instead of faces. ‘Suspect has webbed toes on both feet. Little toe on left foot appears to have been broken; turns in sharply at sixty-degree angle. Hands are square, with bitten fingernails. Small scar on right thumb.”

Hands & feet are simply not the first things we notice about one another, and yet they are so telling of who we are. My hands are freckled like my mother’s & my grandmother’s. It is the Bucklin Irish blood in us. I still have the black spot in my left palm where I accidentally stabbed myself with a sharp pencil in the third grade. There is also a little chunk of my left index finger missing. I was helping my mother in the kitchen chopping vegetables the night Richard Nixon went on national television to talk about Watergate; when he resigned I was so surprised I cut the end of my finger off. I have a callous on my other hand from all the writing I do & a middle finger that has never been the same since a Tennessee walking horse pulled it out of joint.

I could tell you the same stories about my feet, only they are more private somehow. Maybe it is because we have acquired the habit of wearing shoes in public, as ladies used to wear gloves. Last week I remarked to someone that most us have no idea what each other’s feet look like, only she begged to differ. Her mother had nevered mastered the knack of photography, she said & every childhood pictures she has of her & her brothers & sisters is from the waist down. When the pictures came back from the drug store, she said, all the kids would huddle around and figure out who was who by the feet. Maybe if we all wore sandals & washed each other’s feet as our ancestors did we would know more about what is hidden beneath our shoes.

As it is, we know a lot more about each other by our hands.

I could identify some of you by your hands, I think. I have had the privilege of grasping them over the past ten years, and I know some of them by heart. I don’t know which one of them I like better: The hands with some wear and tear on them, who have some clue what this life is, or the little children’s hands, who reach out & take life entirely for granted. I am God’s child. God made me, good.

What I like about my hands is that they do not lie. They can’t. we can usually exercise some control over our faces so that they look the way we want them to look, but our hands give us away every time: nervous hands, clenched hands, damp hands, soiled hands. I love those Sherlock Holmes stories where some unsuspecting soul is introduced to Holmes, spends about five minutes in his presence, and leaves the room. Then he great detective turns to Watson & tells him what the visitor does for a living, her family status, income level, and hobbies – all based on having shaken her hand.

Almost twelve years ago now, a dear friend of mine lost his father quite suddenly to a heart attack. By the time he got to the hospital his father had died & that made it even harder to bear. There was no good-bye, no “I love you,” no time to get used to the idea of losing him. The first chance my friend had to see his father was at the funeral home, where he walked right up to the casket & took one of his father’s quiet hands in his own. They were the same shape and size, those two hands – big, competent paws that could fix anything – strong enough to build a porch swing, soft enough to pat a baby to sleep.

His father had been an auto mechanic who took great pride in distinguishing himself from what he called “shade tree mechanics,” those backyard amateurs who covered themselves with grease and left spare parts lying around all over the place. He, on the other hand, was a garage mechanic, who plied his trade as carefully as a surgeon. He kept a clean shop & before he went home at night he scrubbed his hands with a boar’s bristle brush, washing away the grime of the day.

But as careful as he was, his hands stayed stained in places, and it was that my friend was looking for.  Turning his father’s big hand over in his own, he saw the motor oil in the fingerprints, the calluses dark from years of hauling engines, and he smiled. “It’s him,” he said. “They tried to clean him up, but look, they couldn’t. It’s my daddy. It’s really him.”

“Look at my hands and feet,” Jesus said, and when they did they was everything he had ever been to them. They saw the hands that had broken bread and blessed broiled fish, holding it out to them over and over again. They saw the hands that had pressed pads of soft mud against a blind man’s eyes and taken a dead girl by the hand so that she rose and walked. They saw the hands that danced through the air when he taught, the same hands that reached out to touch a leper without pausing or holding back.

And his feet – the ones that had carried him hundreds of miles, taking his good news to all who were starving for it – into the homes of criminals and corrupt bureaucrats, who he treated like long lost kin; into the graveyard where the Gerasene demoniac lived like a wild dog among the dead, who he freed from his devils forever.

Looking at those feet, they remembered the woman who had wet them with her tears and dried them with her hair, and Mary, who had set there quietly protected by him while her sister Martha railed at her to get up and work.

They were wounded now – all of them – the hands that had joined him to other people and the feet that had joined him to the earth. They had holes in them, sore angry-looking bruises that hurt them to look at, only it was important for the disciples to look, because they had never done it before. Earlier, when they had figured out what was coming to those beloved hands and feet, they had fled, hiding themselves away where they could not see the bleeding nor hear the pounding of the hammers.

Look, he said to them afterwards, when the danger was past, You can look at them now. He wanted them to know he gone through the danger and not around it, so he told them to look – not at his face, not into his eyes – but at his hands and feet, which told the truth about what had happened to him, which was the only proof he had that he was who he said he was. Some of us wish he had come back all cleaned up, but he did not. He left us something to recognize him by – his hands and feet, just like ours, or almost like ours. We know what his said about him. What do ours say about us? Where have they been, whom have they touched, how have they served, what have they proclaimed?

“You are the witnesses of these things,” he told them before he left them, entrusting the world to their care. When that world looks around for the risen Christ, when they want to know what that means, it is us they look at. Not our pretty faces and not our sincere eyes but our hands and feet – what we have done with them and where we have gone with them. We are witnesses of these things. We still are: the body of Christ. And people recognize Jesus in us. Amen.