Thursday • 7/13/2023
A Thursday in the Season After Pentecost (Proper 9)
This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 18; 1 Samuel 16:14–17:11; Acts 10:17–33; Luke 24:36–53
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 8 (“The Song of Moses,” Exodus 15, BCP, p. 85); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3–4, BCP, p. 94)
Welcome to Daily Office Devotions, where every Monday through Friday we consider some aspect of that day’s Scripture readings, as given in the Book of Common Prayer. I’m Reggie Kidd, and I’m grateful to be with you. On this Thursday in the Season After Pentecost our readings come from Proper 9 of Year 1 in the Daily Office Lectionary.
This hopelessly romantic teenager spent hour upon hour pining for a love that could satisfy the longing in the Beatles 1966 song from the Revolver album, “Here There and Everywhere.”
*Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., “Life-Giving Spirit,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 1998, p. 582.
To lead a better life, I need my love to be here
Here, making each day of the year
Changing my life with a wave of her hand
Nobody can deny that there’s something there
Knowing that love is to share
Each one believing that love never dies
Watching their eyes
And hoping I’m always there
I will be there, and everywhere
Here, there and everywhere.
Harry Blamires, Christian thinker and friend of C. S. Lewis, says that youthful desires always carry about them a “sacramental cast.” When we are young, he argues, longings emerge within us that bear within them the promise of ultimate satisfaction and joy — satisfaction and joy that earthly relationships can only partially fulfill. Those desires can only be meaningfully fulfilled in this life if we see them as pointers to what lies beyond them: satisfaction and joy in being loved by and in loving God himself.
The good news is that there is Someone who can be for each of us: “here, there, and everywhere.” That is the extraordinary truth that Luke brings home to us in the final two vignettes of his gospel.
“Here…” The resurrected Christ is really “here”: “Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost (Gk, pneuma) does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39). The Jesus who has returned from the dead is no mere “spirit” (Gk, pneuma), meaning in this context “ghost,” or “disembodied, nonphysical being.” It’s understandable that a fifth century manuscript introduced the term “phantasm” (Gk, phantasma). None of that is what the resurrected Jesus is. The God-Man did not mount the cross and enter his tomb only to emerge as Casper the Friendly Ghost, or as something on the order of the apparitional Obi-Wan Kenobi who guides Luke Skywalker after submitting to Darth Vader’s lightsaber.
In proof of the physical nature of his resurrection-body, Jesus offers his hands and feet to his disciples’ touch. He asks for something to eat. “So they gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in front of them” (Luke 24:42–43). The fact that his resurrection body can take in food raises (at least to me) all kinds of questions about his present (and our future) metabolism. However, the New Testament isn’t interested in speaking to a matter like that (one day, we’ll see what it means). What Luke is at pains to present is the fact that the risen Jesus is not a Savior who has rescued us out of our human, embodied existence. Instead, Jesus has risen as what theologian Richard Gaffin calls our “glorified humanity.”* Jesus has risen to redeem us in our embodied humanity. Praise be!!
“…There, and Everywhere.” But while Jesus is not a pneuma (or “spirit”) in the sense of “ghost,” nonetheless, his presence among is mediated by the Holy Spirit. The last vignette in Luke’s Gospel illustrates what his traveling companion Paul describes in 1 Corinthians as the fact that “the Last Adam (Christ) has become life-giving Spirit” (also Gk, pneuma, but note the necessary capitalization of the word “Spirit” in English, which most translations miss—1 Corinthians 15:45). Luke portrays Christ ascending to the Father in his full physicality, so he can receive and pour out upon us the Holy Spirit. By that same Spirit, Christ returns to us and takes up residence among and within us.
No, Christ hasn’t come back from the grave as a “spirit” (in the sense of being a ghost). But in his bodily form he does ascend to the right hand of the Father so that he can return to us in the person of the Holy Spirit. Two incredible things happen with his ascension. First, now one of us is there—in the very throne room of the Lord of the universe! As firstborn from the dead, the risen Lord Jesus represents us—there he intercedes for us, guides us in living and worshiping, proclaims the Father’s name to us and keeps our name before the Father, sings over us, and brings us bread and wine from God’s holy altar (Hebrews 2:12; 7:25; 8:2; 13:10).
Second, the risen and ascended Jesus sends power from on high to enable us to witness and to see him work miracle after miracle of conversion and transformation. The power he sends is his own presence. The Holy Spirit among us is the Spirit of Christ himself. The amazing thing—the thing that is virtually incomprehensible to us—is that the resurrected Christ can be in two places at once: there at the right hand of the Father, and here residing in each of us and in all of us: “Here, There, and Everywhere.”
Be blessed this day with his presence, “here, there, and everywhere,”
Reggie Kidd+