Commentary on Luke 24:1-12

Having grown up in churches that sang vigorous hymns about the cross’s redemptive power, I have always been prone to see a bit of Easter in Calvary. It has taken me longer to recognize Calvary in the empty tomb. Easter is purportedly about unclouded joy, clear victories, and hope that does not disappoint (Romans 5:5). But Luke’s depiction of the resurrection, much like his depiction of the incarnation, has a decidedly cruciform tone. There is doubt and terror (verses 4–5). There is division among God’s people (verse 11). And there is a Jesus that seems nowhere to be found (verses 5, 12).

This surprises us, perhaps, because we think of Christian affirmations of Jesus’ enfleshed life—whether pre- or post-resurrection—as the warm, winsome aspects of the gospel message. Immanence, rather than transcendence. Presence, rather than absence. Clarity, rather than mystery. We forget how complicated enfleshed life can be. Flesh is “particular, permeable, and provisional”¹—meaning that flesh is limited and localized, it is marked by the world it inhabits, and it is very difficult to control or even interpret. All throughout Luke’s gospel, Jesus’ body has been misunderstood, misused, and even misplaced (Luke 2:41–52).² The cost of revelation that embraces the material world is of great significance to Luke. So it is no wonder Luke’s gospel should emphasize the cost of a resurrection that embraces that same materiality.

The risen Jesus is particular. Unlike some all-encompassing, cosmic force—the resurrected Jesus is not everywhere, all at once. He has gone missing from the place one expects him to be. “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” the two lightning-clad men ask the women. “He is not here” (verse 5). The weighty corollary to Easter faith is that, if our Savior lives, the tombs of certainty, finality, and respectability that we have gifted him will no longer be his dwelling. To encounter a living God, embodied and active in the world, requires that we face something more profound than a happy end. It requires that we face a Love stronger than death, particular in its commitment to lives lost and witnesses disregarded.

From 1976–1983, an Argentinian human-rights organization named Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo) gave stalwart witness to the kidnapping of their children by the military dictatorship that ruled the nation during those years. To this day, on March 24, thousands share in these women’s suffering by protesting this bloody period of the nation’s history. There is something in Jesus’ absent body that binds itself to this grief. It marks these women’s struggle and hallows it—even as their witness marks and interprets Christ’s own. It is no surprise that the women in Luke are not believed when they tell the disciples the stone has been rolled away and Jesus’ body is gone. Nor is it a surprise that Argentina’s right-wing, populist president, Javier Milei, discounts the claims of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, dismissing as false their witness to 30,000 disappearances during the dictatorship.³ Jesus’ witness was also dismissed and assumed false (22:66–71). The mockery of the women’s witness in Luke 24 resonates with the derision leveled at Christ’s own. And this is the second cost of an enfleshed resurrection. Jesus’ risen life is not only particular; it is also permeable—impacted by and impacting our witnesses. Indeed, his resurrection calls us to tell the truth about his person and those lives to whom he has bound his own, regardless of whether we are believed.

Living bodies are also provisional. They change, even as they are remembered over time. Memory plays a crucial role in Luke 24:1–12. “Remember his words,” the men tell the women (verses 6–7). And the women do remember—a memory that testifies to their presence in Jesus’ inner circle of disciples. But Jesus’ words are not only remembered; they are reframed in light of the passion and the empty tomb. Luke’s Jesus does not speak of being “crucified” earlier in the gospel, for all he tells his disciples he will be killed (9:21–22, 43–45; 18:31–33). The Jesus in Luke’s Easter appearances bears wounds that his disciples never thought he would bear (24:39–40), and he inhabits the world in new ways. He is not always immediately recognizable (24:13–35)—even as he is re-membered in the breaking of bread and in the breaking open of the scriptures. And this is the third cost of an embodied resurrection. It requires that continuity and change be held together, one in each hand. The risen Jesus confronts the false comforts of memories leveraged for stasis or despair. Memory is meant to empower God’s new creation, not petrify it. In grace’s dark dawn, Easter resurrection breaks open histories and mistakes frozen in time and asks those whose hearts have grown accustomed to stony resignation: What if the stone was rolled away? What if hope was risked again? What if forgiveness was real? What would it mean to live—not shut inside tombs of all we cannot change, but alive in a world that can?

There is an alternate translation of verse 12—a reading where Peter does not simply “go home,” but wonders “to himself” or “with himself” at what he has seen. I like that reading. It echoes the pondering of Jesus’ mother Mary—but it also underscores all that is at stake for this denying disciple. The resurrection will require Peter to face his failure, remembered in the face of Love. Stooping low (verse 12), Peter wonders at Love’s costly call to face God’s future. So may we all.

Notes

1. I describe these aspects of embodied life in the first chapter of The Overshadowed Preacher: Mary, the Spirit, and the Labor of Proclamation (WJK, 2020).
2. Brittany Wilson’s careful study of Jesus’ enfleshed continuity and fluidity in Luke-Acts awakens readers to the gospel’s complex treatment of corporeality: The Embodied God: Seeing the Divine in Luke-Acts and in the Early Church (Oxford, 2021).
3. Associated Press, “Their Children Disappeared in Argentina’s Dictatorship. These Mothers Have Looked for Them Since,” News Tribune, March 22, 2024, https://www.newstribune.com/news/2024/mar/22/their-children-disappeared-in-argentinas/.