Seeing and Recognizing Are Not the Same
The core message of the incarnation of God in Jesus is that the Divine Presence
is here, in us and in all of creation, and not only “over there” in some far-off
realm. The early Christians came to call this seemingly new and available
Presence “both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36), and Jesus became the big billboard
that announced God’s message in a personal way along the speedy highways of
history. God needed something, or someone, to focus our attention. Jesus serves
that role quite well.
Read 1 Corinthians 15:4–8, where Paul describes how Christ appeared a
number of times to his apostles and followers after Jesus’s death. The four
Gospels do the same thing, describing how the Risen Christ transcended doors,
walls, spaces, ethnicities, religions, water, air, and times, eating food, and
sometimes even bilocating, but always interacting with matter. While all of
these accounts ascribe a kind of physical presence to Christ, it always seems to
be a different kind of embodiment. Or, as Mark says right at the end of his
Gospel, “he showed himself but under another form” (16:12). This is a new kind
of presence, a new kind of embodiment, and a new kind of godliness.
This, I think, is why the people who witnessed these apparitions of Christ
seemed to finally recognize him, but not usually immediately. Seeing and
recognizing are not the same thing. And isn’t this how it happens in our own
lives? First we see a candle flame, then a moment later it “blazes” for us when
we allow it to hold a personal meaning or message. We see a homeless man, and
the moment we allow our heart space to open toward him, he becomes human,
dear, or even Christ. Every resurrection story seems to strongly affirm an
ambiguous—yet certain—presence in very ordinary settings, like walking on
the road to Emmaus with a stranger, roasting fish on the beach, or what
appeared like a gardener to the Magdalene.*3 These moments from Scripture set
a stage of expectation and desire that God’s presence can be seen in the ordinary
and the material, and we do not have to wait for supernatural apparitions. We
Catholics call this a “sacramental” theology, where the visible and tactile are the
primary doorway to the invisible. This is why each of the formal Sacraments of
the church insists on a material element like water, oil, bread, wine, the laying
on of hands, or the absolute physicality of marriage itself.