Why was the risen Christ so hard to recognize?

If one opens the Gospels at their ending, one finds a strange and solemn thing. All the tale has been drawing onward to the victory of victories, to the hour on which the world itself turns. Yet when that hour comes, the Evangelists do not gaze upon it as one would gaze upon a thing mastered and measured.

Mary Magdalene takes the Lord of heaven and earth for a gardener. Two disciples go by the road to Emmaus with a stranger at their side. The apostles look out upon the shore and see a figure standing there, and only later know who He is.

Again and again, they are nearest to the risen Christ when they least understand what stands before them. They meet Him and think they have met another. This, already, is a teaching. As J. Pageau have noted, the Gospel discloses, in the very manner of its telling, what kind of thing the Resurrection is.

C. S. Lewis once said that the death and Resurrection of Christ are the place in history where something unimaginable from beyond history breaks into our world. The Cross and Resurrection are events within time, but they are also the place where time is pierced. They are not one more happening among the happenings of the world. They are the hinge upon which the world is turned.

The Evangelists seem to know this in their bones. They do not set the Resurrection before us as a spectacle. They show it as a mystery that withholds, unveils, and teaches. It is not first known by standing apart from it, but by being drawn into it. Now, what does that mean?

The disciples on the road to Emmaus have the facts in their hands. They know of the crucifixion. They have heard the tidings of the empty tomb. Still they do not see. The facts are true, yet they have not become luminous. They lie before them like scattered shards of some great tale whose blueprint has not yet been found.

Recognition comes at the table, in the breaking of bread. This does not set the mind aside. It brings the mind to its appointed fulfilment. The disciples do not merely receive another piece of news. They are gathered into the shape of the thing itself. The stranger is known when the previous events, and the road, the table, and the bread become one speech.

So it is with Peter. He does not at first know the figure who stands upon the shore. There is only a voice in the grey of morning, giving a simple command: cast the net again. Then the barren sea stirs with life. The deep answers. The waters yield abundance. And then the beloved disciple says, “It is the Lord.”

The sign is not a painted emblem placed beside the truth. It is resurrection in small: life called out of darkness by a word. The same power that fills the net draws recognition from the heart of Peter. He sees Christ because, for one shining moment, the world becomes readable in Christ. Sea, net, voice, and abundance all speak together.

This is the pattern in both instances. The risen Christ is not recognized as a bare fact. He is recognized when the world is gathered about Him and begins to reveal its meaning. Participation and perception belong together. The disciples come to know Him not by standing outside the mystery and taking its measure, but by being caught up into the order of signs through which He makes Himself known.

For this reason the Resurrection cannot be treated as one marvel among many. It is not the chief treasure in the hoard. It is the light by which the hoard is seen. It is not one bright thing within the world, but the dawn by which the world becomes visible.

Once we are taught to read the world in the light of Easter, resurrection begins to glimmer everywhere: in the newborn child, in the first leaves of spring, in morning light before the mind has found words for it. These things bore meaning already. Christ does not force a meaning upon them. Christ reveals that He is their source and fulfilment.

To recognize the risen Christ is to discover what the world has been trying to say from the beginning. And this is why the Church does not finally answer the modern demand for a photograph with a photograph. She answers it with a meal. Every Sunday, Scripture is read and bread is broken. The faithful gather in ordinary time, and by that gathering confess that ordinary time is veiled with more than it shows. The Church does more than remember the Resurrection as one remembers a fallen hero, she dwells within Him.

The stranger is still known in the breaking of bread. And the modern reader is invited into the same schooling as the first disciples: not to lessen the Resurrection until it fits the measure of our sight, but to be enlarged until we may begin to see by its light.