The Door Is the Ghost... Things Just Got Real

Credit to Doug Wilson for this idea. 

Let's look at just one verse. John 20:19 - "On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, 'Peace be with you.'"

This verse comes along after Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection. Jesus is appearing to his disciples and lots of other people, too. The appearance here is remarkable because Jesus entered a room with locked doors. The text doesn't mention any open window. It doesn't say he climbed down the chimney. Or shimmied through some slat. Apparently, locked doors cannot keep Jesus out. (There is probably a bad preaching analogy there about irresistible grace if you are looking really hard for one.)

Was Jesus a ghost? No. He was really physically there. He bid them to check his wounds: his hands and his side. In the next chapter he is found having breakfast with Peter, some fish and bread. The disciples had seen Jesus brutally murdered, and so you can imagine that they might have been shocked into thinking of him as a sort of ghost, seeing him now in their midst. But he clearly was not. 

We might be tempted to think of Jesus as a sort of ghost when we try to imagine how he got into the room. But maybe we are thinking about things the exact opposite way. The tempting way to think about this is that Jesus, by virtue of his resurrection, maybe had some sort of physicality, but also could go spiritual or ghostly and pass through a wall. 

But what if it is the opposite? What if Jesus, in his resurrected state, is more real?! More physical. More tangible. More solid. And it is, in fact, our world that is ethereal and ghostly. 

It is not a ghostly Jesus passing through a real wall, but a real Jesus passing through a ghostly wall. Resurrected reality, as eternal, is far firmer than anything we have yet known. 

Come to think of it, I think Doug Wilson sort of got this from Lewis's Great Divorce in a tangential sort of way. If you haven't read that, I highly recommend it. Let us walk about today realizing that maybe some of the things we can't see are even more "real" than some of the things we can. The laws of logic, gravity, God - invisible things with very visible effects. Let us not despise the things we may not yet fully understand.