He invites them to look at and touch his hands and feet, because in touching them They’re overjoyed, but they still don’t believe it’s simply too good to be true. So Jesus goes to some length to prove to them that he’s not a ghost. When this passage begins, we’re actually in mid-scene: they’ve been arguing about reports that Jesus has been sighted by Simon and other disciples.Įverybody’s gathered in a circle, gesturing and shouting their own take on things, when in the midst of all the craziness they hear a familiar voice: “Peace be with you,” it says, which under the circumstances is just a more polite way of saying, “boo!” And he asks them why they’re frightened? Why wouldn’t they be frightened? Who wouldn’t be frightened of a ghost that’s come back to haunt his old friends with unfinished business? I mean, Jesus has been arrested and publicly executed, and now they’re holed up in a room somewhere trying to figure out what to do and how not to get caught. “Why are you frightened?” Jesus asks them, which does seem a bit unfair, even as a rhetorical question. So it’s no surprise that the disciples’ first reaction is one of fear at the sight of a presumed ghost I doubt many of us would have reacted much differently. That’s a common folk understanding of what ghosts are and thus they are tied to people and places and activities that were important to them in life, and those same cultural superstitions floated around in the 1st century in general ways as they do today, regardless of what the orthodox beliefs of our religious traditions say. The classic romance movie called, of course, Ghost, is precisely about this larger idea: a young man deeply in love with a woman is killed in an apparent street robbery and finds himself returning as a ghost that his love can sense in some ways but not see, because he has “unfinished business,” and the rest of the movie is a discovery of what, exactly, that is, and what it will take before he can complete that and be “at peace.” In both ancient and contemporary folklore, ghosts were believed to be the disembodied spirits of human beings that have “unfinished business,” often those who died an untimely, unjust, or violent death. The fear of ghosts and spirits seems to be almost universal in the world, cutting across every culture and society, cropping up even in places where the dominant religion rejects the idea of them.
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