Flesh, Fish, and Fulfillment Text: Luke 24:36-49
Introduction: The Ghost Problem
Our modern world has a ghost problem. It is haunted by the ghost of Jesus. People are quite comfortable with a spiritual Jesus, a ghostly Jesus, a metaphorical Jesus. They want a Jesus who offers vague spiritual principles, a Jesus who can be molded into a mascot for their favorite political cause, a Jesus who floats harmlessly in the stained-glass windows of their imagination. This ghost is respectable, ethereal, and, most importantly, he makes no claims on your body, your history, or your dinner table.
But the Christian faith is not built on a ghost. Our faith is grounded in a grotesque historical scandal: a crucified man who got up, walked out of His tomb with flesh and bones, and later asked for a snack. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is not a lovely idea; it is a historical fact, as solid and tangible as the piece of broiled fish He ate in the presence of His disciples. If the resurrection is not a bodily, physical, historical event, then our faith is futile, we are still in our sins, and we are, of all men, most to be pitied.
This passage in Luke is a frontal assault on all Gnostic, spiritualized, metaphorical versions of Christianity. Luke, the meticulous historian, goes to great lengths to show us that the risen Christ was not a phantom or a hallucination. He was corporeal. He had mass. He could be touched. He could digest food. And this physical reality is inextricably linked to the meaning of all of Scripture and the mission of the Church. Here, the risen Lord confronts His disciples' terror, proves His physicality, unlocks the Old Testament, and commissions His church. This is the foundation of everything.
The Text
Now while they were telling these things, He Himself stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace to you.” But being startled and frightened, they were thinking that they were seeing a spirit. And He said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? See My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself; touch Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And when He had said this, He showed them His hands and His feet. And while they still were not believing because of their joy and were still marveling, He said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave Him a piece of a broiled fish, and He took it and ate it before them.
Now He said to them, “These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and He said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ would suffer and rise again from the dead the third day, and that repentance for forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in His name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And behold, I am sending the promise of My Father upon you, but you are to stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.”
(Luke 24:36-49 LSB)
The Corporeal Christ (vv. 36-43)
The scene is charged. The two disciples from the Emmaus road have just burst in, telling their story of the risen Lord. And right in the middle of their testimony, Jesus Himself appears.
"He Himself stood in their midst and said to them, 'Peace to you.' But being startled and frightened, they were thinking that they were seeing a spirit." (Luke 24:36-37)
His entrance is supernatural. He does not knock. He simply is there. And His first word is "Peace." This is the peace that He promised, a peace the world cannot give, the peace of reconciliation with God. But their reaction is not peace; it is raw terror. Why? Because their first assumption is pagan. They thought they were seeing a ghost. A disembodied spirit in the ancient world was a terrifying thing, a shade from the underworld. Their minds went immediately to superstition, not to Scripture.
Jesus immediately confronts their fear and its source: their unbelieving hearts. He does not offer them a spiritual platitude. He offers them empirical evidence. He offers them His body.
"See My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself; touch Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have." (Luke 24:39)
This is the great anti-Gnostic declaration. Gnosticism, both ancient and modern, despises the material world. It seeks to escape the body. But Jesus grounds our salvation in His body. He says, "See My hands and My feet." He is directing them to the evidence of His crucifixion. The wounds are still there. His resurrected body is a body that remembers the cross. These are not the hands of a ghost; they are the hands of a carpenter, the hands that healed the sick, and the hands that were pierced for our transgressions. He invites them to touch Him. Christianity is a tangible faith. It is not a system of ethics or a set of nice ideas. It is about a God who took on flesh and bone, who died a bloody death, and who rose with a physical body that can be handled.
Even with this, they are caught in a state of joyful disbelief. It was too good to be true. So Jesus provides the final, glorious, mundane proof.
"Have you anything here to eat?" They gave Him a piece of a broiled fish, and He took it and ate it before them. (Luke 24:41-43)
This is one of the most profound and down-to-earth moments in all of Scripture. The Lord of the universe, the conqueror of death and Hell, asks for a snack. Ghosts do not eat. Visions do not digest. Jesus eats a piece of fish to prove, beyond all doubt, that He is physically, bodily alive. This act consecrates the ordinary. It tells us that our bodies, our meals, our physical lives matter to God. The redemption He purchased is not an escape from the physical world, but the redemption of the physical world.
The Unlocked Scriptures (vv. 44-47)
The physical proof was essential, but it was not enough. They had seen, they had heard, they had touched, and they were still marveling in confusion. Now Jesus moves from the physical evidence to the interpretive key. He moves from His body to the Book.
"These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled." (Luke 24:44)
Jesus asserts that the entire Old Testament, what a Jew would call the Tanakh (Law, Prophets, and Writings, here represented by the Psalms), is about Him. It is not a random collection of stories, laws, and poems. It is one unified story that points inexorably to His suffering, death, and resurrection. The cross was not plan B. It was the fulfillment of thousands of years of prophecy. He had told them this before, but they had not understood. The data was there, but they lacked the framework to interpret it.
So, Jesus performs another miracle.
"Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures." (Luke 24:45)
This is a divine act, as miraculous as calming the sea or raising the dead. We cannot, by our own intellect, truly understand the Bible. The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God. We need the risen Christ, by His Spirit, to remove the scales from our eyes. He must give us the hermeneutic, the interpretive key. And what is that key?
He summarizes it for them. The central message of all of Scripture is this: "Thus it is written, that the Christ would suffer and rise again from the dead the third day, and that repentance for forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in His name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem" (Luke 24:46-47). This is the gospel in miniature. It is not just about a personal feeling of peace. It is about a historical event (suffering and resurrection) that creates a universal message (repentance and forgiveness) for a global audience (all the nations). The entire Bible hinges on this point.
The Empowered Witnesses (vv. 48-49)
Having established the reality of His resurrection and the meaning of the Scriptures, Jesus now defines their new role and the power by which they will accomplish it.
"You are witnesses of these things." (Luke 24:48)
A witness is not someone who invents a story. A witness is someone who reports what he has seen and heard. Their job is not to be creative, but to be faithful. They are to testify to the fact of the empty tomb, the reality of the risen, fish-eating Christ, and the truth of the unlocked Scriptures. This is the apostolic task, and by extension, it is the task of the church in every generation. We are witnesses.
But this monumental task is not to be undertaken with human strength or enthusiasm. There is a command and a promise.
"And behold, I am sending the promise of My Father upon you, but you are to stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high." (Luke 24:49)
The mission is global, but the strategy begins with waiting. They must wait for the "promise of the Father," the Holy Spirit. The word "clothed" here is a military term. It means to be equipped for battle. The proclamation of the gospel is spiritual warfare. It is an invasion of the kingdom of darkness. And you do not go to war in your street clothes. You must be clothed with power from on high. The resurrection of Christ provides the message, but the Spirit of Christ provides the power. The book of Acts is the story of this promise fulfilled, as these once-frightened men, clothed with the power of Pentecost, turned the world upside down.
Conclusion: No Ghosts Allowed
The faith that was delivered to the saints is a robust, muscular, and historical faith. It is not a ghost story. It is a story of a real body, scarred with real wounds, that conquered a real death. It is the story of a real book, the Scriptures, that makes sense of all of reality in light of that resurrection.
Because Jesus rose with flesh and bones, your body matters. How you use your hands, your feet, your mouth, matters. Your physical life is not a waiting room for eternity; it is the training ground. Because He ate fish, our ordinary lives, our meals, our work, are shot through with eternal significance.
Because He opened their minds to the Scriptures, we are not left to guess about the meaning of life. We have the dictionary. We have the key. The Bible is not a book of disconnected moralisms; it is the coherent story of God's redemptive work in history, culminating in the Christ who suffered and rose.
And because He sent the Spirit, we are not left to our own devices. We are called to be witnesses, yes, but we are clothed with power from on high. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead is at work in us and through us. Therefore, we do not proclaim a ghostly Jesus or a metaphorical hope. We proclaim a risen King, the Lord of heaven and earth, who has a body, who has a book, and who has a mission for His people: to proclaim repentance and the forgiveness of sins to all the nations, until He comes again.