Signs engineered to maximize visibility emerge only after their usefulness has disappeared. Beyond them, the dim outlines of buildings and trees dissipate with distance. Fog shrouds the entirety of the morning’s two hour commute. The deep, broad cloud hugging the ground darkens the entire landscape despite the hour after sunrise. Headlights are no help, high beams illuminating only the obscuring fog.
After the resurrection, people who followed him closely for years have a remarkably hard time recognizing resurrected Jesus. At the tomb, Mary Magdalene thinks he is a gardener, the fishing disciples do not identify him on the shore until he repeats the miracle of their early calling, and the two disciples on a country road to Emmaus manage to tell him his own story, listen to him tell them the extended version, and host him in their home, all without identifying him until he replicates the last supper’s moment with them: taking, breaking, blessing, and giving them bread. Given our proclivity to believe only what we think possible, the supernatural contribution to each of their blindness is likely negligible.
Life-long experience blankets our world in temporal fog, limiting what we believe possible to what we have already seen, shrouding eternity. Those we call wizened, jaded, have focused attention on the fog, have turned on their high beams. Each funeral veils resurrection, each conflict peace, each tear hope, each disappointment promise, until we can no longer see even the vague, distant outline of God’s perfect reign.
Now we see through a mirror—grasping the eternal through analogies reflecting the temporal and material, the very fog tending to conceal it. We see with the clarity of resurrected eyes only to the extent we live in the truth and power of the resurrection here and now. To a woman socked in by the anger and grief of her brother’s death, Jesus speaks clearly: “I am the resurrection”; the fog lifts.
To a week seeing past this life’s obfuscations, living in the resurrection already realized in Jesus.