There is something about the accounts of Jesus after His resurrection that I find almost hard to get my head around.
These were people who knew Him. They had walked with Him, listened to Him teach, eaten with Him, and spent years around Him. Yet after Jesus rose from the dead, there were times when some of His closest followers looked right at Him and didn’t recognize Him.
I have read these passages before, but every once in a while something in Scripture catches me differently. The accounts of Jesus after His resurrection appearances did that to me.
How could they not know it was Him?
And then another question follows.
Why did Jesus remain here and appear to His followers at all?
They Knew Jesus, but Didn’t Recognize Him
One of the clearest examples happens on the road to Emmaus.
Two of Jesus’ followers were walking along discussing everything that had happened. Jesus Himself came alongside them and began walking with them.
But Luke tells us something remarkable:
“but they were kept from recognizing him.”
— Luke 24:16 (NIV)
Think about that.
They walked with Jesus. They talked with Jesus. He explained the Scriptures to them. Yet they didn’t realize who was walking beside them.
It wasn’t until later, when Jesus broke bread with them, that their eyes were opened and they recognized Him.
Mary Magdalene had a similar experience.
She was outside the empty tomb, grieving, when Jesus stood near her.
“He asked her, ‘Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?’ Thinking he was the gardener, she said, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.'”
— John 20:15 (NIV)
She thought Jesus was the gardener.
Then He said her name.
“Mary.”
And she knew.
I find these accounts fascinating because Scripture doesn’t explain every detail for us. There are places where the disciples were prevented from recognizing Jesus, and there are other encounters where recognition wasn’t immediate. We aren’t told everything about why.
But Scripture does make something else very clear.
This really was Jesus.
Jesus After His Resurrection Was Real and Physical.
When Jesus appeared to His disciples, they were frightened. They thought they were seeing a spirit.
Jesus answered their fear in an incredibly practical way.
“Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.”
— Luke 24:39 (NIV)
Then He ate a piece of broiled fish in front of them.
There is something almost wonderfully ordinary about that detail.
Jesus didn’t just tell them He was physically alive. He showed them His hands and feet. He told them to touch Him. He ate in front of them.
Thomas would later be invited to see Jesus’ wounds for himself.
The resurrection wasn’t presented as Jesus’ spirit living on after His body died. The tomb was empty because Jesus had risen bodily.
And yet His resurrected body was clearly different.
Paul later described what happens in the resurrection:
“it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power;”
— 1 Corinthians 15:43 (NIV)
It was Jesus—the same Jesus who had been crucified—but now raised in glory.
Scripture gives us glimpses of what His resurrected body was like, but it doesn’t explain everything. We know it was really Jesus. We know He could be seen and touched, and that He ate with His followers. Yet there was clearly something different about Him after the resurrection.
Maybe that’s part of what makes these passages so remarkable.
The Bible Doesn’t Clean Up the Story
There is another thing I notice when I read these accounts.
If someone were trying to invent a convincing story, this seems like an awfully strange way to write it.
Jesus’ own followers don’t come across as fearless people who immediately understand everything. They are confused. They’re frightened. Thomas doubts. Mary doesn’t recognize Jesus. The Emmaus disciples don’t recognize Him. At one point the disciples think they’re seeing a ghost.
Even after everything that had happened, Matthew records this when the disciples saw the risen Jesus:
“When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.”
— Matthew 28:17 (NIV)
Some doubted.
The Gospel writers left that in there.
I find that remarkable. The Gospel writers didn’t try to make the people closest to Jesus look better than they were. They included the fear, the confusion, and even the doubt.
To me, that’s another one of those details in the Bible that makes you stop and think. If someone were simply making this story up, why would they tell it this way?
The Bible has a way of doing that. It records people as they actually are, including the parts we probably would have cleaned up if we were writing the story ourselves.
And these frightened and sometimes confused people were about to be entrusted with something enormous.
Why Didn’t Jesus Simply Leave?
That brings up another interesting question.
Jesus had risen.
Why not ascend immediately?
Instead, He appeared to His followers over a period of time. He walked with them. He ate with them. He explained Scripture to them. He allowed them to see and touch Him.
And He dealt with them personally.
Mary was grieving when Jesus called her by name.
Thomas doubted, and Jesus confronted his doubt.
Peter had denied Jesus three times shortly before the crucifixion. After the resurrection, Jesus met Peter on the shore, ate breakfast with him, and spoke directly to him about what was ahead.
The two travelers on the road to Emmaus were confused and discouraged. Jesus walked beside them and patiently opened the Scriptures to them.
Different people. Different circumstances.
The same risen Christ.
There is something deeply personal about that.
The Same Jesus
Eventually, Jesus gathered His followers and gave them the mission that would carry the Gospel far beyond the small group standing there.
Then He ascended.
Acts records what happened next. As the disciples stood staring into the sky, two men dressed in white appeared and told them:
“‘Men of Galilee,’ they said, ‘why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.'”
— Acts 1:11 (NIV)
I love those words:
This same Jesus.
The Jesus who walked with people.
The Jesus who ate with them.
The Jesus who knew their fear and their doubts.
The Jesus who called Mary by name.
The Jesus who restored Peter.
The Jesus whose hands still bore the evidence of the cross.
Jesus was still the same Jesus His followers had known, but now they were seeing Him as the risen Christ—the One who had conquered death.
And there is something deeply comforting to me in knowing that the Jesus I pray to understands what it means to be human. He knows sorrow, pain, rejection, and the weakness that comes with this life.
For a long time, I believed in God without really understanding what it meant to know Him personally. I wrote more about that journey in I Always Believed in God. But I Didn’t Know Him.
Hebrews tells us that we don’t have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses.
That matters in real life.
After enough years of seeing life at its best and its worst, I’ve learned that not everything has an easy answer. Some things in this life are hard, and I don’t pretend to understand why they happen. Some prayers aren’t answered the way we hoped. And sometimes we don’t recognize what God is doing while we’re standing right in the middle of it.
Maybe that’s another reason the road to Emmaus stays with me.
Those two men thought they were walking through the aftermath of something that had gone terribly wrong.
Jesus was walking right beside them.
They just didn’t recognize Him yet.
More Straight Talk on Faith
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