Luke 24:44-49

OUR LORD'S RESURRECTION BODY. The Gospel statements indicate-that at this time our Lord had a real body, identical with His pre-resurrection body and with His glorified body, and yet differing from both, especially from the former. ‘It is palpable, not only as a whole, but also in its different parts; raised above space, so that it can in much shorter time than we transport itself from one locality to another; gifted with the capability, in subjection to a mightier will, of being sometimes visible, sometimes invisible. It bears the unmistakable traces of its former condition, but is at the same time raised above the confining limitations of this. It is, in a word, a spiritual body, no longer subject to the flesh, but filled, guided, borne by the spirit, yet not less a body. It can eat, but it no longer needs to eat; it can reveal itself in one place, but is not bound to this one place; it can show itself within the sphere of this world, but is not limited to this sphere' (Van Oosterzee). At the same time, the resurrection Body of our Lord had not yet, during the forty days He lingered on earth, assumed the full glory which belongs to it, and which it now possesses as the glorified Body of the Divine-human Redeemer. In view of the care with which our Lord proves the reality of His Body after the resurrection, we must take care not to slight the lesson; especially as the only positive facts bearing on the subject of our future glory are those here presented. More is told us, indeed, but only thus much has been shown us as a historical occurrence. The Apostles teach us that after the resurrection, the saints shall have bodies like unto His glorious body (Philippians 3:21), and in regard to the interval, our Lord's teaching about disembodied spirits (Luke 24:39) suggests the obvious truth that the dead thus live without the body. The facts of this section guard against two classes of errors: those which deny the separate life of the soul, and, on the other hand, those which ignore the reality of Christ's post-resurrection body by forgetting that believers will not possess their full glory until the whole man is redeemed at the resurrection.

TIME. It is impossible to determine with certainty when this discourse was uttered. Luke would scarcely be silent about the instruction given on the evening of the resurrection day; and Luke 24:44 would be at once regarded as the beginning of a discourse then uttered, had we no other information. But Luke's own account in the Book of Acts, compels us to believe that Luke 24:49 was spoken forty days later. Yet the structure of the passage does not point to a single verse which seems to be the beginning of a second and later discourse. The E. V. assumes such a break at Luke 24:49, but Luke 24:46-48 include language similar to that in Luke 1:8, which was spoken after the command not to depart from Jerusalem. It cannot be supposed that Luke was ignorant of the interval of forty days when he wrote the Gospel; his silence on that point here is quite characteristic. Some have supposed the whole is a summary of our Lord's teaching during the interval; but Luke 24:49 can only belong to the last discourse. Others, with more reason, regard the whole as spoken just before the Ascension. We incline to the view that Luke 24:44 was spoken on the evening of the Resurrection Day, that Luke 24:45 sums up the instruction of the interval, His ‘speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God' (Acts 1:3), and that Luke 24:46 introduces the account of the discourse on Ascension Day, more fully recorded by Luke in Acts 1:4-8.