On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the door locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you!" John20:19
Let us meditate on the resurrection and the body of our Lord Jesus, on which the faith and hope of us Christian depend. It is indispensable for us to accept the description of the Bible as it is. Because the Bible promises us that we will resurrect from the dead or be transformed into the same glorious body with that of Lord Jesus and the resurrection of Christ is the first fruit of the rebirth of the universe, that is re-creation of the world.
John Calvin asserts as follows in his commentary on John 20:19 written above.
"And while the doors were shut.
This circumstance was expressly added, because it contains a manifest proof of the Divine power of Christ; but this is utterly at variance with the meaning of the Evangelist. We ought, therefore, to believe that Christ did not enter without a miracle, in order to give a demonstration of his Divinity, by which he might stimulate the attention of his disciples; and yet I am far from admitting the truth of what the Papists assert, that the body of Christ passed through the shut doors. Their reason for maintaining this is, for the purpose of proving not only that the glorious body of Christ resembled a spirit, but that it was infinite, and could not be confined to any one place. But the words convey no such meaning; for the Evangelist does not say that he entered through the shut doors, but that he suddenly stood in the midst of his disciples, though the doors had been shut, and had not been opened to him by the hand of man. We know that Peter went out of a prison which was locked (Acts 12:10); and must we, therefore, say that he passed through the midst of the iron and of the planks? Away, then, with that childish trifling, which contains nothing solid, and brings along with it many absurdities! Let us be satisfied with knowing that Christ intended, by a remarkable miracle, to confirm his disciples in their belief of his resurrection.
from the Bible Commentary Page.
The apostle Paul, however, describes the resurrected body of Christ as heavenly body, glorious body and spiritual body(1Cor.15:39-44). He means that His resurrected body belongs to the spiritual world, so that it is infinite, and can not be confined to any one place as Calvin says, papists say, but it has real physical body which disciples can touch under the direction of their Lord. However the exegesis (interpretation) may look like childish trifling as he says, we can not understand these verses in other ways as Calvin asserts.
When two disciples met the resurrected Lord on the way to Emmaus and the moment two disciples perceived the person to be Lord Jesus they had met and had meal with at an inn, His body disappeared from their sight. The happening show His resurrected body belongs not to this world but to the other world, that is, to the Heaven.
The fact that Jesus entered the shut door did not mean His body had no physical substance in the way of this world. He was touched by the hands of disciples and He ate food with them after His having come out of the dead. We cannot understand the phenomena which the New Testament reports to us, but we can believe the fact as the fact from God. That is the same with that we can not recognize the Trinity of God, but that we can believe and have fellowship with Triune God.
I believe that the exegesis of these verses published by Merrill C. Tenny on the Gospel John is quite true and Biblical. He thinks the purpose of the angels who removed the big stone from the entrance of the sepulcher was not to let Jesus go out of the tomb, but to make His disciples come in.
We can not go without saying that rationalism lying at the root of European spirit from the time of ancient Greece had gotten hold of Calvin's spirit to make him unable to accept the biblical facts:the resurrected body and other tongue and so on.
16 April 2006 Published
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