Over Easter I attended a national conference for Catholic principals in Hobart. The program was dense but inspiring and there is much I have yet to unpack, absorb and enact. While standing in line I heard the voice behind me utter: ‘Don’t you say hello to your old friends.’ As I turned and faced the owner of the voice I had zero recognition, so I looked at his name tag, looked at his face again. It had been 28 years since we had last met. A rush of memories overwhelmed me.
Our capacity to recognise faces is usually much better than this experience, though admittedly we had both aged considerably, had less hair, more bulk and had long, but wonderful stories to tell. When newborns bond with their mothers they read the face, absorb the smells and react to the stress and anxiety. These faces are fixed into our memories, and we have this ability to refer this knowledge to new faces, to see racial or regional characteristics or where we see familial similarities. There is a name we give to the disorder when people cannot recognise faces they know – prosopagnosia.
In our Gospel reading this week (John 21:1 – 19) the disciples encounter Jesus while fishing. Jesus calls out to them. Only one disciple, ‘the disciple Jesus loved’, recognises that it is the Lord, and it is then that Peter also acknowledges, ‘It is the Lord.’ Yet, despite the ‘recognition’ when all the disciples join Peter and Jesus for a breakfast of bread and fish, ‘none of the disciples was bold enough to ask, ‘Who are you?’ for they knew quite well it was the Lord.’ It is possible that the disciples were still expecting a resurrected Jesus to be a revivified corpse? Or was the resurrected Jesus not quite recognisable because he was substantially different, or was the transformation so significant that not only was their facial recognition ability impaired, but so was their very perception of the person of Jesus. This, according to John, was the third time that Jesus had ‘shown’ himself to his disciples, and obviously they still didn’t get it.
This is the problem also faced by the disciples on the road to Emmaus. Although the stranger explained all the scriptures and the prophets, it was not until the breaking of bread that they recognised who he was, and then he disappeared from their sight.
The key for us is recognising the person of Jesus alive amongst us. His resurrection means that he continues in some way within our community, he exists as a person, as the Body of Christ. Our faith calls us and invites us to explore that presence through service of the community, through the Body of Christ. The faces we see every day, those we know well and those we have never met and those which have gone before, and those yet to be born will all bear the image of Jesus himself. Will you recognise him?
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