He is risen. Be not afraid.

George Weigel writes that we humans have an innate, physical resistance to death.

You’ve noticed it if you’ve kept a death-watch by the bedside of a loved one; emergency medics, physicians, and clergy see it all the time, even on the battlefield: the human body fights against death, resisting the inevitable to the end. Viewed through the lens of biblical faith, this innate, physical resistance to death is a trace of what theologians call “original innocence,” the condition of Adam and Eve before the Fall: before sin and death entered the story. Death is unnatural, in the sense that the Creator did not intend it “in the beginning.” Because “he is not God of the dead but of the living; for all live to him” [Luke 20.38].

...the Resurrection wrought a great change in the order of nature as well as in the order of history — a great change in the structure of reality itself, as well as in the trajectory of the human drama.

...Keeping in mind the magnitude of the change wrought by the Resurrection — a divine action in history and nature that changed history and nature in a radical way, opening new possibilities of life beyond the reach of death — we can get a deeper insight into those readings from the four Gospels that the Church uses on Easter Sunday and throughout Easter Week — readings in which the disciples don’t get it, time after time after time, in their encounters with the Risen One.

Take, for example, one of the literary gems of the New Testament: the account, in Luke 24.13–44, of the two disciples who meet the Risen Lord on Easter on the road to Emmaus, fail to recognize him at first, then come to know him in the breaking of bread. The two then rush back to Jerusalem where they share their experience with other friends of Jesus. Both the Emmaus disciples and the disciples in Jerusalem (who have found the empty tomb and have heard the angel’s proclamation of the Resurrection) believe that Jesus has been raised; they accept the testimony of their own eyes, and of witnesses. But they still cannot grasp what this “being raised” means. So when the Risen One appears among them, their first reaction is to think that this is a “spirit,” a ghost.

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