The Resurrection did not mean that Jesus' mortal life had been prolonged. His life after Resurrection was totally different from the life he had lived for more than three decades among his family, friends and followers. That is the intriguing puzzle that the Resurrection stories make evident to us. Clearly, after the Resurrection, he was the same Jesus they had known and followed: They recognized his voice, they touched him, they shared meals with him. The Gospels very definitely emphasize the physical character of his appearances.

Yet, equally, the Gospels make clear that there was something bewilderingly different about the risen Jesus. He was no longer subject to the limitations that mortality places upon us (and indeed placed on him, too, before his Resurrection). Once risen, he could be present to his friends, without their recognizing him. He could enter rooms where the doors were shut. He could appear suddenly and just as suddenly disappear, as he did with the two disciples with whom he broke bread at Emmaus.

In reflecting on the various appearances of Jesus, it is worth our while to ask the question: To whom did the risen Jesus appear? Or to put the question another way: To whom might we expect him to appear?

Certainly he had a wonderful opportunity to dispel all doubts about the truth of his Resurrection. Thus, he could have appeared in Pilate's palace, perhaps when Pilate and his wife were having breakfast. Or Jesus might have suddenly turned up at a meeting of the Sanhedrin and forced them by the pure evidence of his presence to accept the fact that a man whom they knew for certain had died was now, inexplicably but beyond any shadow of a doubt, alive. Another possibility would have been even more dramatic: He could have had his followers organize a procession, like they had done on Palm Sunday. He could have ridden into Jerusalem, mounted this time not on a lowly donkey, but on a great horse...Yes, these are the kinds of appearances that would have silenced all doubt.

Writers of textbooks defending the faith would have been spared a great deal of unnecessary labor if Jesus had only done things in such reasonable and sensible ways. It would have made getting people to accept Jesus and his message a breeze, a pushover. Nonbelievers would be overwhelmed by the evidence. They would be compelled to become believers or be charged with the rankest insincerity.

Yet these are precisely the kinds of things that Jesus did not do. He appeared to no one except those who were disposed to believe. He appeared only to his chosen disciples. The disciples may have lost hope in Jesus after he died, but they never lost their love for him and their faith in him. And it was this love and faith that gave them the discerning eye that enabled them to recognize him, when others could not. Seeing the risen Jesus was not an experience of empirical data; it was an experience of faith.

—From the Catholic Update article, "The Resurrection: How We Know It's True"

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