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When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, 'Peace be with you. ' (v. 19)

It must have been difficult for the first followers of Jesus to get their head around the fact that Jesus was alive again after the crucifixion when they knew for a fact he was dead. It would take years to assimilate this new reality. In fact, Christians are still debating what it all means.

Was Jesus’ corpse resuscitated? Was it really Jesus in the flesh that Mary touched when she met him outside the tomb and he said, “Don’t hold onto me? I have not yet ascended to my Father.”

Could she have held on to him? Was that really a possibility?

The disciples were terrified after the crucifixion, the men that is. The women disciples had stayed at the cross on Friday, and on Sunday morning had gone to the tomb to anoint the body. But the tomb was empty. The body was gone — or was it?

The ten disciples were terrified when Jesus suddenly appeared among them, seemingly out of nowhere, in that locked room where they were hiding from the religious authorities. They were afraid they would be turned over to the Romans and be crucified like Jesus.

Jesus reassured them, saying, "Look at my hands and feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have." He asked them for something to eat. Yet they testified that he passed through walls.

Was Jesus somehow able to rearrange the molecules of his resurrected body?

The doubtful Corinthian Christians asked, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?" Paul wrote: "There are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one thing and the glory of the earthly is another."

What exactly does that mean? If it happened then, why doesn't it happen now?

It does. Many have reported meeting Jesus in his heavenly body.

Donald Prom, Wisconsin's longest surviving heart transplant recipient, until his death at the age of seventy in December of 2000, described a healing vision that occurred after a failed heart bypass operation. His doctors told him he would die within a year, but something kept him alive. His wife Marie, mother of the couples’ nine children, said, "He told me that he had an out of body experience...he went through a tunnel of light and saw Christ and Christ said, 'You must go back to your family.'”  “Thanks to a heart transplant seven years later, Prom stayed alive almost two more decades..." and "...lived to see 23 more grandchildren."

Spirits come and go and are sometimes present with loved ones on earth.

The singer and actor, Della Reese, of “Touched By An Angel” television fame wrote about both the visitation of a loved one and being outside of her own body after crashing through a glass patio door at her home in Hollywood in the early 1970s. The shattered glass cut deeply into her stomach and just as the glass on top of the door was about to fall down on her head, her mother, who she said, “…had died in 1949… reached around from behind me, taking hold of my head and shoulders, and lifted me onto my feet and told me to sit down in my chair.” Della knew it was her mother because “…it was her smell only, that wonderful-smelling mixture of Ponds cold cream, vanilla and spices.” “…Mama spoke to me, her scent still all around, telling me what to say to Dumpsey (her daughter) to show her how to make a tourniquet for my leg. And then Mama was gone.”

Most people in our society take these accounts about as seriously as ghost stories told around a campfire, no matter how credible the source might be. We find it difficult to integrate out-of-body and real touch visitation experiences, even when they are reported by people we love and trust. We believe them but put the idea into that compartment that rarely affects our everyday life in the “real world.” We don’t know what to do with views of reality that are radically different from the accepted scientific worldview.

It is not as difficult to believe that we have both a physical and a spiritual body as it is to comprehend that a person who has died and left the physical body behind can come back, seemingly appear out of thin air as Jesus did, pass through walls and feel solid to the touch.

Psychologist Raymond Moody tells about a woman who came to him after her son died from cancer. She missed him terribly. Dr. Moody writes:

One day I received an incredible call from her. A few days after her visit to my clinic, she awoke from a deep sleep... There standing in her room, was her son. As she sat up in the bed to look at him, she could see that the ravages of cancer were gone. He now looked vibrant and happy as he had before his disease... The woman was in a state of ecstasy. She stood up and faced her son and began carrying on a conversation. “I couldn't believe it was him... so I asked if I could touch him.…” ...her son stepped forward and hugged her. Then the woman said, he lifted her right off the ground and over his head.”

The resurrection of Jesus changed everything. It is a paradigm shift, a new way of understanding the world. Suddenly there is another dimension of reality to consider. I can't explain it. Nobody can really. Something happened all those years ago that changed the disciples forever -- and is still changing us today.