Wright: Through Death and Out the Other Side

[Rembrandt's 1648 'The Supper at Emmaus']

N. T. Wright on the intercanonical connection between Gen 3:7 ('and their eyes were opened, and they knew') and Luke 24:31 ('and their eyes were opened, and they knew [him]')--both of which describe two people who have just eaten.

Luke, echoing that story, describes the first meal of the new creation. . . . [T]he long curse had been broken. Death itself has been defeated. God's new creation, brimming with life and joy and new possibility, has burst in upon the world of decay and sorrow.

Jesus himself, risen from the dead, is the beginning and the sign of this new world. He isn't just alive again in the same way that Jairus's daughter, or the widow's son at Nain, were. They, poor things, would have to face death again in due course. He has, it seems, gone through death and out the other side into a new world, a world of new and deathless creation.

--Tom Wright, Luke for Everyone (SPCK 2001), 296