The Original Locked Room Mystery

A Protestant friend recently argued with me against the doctrine of transubstantiation on these grounds: that Jesus, after the resurrection, proved he was not a spirit by having Thomas put his hands in the marks of the nails. It is in this Sunday’s gospel reading:

Jesus came, although the doors were locked,
and stood in their midst and said, “Peace be with you.”
Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands,
and bring your hand and put it into my side,
and do not be unbelieving, but believe.”

A brief summary of the doctrine of transubstantiation is perhaps needed here: the Catholic Church holds that, at consecration, the bread and wine for communion actually transforms into the body and blood of Christ. They retain all the physical qualities of bread and wine, the “accidents.” But the substance has changed.

My Protestant friend is arguing that Jesus was here using the accidents to prove that he was in fact there in body, not just a hallucination. If God himself considers such visual and tactile evidence proof, it follows that anything that looks, smells and tastes like bread and wine, is actually bread and wine. No transubstantiation.

A clever argument; but it has things cleverly reversed.

In the gospel, Jesus is not showing the wounds in his hands and side to prove he has a physical body. To prove he were not a hallucination, touching him anywhere would have sufficed. But so would the simple fact that many disciples were seeing him at the same time. Touching his wounds proved something else. These wounds, after all, were fatal. He is proving he really did die. Yet he is here. He is proving that he has been able to overcome the characteristics, the accidents, of a physical body.

This body has also just passed through a wall into a locked room. The essence of the physical is that it occupies a discrete point in space; this body does not.

Later, when disciples encounter Jesus on the road to Emmaus, they do not recognize him. His body apparently lacks all the accidents that would identify it as him.

If Jesus’s resurrected body is capable of such things, it is surely as capable of appearing as bread or wine.