We will get a clear idea of it if we only consider the role played by our bodies as the instruments of our presence in the world. It is in fact through the body that we are present in a world of bodies...because it can do nothing but offer itself to our gaze, it can do nothing but be seen. To be seen, and to be corporeally present, is all one. My corporeal presence is my visibility, but my visibility is not my own; it belongs to every gaze, unbeknownst to me and without being able to do anything about it — an ignorance and impotence constituting the every essence of my visibility. Thus, no one is master of his corporeal presence, and, even more, to be corporeally present is not to be master of this presence.
What happens then, to the contrary, in the Resurrection of Christ? What happens is that the resurrected Body is as if a witness, a living proof, a saving irruption of the glorious nature of the created within the bosom of its dark and opaque modality: Christ's body is still the instrument of presence in the world of bodies, but, by a total change, it is no longer of the essence of this presence to be passive and involuntary. The soul which inhabits this instrument is entirely master of it and makes use of it at will. Christ can actualize the corporeal mode of His presence according to His own decision and as He judges good. The relationship that He entertains with the corporeal medium of His presence has been completely transformed. A presence active throughout the entire world because a presence really in act, all relationships which unite this corporeal medium with the rest of the bodies, that is to say with the entire world and with the conditions that define it, all these relationships have been changed. Christ is no longer seen, He causes Himself to be seen.
This is exactly what the Gospels teach, and which so many modern exegetes are incapable of understanding. Christ glorious is not 'above' the world of the senses, except in a symbolic sense. Simply put, He is no longer subject to the conditions of this corporeal world. His bodily presentification becomes, then, a simple prolongation of its spiritual reality, entirely dependent upon this reality (whereas in the state of fallen nature, it is the person's spiritual reality which extrinsically dependent upon its bodily presence), a presentification which the spiritual person may or may not effectuate, as freely as human thought can, in its ordinary state, produce or not produce such or such a concept or sentiment. Whoever stops to consider this doctrine of the reversal in the relationship of the person to his corporeal medium and the consequences that this entails, will take into account the remarkable light that it casts on the significance of Christ's post-pascal appearances according to the Gospels.
