In Christian speech a witness is not a reporter. Witnesses speak about what they know. The witnesses of Christ’s Resurrection not only told people what they had seen, but also spoke of what had happened to them because of what they had seen. They spoke about Christ in them, not only about the person they had known during his sojourn among them and who had appeared to them after his Resurrection.

Jesus appeared only to those who were capable of knowing what they were seeing. It is an interior knowing that transforms the knower. Once one has known the living Lord life will never be the same. Martyrs/witnesses always speak in the first person. It is not enough to speak in the voice of Paul or Isaiah. The text must pass through the life of the lector so that it becomes a living word of witness in the present, not a recitation of what someone said long ago. As Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, “The word of God which you heard from us, you accepted not as the word of men, but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers” (1 Th.2:13).

God is not an object who awaits our perception. When Scripture speaks of God in relation to us, the accent is on what God does, and when God appears our response is not, as in the case of things, “Yes, I see it,” but wonder, adoration, obedience, and love.