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Touch and see. The police blocked us from seeing them, from seeing their skin, their bodies, their personhood. Helmets covered their heads and plastic shields veiled their faces, distorting their countenance. From their necks down to their combat boots, they wore black uniforms—padded with armor, reinforced plastic and rubber running up their legs and down their arms. Their gloved hands held metal clubs, warning us to stay away. They would not be touched or seen.
But the police touched people. I saw one officer plunge into the crowd to pull out a black woman, throwing her to the ground face first and thrusting his knee into her back as he yanked her arms behind her and bound her hands with a cable tie. The officer touched whomever he pleased, and with violent force—yet he and his colleagues made it clear that they would not be touched by us. Human touch happened only on their terms, and when it did happen, it was not humane. Like the officer who put his arm around Garner's neck, these officers did not seem to know how to touch others without violence.
Once, in a class I taught in a prison, the incarcerated men started talking about which officers and staff would and ­wouldn't shake their hands. To shake hands was a sign of respect, of mutuality, of recognition that they shared at least one thing in common: their human flesh. The men all agreed that they were grateful for the new chaplain who had started that week, because he looked them in the eyes and shook their hands. I could imagine them saying the words of Jesus, "Touch me and see." Shake my hand and discover that I am human like you.
After the resurrection, the disciples don't recognize that Jesus is fully human, as human as they are. "They were startled and terrified," says Luke, "and thought that they were seeing a ghost." They see him, but they don't see him. They recognize him as Jesus but are convinced that he is not the human Jesus, not Jesus fully alive, not flesh and blood like their own flesh and blood. For the disciples, Jesus is at first a ghost, an unclean spirit from the grave—Jesus undead in their midst. He is other and strange, provoking fear in the people in the room.
The gospel of Christ's peace happens in our touch, in which gentleness is made flesh. "Why not simply try to touch the other," writes Franz Fanon, "discover each other?" To trust in the resurrection of Jesus is to believe in the transfiguration of all flesh, to believe that God comes to us in our encounter with the other.
"Touch me and see." "Don't shoot." See my body; see my life. It's like yours, human flesh. Jesus invites his friends to see him as a stranger who is a friend, an other who is the same—to recognize Jesus' flesh in others and to discover that our neighbor's hand offers us the fellowship of Christ.
For black Americans, the abuse of power by police is not an aberration. It's a familiar pattern.
The risen Jesus' first witnesses didn't just give their testimony in words. Many of them eventually offered evidence written in their own blood.