February 11 , 2007
Sixth Sunday After Epiphany
Jer. 17:5-10, 1 Cor. 15:12-20, Luke 6:17-26
Last month there was an editorial in the Post by John Yates, former rector of the Falls Church. You might remember reading it. Among other things, he argued that those of us remaining in the Episcopal Church “no longer believe the historic, orthodox Christian faith.” He pointed to a few examples of our lack of orthodoxy, all of which I wanted to argue with, but the one that stuck out most for me was his claim that many of us think “the resurrection of Jesus is a fiction.” At the time, the idea seemed absurd to me – of course we Episcopalians believe in the resurrection. But I didn’t stop to think about exactly what it is that we believe.
A few days later a good friend of mine from law school was visiting with her kids and her dog, Athena. Back when Kristin and I started law school, Athena was about a year old and still acted like a puppy. Which, as I soon learned, can be a dangerous thing for a rotweiler/doberman mix. Once I took Athena on a walk around the neighborhood when Kristin couldn’t for some reason. I wasn’t used to dogs so Athena pretty much walked me. That is, until she saw a squirrel and started running, which meant that I started running too. Finally she was running so fast that I just couldn’t keep up and ended up flying through the air and landing on my head. A lot of blood and stitches later, I came home from the emergency room with a new and healthier respect for Athena. But the Athena that stayed with us a few weeks ago was a whole different dog. Now, the poor thing can barely walk and doesn’t hear or eat much. She no longer presents any danger to passing squirrels or inexperienced dog-walkers. Kristin told me that she’s been trying to prepare her kids for the not-too-distant eventuality of Athena’s death. When her daughter asks what will happen to Athena when she dies, Kristin tells her that Athena’s body will be in the ground, but her soul will be in heaven. After my experience with Athena I wasn’t sure how I felt about the idea of dogs in heaven, but otherwise I thought that sounded perfectly reasonable – very pastoral, not too scary, fairly positive and hopeful.
But then I saw today’s reading from 1st Corinthians. Paul spends the entire 15th chapter of this letter to the Corinthians preaching pretty intensely about the resurrection of Jesus and the Corinthians’ own resurrections. He’s not just spouting doctrine or making an academic argument; he’s writing to correct these early Christians’ beliefs about the resurrection. And do you want to know what was it the Corinthians were thinking that warranted this reaction from Paul? Exactly the same thing that Kristin told her daughter about Athena. Exactly the same thing that sounded perfectly reasonable to me. They were thinking that resurrection was a spiritual, rather than a bodily thing. The Corinthians were very spiritual people and shared the philosophical view common at that time that the physical world and the body were so crass and embarrassing that they should be separated from the soul and the spiritual world. And so they believed that their souls would be resurrected to be with God, but that their physical bodies wouldn’t be.
I have nothing other than anecdotal evidence and my own experience to back this up, but I bet you anything that’s what most American Christians think happens when we die. I certainly don’t feel like I am just a soul trapped in a physical body. The thoughts of my brain, the joy and pain of my emotions, the memories and feelings that come when I smell or hear something familiar, the knowledge and love of people that can come from physical contact, the fact that I am really deeply me only when I am really deeply in communion with you. All of these things are part of who I am. And yet even knowing how much of me derives from my physical being – my utter humanness – my unexamined instinct was still this idea that only my “soul” will be preserved after death.
Paul doesn’t let the Corinthians get away with that idea. He makes clear that Jesus’ resurrection was bodily. And Paul claims that Jesus’ resurrection is inextricably linked to our resurrections. Paul is absolutely convinced that unless there is a bodily resurrection for us, there can’t be one for Jesus and then our entire Christian faith is void. So, as much as I hate to admit it, maybe there is a tiny bit of validity to that awful editorial in the Post. And maybe we need to hear Paul’s argument today just as much as those Corinthians did way back when.
The Bible talks quite a bit about Jesus’ bodily resurrection. During his life, Jesus promises his disciples that he will rise again on the third day. But they have no clue what he’s talking about and it is only after his death that they see what he meant. Three days after his death and burial, he returns and starts showing himself to his disciples and friends. There’s no doubt that his return is in some way bodily rather than just spiritual. Mary Magdalene “clings” to him. Jesus shows the wounds in his hands and his side and invites the disciples to touch them. He walks and talks. He even eats roasted fish. And yet his body is transformed somehow. He doesn’t simply resume his former physical body; resurrection isn’t resuscitation. The laws of physics don’t seem to restrain him; twice he appears in the midst of his disciples in a locked room. And we aren’t told what he looks like, but we hear that even his closest friends don’t recognize him until he begins to discuss scripture or break bread with them.
For me, the fact that we are all sitting here today and that the Church exists at all is proof enough that there was some kind of resurrection. What else could make the disciples go from hovering scared in locked rooms after Good Friday to boldly proclaiming the gospel throughout the world?
But that doesn’t really help explain Jesus’ bodily resurrection. Why does it matter so much that we believe Jesus Christ was bodily resurrected and that we will also be resurrected in this way? Why does it matter so much that the splitting churches would argue that our ostensibly failing to believe in it was a main reason for their leaving? Why does it matter so much that Paul spent all this time writing about it to the Corinthians, who seem to have plenty of other religious issues to deal with? Why does the resurrection of the body matter so much that centuries of theologians, from Justin Martyr to Augustine, argued for its truth and branded opponents as heretics?
Paul argues that if we won’t be bodily resurrected, then Jesus Christ can’t have been either. And if Jesus hasn’t been bodily raised from the dead, then our faith is in vain, we are misrepresenting God, we are still in our sins, and all who have died are just gone forever.
I’m sorry to say that, for me, Paul’s argument doesn’t really cut it. It’s like a faulty syllogism. If A=B then C=D. If we won’t be bodily resurrected then Jesus can’t have been either. Well, why not? Seems like God would certainly be capable of raising and transforming Jesus’ perfect human body and leaving our imperfect human bodies to become worm fodder if that’s how God wanted it to be. Paul doesn’t explain the link between Jesus’ resurrection and ours very well, and for me that makes his whole argument problematic. (I recognize that this is probably the ex-lawyer in me.)
But something about Paul’s insistence on there being a bodily element to Jesus’ resurrection and to ours does ring very true for me. So instead of just trying to get myself to take Paul’s word for it or else just dismissing the idea completely, I wanted to find a way that would help me fill in the missing link in Paul’s argument.
C.S. Lewis wrote that “[w]e in our heart of hearts, tend to slur over the risen manhood of Jesus, to conceive Him, after death, as simply returning into Deity, so that the Resurrection would be no more than the reversal or undoing of the Incarnation.” And (speaking for me now), that is an incredible shame.
Because it means we aren’t really taking God’s incarnation seriously. It means we aren’t really believing that when God became man in Jesus Christ he was fully human. He really was born a particular person in a particular time. He really walked this earth and experienced life’s beauty and pleasures but also life’s potential for heart-break. He really suffered physical pain and isolation and forsakenness at the hands of other humans. And he really and truly died and had his human body placed in the deepest darkest night of the grave. God was not just pretending to interact with us humans. God became human utterly and completely and truly. God experienced everything in his humanity that we do. And it seems to me that the bodily nature of Jesus’ resurrection is the climax of all of that. It shows us, once and for all, that God is absolutely committed to us humans. So committed that He not only takes our humanity on and becomes one of us and dies for us, but He brings that humanity back up into Himself. As 2nd century Christian theologian Irenaeus put it, God became man so that man might become God. God didn’t abandon humanity and bodily existence at the grave; He redeemed and reconciled it.
That’s why our hope after death is not to escape our humanity but to have it transformed so that we are finally made whole. God’s becoming human and Jesus Christ’s bodily resurrection means that our creaturely life matters. This world, God’s creation, matters. What we do with our body matters. How we use resources, how we treat other people – all of it matters deeply to God.
The most common symbol of our faith is the cross. And, as you can see (point), that cross is empty. Jesus is no longer there, no longer either a suffering man or a dead body. But an equally important symbol, although – granted – much harder to market, is his empty tomb. It’s not Jesus’ divinity alone that was resurrected; his body is gone from the grave just like it’s gone from the cross. He is really and truly our risen Lord in every possible way.
Don’t ask me what John Yates would think about my vision of the resurrection. I’m sure he’d find something unorthodox about it. But along with him I can proclaim with a full and sure heart -- “Alleluia. Christ is risen.”
Elizabeth Rees