Resurrection and the Body

John 20.11-18

1 Cor 15.35-58

Preached Canberra Baptist Church 21 st May 2006

She was good player, a really top player. She’d trained consistently, been coached well and proven herself at the highest levels of competitive hockey. She knew the moves and the tactics, but somehow it hadn’t been her day. The stick hadn’t felt ‘right’ in her hands. Her mind knew what she had to do, but her body had not been able to respond. That sense of balance, of seamless ‘thought-action’ that is instinctive and unconscious to the player in form had been absent. Today she was missing that 1 or 2% that makes a true champion, that she knew was in her, but not in evidence right now.

They’d been married for thirty years, quite successfully as these things go. They’d both managed career and kids with the usual dramas but no real crises. They had entered the broad open country called ‘fifty’ and almost without noticing it, things slipped away. First it was the kids. They’d welcomed the silence at first, but soon realized what they’d lost. Then it was the mortgage. Finally, and without really noticing it, it was their love-life in every sense of the word: their joy in each other’s company, their shared life-interests, their once passionate and life-giving encounters. All these slowly and quietly slipped away, ceased upon the midnight without pain and they found themselves staring at each other across an empty living room.

He had prepared himself for the diagnosis and it didn’t go too badly. It’s just a word, they say, not a sentence. And they’re right. His chances were very good. The surgery and then the therapy had gone well. The hardest thing was the sense that his body had somehow turned on him, that it had allowed in an alien presence, and that presence had tried to take hold. He had been used to battles – you didn’t climb to his position in the firm without knowing how to fight. He had always known who the enemy was and known how to deal with them. But now the enemy seemed to be his own body, his cells at war with each other, his organs and limbs suspect in their loyalties, their future. He wasn’t frightened of dying, but how was he to live, divided and suspicious of his very self?

She had always been beautiful in a classical kind of way – fine of face and figure with a warm smile and gentle manner. Friends, male and female seemed to warm to her, and she’d had boyfriends, but none really special. She was envied and admired and seemed to have so much. But she worried about her weight and that little mark on the skin, that blemish that she could always see, even when carefully covered by her clothes, as she was sure others could see, and would always notice. So small, so insignificant, so inconsequential to others, yet to her, always the focus in the mirror, and the centre of her insecurities.

All of them, and all of us who have dragged out bodies into church , are bound by a common experience: embodiment, of having, or more correctly being, a body!

We have been exploring Resurrection and how it relates to the life we are living now. Too often we think of resurrection as a mysterious and future hope, something to be experienced after death or in a completely ‘other’ realm of experience. According to the English theologian HA Williams:

If we have been aware of resurrection in this life, then and only then, shall we be able or ready to receive the hope of final resurrection after physical death. Resurrection as our final and ultimate future can be known only by those who perceive resurrection with us now encompassing all we are and do. For only then will it be recognized as a country we have already entered and in whose light and warmth we have already lived . (True Resurrection: 13)

Resurrection as our final and ultimate future can be known only by those who perceive resurrection with us now encompassing all we are and do. How does resurrection might impact our experience of being a body?

Those who are attentive among you will have noticed that my title has not used the classic formulation ‘the resurrection of the body’, that final transformation of the physical body that lies somewhere in God’s future. Of this Christians dispute often and sometimes vigorously. Some hold that the resurrection body is a physical reality consistent with our present embodied experience but mysteriously transformed to be beyond imperfection and suffering. Indeed, the ‘physical nature’ of resurrection (expressed by some in the assertion that “Jesus rose ‘physically’ from the dead” – meaning that he resumed the kind of physical substance of human being) is taken as a key mark of evangelical orthodoxy. [Did Jesus rise physically from the dead? – Of course not!] To any such query addressed to me I also must answer: no, I believe the Bible!

In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul teaches at length about the mystery of Resurrection. Of the Resurrection of the body his teaching in vs 44 is clear: Using the metaphor of the sowing of seed and the growing of the plant as expressing the mystery of resurrection Paul says: “It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.” In case there is any doubt he goes on to affirm that ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God , nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable’ (v 50). From the appearances (and disappearances!) of Jesus described in the gospels, from the difficulties of recognizing him, from the direct testimony of Paul, one thing we can be very sure of (if we are to read and believe the Bible) is that the Resurrection body is anything but physical, in the terms that we know.

That does not mean that Resurrection is some disembodied and vague hope that does not touch our bodily existence! Resurrection life is embodied life, but life in a different kind of body. Paul rehearses some of our experience of bodily structure and existence in the universe, ranging from the bodies of seeds and animals and fish, through to the ‘bodies’ that are seen in the heavens, each with its own beauty and ‘glory’ and each carrying life, energy and meaning in some form. Whatever the mystery that will finally claim us all, it to involves the mystery of embodiment, of identity and particularity, of a bounded and meaningful and relational estate.

But I do not speak of that far horizon, important as it is. I speak of resurrection NOW, and what it might say about our bodies dragged here joyfully or reluctantly this morning, the bodies that I described in those opening vignettes. If HA Williams is right, the hope of our bodies for final resurrection is grounded in whether they are capable of experiencing resurrection here and now. So I speak not of the resurrection OF the body: let us leave that joyful mystery, to the trustworthy grace of God. Let us speak of Resurrection AND the body, how resurrection rubs against the frame of our mortal flesh even today.

We all have bodies, or perhaps more correctly, we all are bodies – for it is impossible for us to imagine what life might be like apart from the body. I stand before you as man on the mature side of fifty years. I am a little deaf, generously proportioned in mostly the wrong places and facing the onset of both grey hair and wrinkled skin with some equanimity. My mother rang one morning this week before I went cycling – I won’t relay her comment about the thought of me in cycling apparel (but let us at least acknowledge it was accompanied by laughter). If we were indelicate and looked around the pews some of us are older and more wrinkled, some are young and fresh-faced. Some are athletic and sporty and strong, some are slow and deliberate and faced with challenges in mobility or health or longevity. But whether you are a swimsuit model or a pensioner on a walking frame it is likely that you are a little anxious about the body you brought along with you this morning.

This is not just that we are an insecure congregation, prone to self-doubt. Experience suggests that many human beings share such anxiety. We have all known stunningly beautiful people who are ashamed of their supposedly ugly toes, or the person with an athletic frame who feels it all spoilt by the mole on their left shoulder.

This improves with age. There can come a time when anxiety about body image settles down. This has been called ‘post-modelism’ – the dawning recognition that one is never going to be a super-model!

Underlying this anxiety about the body is a deep philosophical prejudice. It is the dualism of ‘body’ and ‘soul’, ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’. This ancient view of the world is grounded in the philosophy and worldview of old Greece. It says there is a physical, fleshly, part of us called the physical body, which is physical and demeaned and demeaning. And there is a lofty, spiritual, intellectual part of us which is noble, and good and immortal! And at death (says Greek thought) the noble bit escapes and is set free and the gross, unreliable, fleshly bit dies and is cast off.

You can sense some overtones of a view of the afterlife here – but it is not Christian! This kind of dualism, of splitting the human being, has nothing to Christian hope which affirms the body and somehow sees it also enduring and being a part of the renewed existence. You can also sense here a connection with experience of most of us, as our minds, memories and emotions stay young and fresh and strong, even as our bodies age and become less reliable. The dualistic way of thinking, of letting go the old, slow, and limited body, and letting the mind and emotions fly free into some continuing state.

This dualism is a deeply painful and puzzling aspect of human experience. We deal with it in various ways. Paradoxically, two seemingly quite different tendencies in our culture are responses to the vulnerability and limited life of the body . One is the great effort of medical science to overcome the aging and decline of the body through medicine and replacement surgery and all the apparatus of therapeutic disciplines which keeps us going – for which we are grateful. The other is the cult of the body beautiful in its various guises of fitness and athleticism and celebrity. A hybrid form of this is the ‘body makeover’, extreme or otherwise, in which the natural aging and decline of the body are fought against, resisted, pushed away!

I suspect that the more literal readings of the ‘physical resurrection’ of Jesus are a another form of this ‘body denial’. Just as the humiliated, tortured body of Jesus was raised in glory to a new life, so might we hope, overweight and under-prettied as we are, for another body, a new beginning. This is another form of denial of our current embodied existence and all the limitations and struggles of this all too human flesh!

But central to the NT accounts of the Resurrection and the witness of western art, is that the risen body of Christ carries the marks of his suffering. Far from a glorious new beginning in which all the marks and wounds of bodily existence have been rubbed out in a burst of fresh glory, the risen Christ bears the marks of the human Jesus. It is the body as wounded that is raised, the life as lived that participates in the mystery of resurrection.

When the risen Christ, glorious, yet wounded, appears to the disciples the words of Pilate are never far away: “Behold the man!”. At the trial, with deep and unintentional irony, Pilate presents the flogged and humiliated Jesus to the crowd with the words (in Latin) “Ecce, Homo!” – “behold, humanity!” In the resurrection, this bleeding, abused body of humankind is affirmed and transformed in glory and hope. Jesus takes us all into a new future, not as supermodels or athletes or beautiful actors, those that this world celebrates as heroes and role models because people are so uncomfortable in their own skins, but in the ordinary lives we are living now, with all our poor form, and ill health, and physical blemishes!