“Make no mistake,” John Updike warns in his famous poem Seven Stanzas at Easter. “If he rose at all,/it was as his body;/if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit,/the amino acids rekindle,/the Church will fall.” The resurrection, Updike’s poem explains, was not a metaphor. Jesus’ very flesh rose. The thumbs, toes, and heart which had gone limp only days before came back to life.
Each time we renew our Baptismal Covenant, we say that we believe in “the resurrection of the body.” But, especially in more progressive Christian contexts, we tend to talk about the resurrection as a spiritual phenomenon, if we talk about it at all. The resurrection is one of the more embarrassing doctrines for a modern thinking person to openly affirm, so we downplay it. We make it an abstract concept so that it seems less outlandish, less scary.
The Gospels, however, challenge our instinct to minimize the resurrection’s physicality. In last week’s Gospel reading from John, Jesus invites Thomas to touch his hands and side. In this week’s Gospel reading from Luke, Jesus eats a broiled fish provided by the disciples themselves—just to prove that he’s not a ghost. The Gospels appear to be underlining for us, again and again, that this resurrection thing really happened. The cells’ dissolution reversed; the molecules reknit; the amino acids rekindled. Jesus was not a ghost or an illusion or a narrative device. Jesus’ thumbs, toes, and heart actually came back to life.
And if Jesus’ body, not just his soul, was resurrected, then the human body is not some insignificant vessel we can afford to overlook. Our bodies, God willing, will be resurrected, too—which means that flesh might stick to our bones for a very, very long time. We won’t be escaping our bodies, even on the other side of the grave. So we better get used to them.
1 Comments
How true.