The Scandal of Resurrection

Scripture: The Third Sunday of Easter, A.D. 2015 B

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

They gave Him a piece of broiled fish, and He took it and ate it in their presence.

That’s a rather odd detail to point out, don’t you think? Here Jesus Christ has arisen from the dead, having conquered forever sin, death, and hell, and Luke’s Gospel dedicates no less than three full verses to Jesus eating a fish.

In the time of Jesus, there were two major understandings of life after death. On the one hand you had folks who insisted that the body is more important than the soul—that the body is the real you, and when the body dies, that’s pretty much it. The great pagan poet Homer talks about the “shades,” or ghosts, of great warriors descending into Hades, the Greek underworld. But these shades are more like echoes or reflections of the dead person, leading a miserable half-life in the darkness, moaning and gibbering and wishing they could be alive again. For the old heroes in the old poems, life was short and brutal, and only fame lived on. The real you was the corpse you left behind, in the most opulent tomb available. In other words, eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

On the other hand, you had folks like Plato and Socrates, who insisted that the real you is not your body but your immortal soul. Socrates is famous for having said, among other things, that no harm can befall a good man. This doesn’t mean that Socrates was naïve, or thought that bad things never happened to good people. In point of fact, he was publically executed on trumped-up charges, so he knew the unjust brutalities of life. But he believed that the real you was your soul, your eternal spirit, and that only you could truly harm your own soul. So as long as you’re good, it doesn’t matter what happens to your body, because your body isn’t you. Plato took this even further with talk of reincarnation.

These same opposing beliefs are found in every culture and religion throughout history. I daresay that they remain the dominant understandings of life after death today. You’ve got materialists who claim that the body, the here and now, is all there is, that the soul is unimportant or nonexistent. And then you’ve got spiritualists who shun the physical world as an illusion, a prison to be shucked off and left behind. There are even some Christians—quite possibly most Christians—who think that’s how it works. We die, our souls flit off to Heaven, and that’s the end of the story. Pie in the sky, by and by.

But that ain’t in the Bible, folks. That ain’t how it works. Yes, Christ promises that faithful souls shall dwell with Him in Heaven—but that’s just stage one. Things really get interesting not when our souls leave, but when they come back.

Judaism, from which our Christian faith derives, was considered scandalous for its religious teachings in the ancient world, but not for the reasons you might think. By the time of Jesus, Judaism had been so influential that many pagans and philosophers had started thinking in monotheistic terms. They began to talk about there being one great unknowable God beyond all others. In fact, this became a rather popular idea. Some 10% of the Roman Empire worshipped the Hebrew God.

Jews—most Jews, anyway—also believed that humans possessed immortal souls, and again, this wasn’t all that controversial. You might even say it was fashionable. Well-educated Greeks and Romans adored philosophy, and most philosophical schools, taking their cues from Socrates and Plato, believed in immortal souls destined to return to the One God. That Judaism came to this conclusion first gave Jewish philosophers a fair amount of street cred. They had one God before it was cool.

But what made the God of the Bible controversial, even gauche in educated circles, was the ridiculous Hebrew insistence upon the resurrection of the dead. This is the belief, passed down to us by the biblical prophets, that at the end of the age the dead will literally rise up from earth and sea, that the breath of life shall re-enter all flesh, and that body and soul shall be reunited in perfect harmony forever. The resurrection means that we don’t spend eternity as ghosts, nor do we reincarnate as different people. We come back as ourselves, perfected—not undead, but fully alive for the very first time.

The separation of body and soul at death is temporary. At the end of time, Heaven will descend to earth, God will dwell with Man, and there will be a perfect fusion of the physical and the spiritual. Death will be no more. Weeping will be no more. We will live forever, like Jesus, with Jesus, in Jesus. Thus all Creation shall be redeemed.

This whole notion of resurrection sounded scandalous, even silly, to the ears of ancient Greeks—just as it sounds scandalous and silly to most folks today. The materialists and spiritualists alike reject this flesh as temporary. Thus we have entire industries dedicated to overcoming the body, reshaping the body, denying the realities of the body. We don’t want to be bodies; we want to be souls, or at least minds, free from physical restraint—like we can pretend to be on the internet.

But the God of the Bible, the God of Judaism and Christianity, does not hate the world. He made it, He loves it, and He fashioned it for good. The fact that the world is now broken and corrupted does not deter Him. He intends to save it, to save everything that He has made, from the lowest worm to the highest star. Human beings were built to be the stewards of Creation—God’s own subcreators. We are the bridge between the physical and the spiritual, between angels and apes, between the material and the ethereal. We are neither souls that possess a body nor bodies that outweigh souls, but a perfectly harmonious fusion of the two.

Deep down, of course, we know this instinctually; we know that body and soul are intended to exist in permanent union. Such is why, whenever we encounter one half without the other—that is, either a corpse or a ghost—we react with repugnance and fear. We know it is unnatural. God made a physical world, breathed into it spiritual life, and judged it good together. This is why early Christians always stressed the future Resurrection. Our God promises a fully redeemed and resurrected world, in which birds and beasts, rocks and trees, men and women, all share a single divine destiny.

I can’t tell you how important, how integral, this idea really is to the worldview of our faith. It makes sense of everything, and no one sermon is going to do it justice. The infusion of the spiritual in the physical explains why God came down as a baby at Christmas. It explains the unspeakable glory of Easter, when Christ arose bodily as the first fruits of the Resurrection. It explains why Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to dwell literally within us at Pentecost, making our own bodies His new Temple. It explains why Christians reverence and pray to the bones of saints as if their corpses one day will simply sit up again, alive and awake—which of course they will.

But beyond this, our understanding of spiritual and physical fusion explains why we love God by loving our neighbor; how we encounter God in the Sacraments of Word and water, bread and wine; why we insist on justice and mercy and peace, not just in some distant hereafter, but in the here and now. It also explains why it was the unwashed barbarians of Christian Europe who developed the scientific method, the Age of Exploration, the theory of human rights, and the end of the slave trade, rather than the far more civilized empires of China and Islam, who had a good thousand years’ head start. The Resurrection informs everything we say and do, everything we are.

Granted, the Resurrection of the dead brings with it a host of technical questions. How will disintegrated bodies regrow? How old will we be when it happens? What does a person who is both physically and spiritually perfect even look like? And there are answers offered to these questions—some quite fascinating. I’d be happy to discuss them later. For now suffice it to say that Jesus has redeemed us both body and soul. This means that while our destiny is eternal, our duties are immediate. We can deny neither the importance of eternal, spiritual truths, nor the immediate and very physical needs of our fellow human beings. We have one foot in time and the other in eternity.

Creation is not a duality, a conflict between body and soul; Creation is a harmony, a perfect blend of the two. The original music of Creation has been marred by the discord of sin, death, and the devil, but Christ has conquered all these three. Now is indeed the age of Resurrection, the time between the first rising of Jesus and the final rising of all people at the end of the age. God has not left this world behind but loves it still, and finds goodness in the simplest things it has to offer. Even something so humble, so physical, as a meal of fish with His friends.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.