Pneumatic

Propers: The Seventh Sunday after Epiphany, A.D. 2019 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

Let’s talk resurrection.

For the past several Sundays we’ve been reading from St Paul’s letter to the Christians at Corinth, in which Paul is attempting to explain the Judeo-Christian concept of resurrection. Corinth is in Greece, and mainstream Greek philosophy asserts a sharp divide between matter and mind, the physical and the spiritual, heavily favoring the latter.

For Greeks, the physical world is an illusion, and the body is a trap. What we really are, according to Plato, are spirits, who escape the physical world at death and leave our bodies far behind. This was a popular notion in the ancient world, and is still pretty dominant today. We like to think that we are not our bodies, that our flesh is arbitrary, customizable, and ultimately disposable. “The real me is who I choose to be.”

Christians and Jews don’t see it that way. The biblical worldview doesn’t present the physical as bad, nor the body as a prison. The world, in fact, was made good at every single stage, ever created and supported by the grace and love of God. The problem is not that our world is bad, but that our world is broken. The way things are is not the way that God intended.

The New Testament understands God not as a micromanager but as a delegator, a benevolent Father who entrusts His treasures to beloved stewards—both to human beings like us, and to spiritual powers very unlike us. Tragically, these stewards have rebelled. The angels fell quite early on, before the world itself. And the Fall of Man predictably followed after. So rather than being Good and True and Beautiful, our world is quite a mess. Bad things don’t happen because God wills evil. Bad things happen because ours is a broken world. And we’re in large part the ones who broke it.

But God does not let this stand. God will not let evil have the final say. He made the world good, and He will make it good again, but not in the way that we might expect. He won’t lead armies of angels raining brimstone from the sky. Rather, God will reclaim the cosmos by entering into it Himself—the Creator become part of Creation—in Jesus Christ our Lord. And Jesus will not save the world through conquest by the sword, but by pouring out His own infinite life and love for the world.

This is the love poured out from the Cross, poured down into Hades, down to the dead. This is the love that will fill up hell to bursting, until the chasm torn by our sin, the distance ripped between God and Man, is sealed up by the Blood of Christ. And so Christ rises, not as He was, not as we are, but as we were always meant to be. He rises immortal, rises eternal, rises in power and glory and might. For He is something we have never seen before: a human being made fully alive.

And His Resurrection, mind you, is but the firstfruits of a far greater harvest. Someday, we are promised, the crop will come in full. Someday all of humanity, all of Creation, will rise up from our graves to life everlasting. Then shall there be no more death, no more tears, no more darkness or shadows or lies. Then shall Christ hand over the Kingdom to His Father, and God at last will be all in all. Thus shall the cosmos be redeemed, restored even beyond its former glory.

You and I live in the time between: between the breaking and remaking of the world; between Christ’s Resurrection then, and the Resurrection of the dead to come.

Because the truth is that the life we live now is but a shadow of life as God intends for it to be. Our frailty, fragility, our weakness, sickness, death—all of this will pass away. This crippled half-life will vanish like smoke upon the wind. And we shall rise immortal with the world restored to glory, all of us as one in Christ, yet each uniquely who we’re truly meant to be. We shall be ourselves, perfected.

It’s an astonishing promise, and a destiny far beyond any for which we could’ve hoped. But the Corinthians are finding the whole thing rather a hard pill to swallow. They can’t quite get their minds around the mechanics of it all. How does the Resurrection work? Do we get new bodies? Do we get our old ones back again? Will we rise as the same age we were when we died? What about scars? What about marriages? Will we even be male or female?

You’re all rather missing the point, Paul replies. The Resurrection of the dead will be far beyond all of our wildest expectations. Think of a seed, he says. When you plant a seed in the ground, it sort of dies, in that it ceases to be a seed any longer. Yet that seed grows up into a wondrous plant, which is itself the seed fulfilled, what the seed was meant to become. It is the same organism, yet it has died and been remade. Its life as a seed is gone for good; what was old is now made new.

Paul then moves on to a more complex metaphor. He begins to speak of two kinds of bodies, two modes of life. The first he calls psychic, the second pneumatic. At first it may seem strange indeed to speak of psychic bodies and pneumatic bodies. Psychic we associate with clairvoyance, and pneumatic with tubes of air. But give a care to the Greek.

Psuche, or psyche, in Greek, refers to the soul or the mind, which is the principle of earthly life, the psychological self. The mind, like the body, is fragile, susceptible to damage and decay, eminently ephemeral and ultimately mortal. The psychic body, for Paul, is the one that we have now: weak, frail, sickly, broken; as diaphanous as smoke wisping off upon the breeze.

Pneuma, on the other hand, means spirit. And spirit has a specific connotation in Paul’s day and age. Today we tend to think of physical things as real, as solid, and spiritual things as evanescent or imaginary. But for the Greeks it was just the opposite. Spirits are more solid, more real, than the things that we can merely see and touch, for everything in the world of our experience passes away, while spirits remain immortal. Spirits cannot die.

The difference between the psychic body and the pneumatic body is the difference between a person made of Kleenex verses Superman. Paul says that what we are now is weakly, sickly, a shadow of what we will and ought to be. But at the Resurrection—when death itself shall be destroyed and God at last shall be all in all—then we will be fully alive, fully healed, fully human; which is to say, pneumatic. It will be our old life made new. Our bodies shall be no longer be filled with smoke, but with deathless eternal fire.

We shall be as Christ Himself, the perfect union of God and Man, and the love of God shall flow through us as fully and effortlessly as sunlight through a window of clear and flawless crystal, suffusing the cosmos.

We needn’t get hung up on the distinction between soul and spirit, psychic bodies and pneumatic bodies. Paul uses those terms differently than we use them today. What matters is that the whole thing is an elaborate metaphor attempting to express how in the Resurrection we will still be ourselves, yet more ourselves than we’ve ever been before. And the same goes for the whole of Creation.

Resurrection is the restoration of all things: life to the dead, wholeness to humanity, salvation to the universe, and Creation to God. It has already begun in Jesus Christ. And it will continue unto the end of the world and the dawn of the age to come. Yet it is not simply our future hope.

The Resurrection is real here and now in every one of us. We are given, each of us, God’s own immortal Spirit breathed into us at Baptism. We are given, here on this Altar, the very Body and Blood of the Risen Christ, that we may all be one in Him. Thus are we sent out to be the Resurrection for others; to bring promise and healing and life and hope to all this fallen world; to forgive the sinner, speak truth to power, and raise the dead from out their graves.

And that will look very much like turning the other cheek, forgiving those who sin against us, and even embracing those brothers who’ve betrayed us and left us for dead. But such is the work of Resurrection, and the life of the world to come.

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