What does it mean to believe in the resurrection? Some of you may be surprised to know that both the Bible and the earliest confessions of the church are in majority agreement as to what it means. The resurrection is the centrepiece of a worldview that includes all time and space, all life and meaning. It is about the world and about us humans in the world. It is about the joining of heaven and earth, the renewal of creation and a future where death is no more. It is about hope, but a hope that requires faith to be activated. It is about the victory of love over the forces of hate and indifference that seem to hold so much sway in the world we know and inhabit. So what does it mean to believe in the resurrection?
First, the resurrection is about all of us, not just part of us. “I believe in the resurrection of the body,” the Apostles’ Creed tells us. For most Jews in Jesus’ day, a person’s spirit could not be separated from his or her body. We are a psycho-spiritual-physical unity. To be resurrected in spirit without a body is no resurrection at all. And the earliest confessions claim the resurrection of the body over and against broader Hellenistic views of the immortality of the soul without need of a body. Even though it is easier to believe in a resurrection that is “spiritual” (i.e. with no body to worry about), the Bible and the earliest confessions go to great lengths to emphasize that the resurrection includes the body. Why?
To begin with, Jesus rose again in a body. I realize this is easier stated than believed. But let us not mistake what the earliest witnesses confess explicitly. The risen Jesus given us in the gospels is one who is very physical, and he demonstrates that he is no phantom by eating, touching and being touched, and showing the marks of his wounds so that it is clear that it is he and not some lookalike.
Even after doing all this, his disciples still have a hard time believing it is him. The difficulty is not so much the physicality of the resurrection. As already mentioned, most Jews believed that any credible resurrection had to be physical. Rather, the difficulty is the witness of someone being resurrected in the midst of history, the midst of time. Nobody had ever thought or imagined that, and so, the disbelief, disorientation and bewilderment of the early witnesses.
At the same time, the risen Christ is also different. Most Jews understood that the resurrection of the body had to have a spiritual component to it because existing bodies were subject to decay and death. Jesus is the same physical-spiritual person, yet different also. His body is the same body, yet also possesses properties that are not subject to decay and death.
Now even as I write this I realize it sounds crazy. How is this possible? It is only possible if the witnesses are right. How could they be? Let us not confuse the challenge of believing such things from the consistency of what is confessed. The resurrection is about the body as much as it is about the spirit. We are a unity.
Our distinctive identities include our physical senses as much as our minds, emotions and spirits, our faces as much as our values. But clearly, according to biblical testimony, the limitations of bodily-ness do not have to include decay and death. Decay and death are a consequence of the fall, however we understand that. They are not part of the creational intention or goal of God. I do not have space here to cite chapter and verse in the scriptures to show this is what is confessed.
Finally, however, we must ask: does it make a difference if the resurrection includes the body or not? How is such a confession linked to our hope as Christians? I began by stating that the resurrection is the centrepiece of a whole world view. Creation and re-creation with the fall and redemption in the middle are movements of a larger historical/spiritual symphony if you will. Heaven is not the final note but an interim movement.
The final note is the joining of heaven to earth, a recreation/completion of the work God began with creation and has continued throughout, all of it very good. Jesus’ resurrection sounds the note of victory. With this event and the gift of the Spirit which flows from it, we as Christians live out of the end in the midst of time.
Jesus is a prototype of the new creation, a creation for which all existence longs and awaits with patience in the midst of suffering. Our task as believers and as communities of faith is to implement the seeds of the new creation in this world of decay and death, evil, injustice, pain and suffering. We are here to declare in our actions and relationships that the structures of this world in so far as they breed inequality and injustice are part of the decay and death that is passing away.
We are declaring that God’s kingdom in Christ has already begun to reveal itself, and we are its citizens and proclaimers in word and deed. All creation, spirit and body, needs redemption. Resurrection is about all that is, because all that is, is good in so far as it is. Evil is an unwelcome intruder. Its destiny is banishment forever.
Do we believe this? “‘Lord I believe, help my unbelief’… especially when I am overwhelmed by the anguish in our world.” Amen.
