Easter People

But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe” [John 20:24-25].

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Jane and I spent almost two weeks in March lounging and talking with a small group of college friends at two separate idyllic spots on the South Carolina coast. Virtually all of us are the same age and so, it wasn’t long before we were discussing the accumulated aches and pains that visit those of us who are fortunate enough to live into our eighth decade (do your math). As Lewis Grizzard once wrote, “Elvis Is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself!”

This afternoon I received an email message from a longtime professional colleague who is 10 or 12 years my senior. He apologized for the message’s format—it was in 28-point type—but he related that his macular degeneration was worse and it was either use “big” type that he could see and edit, or send no message at all.

For the past two years or so, several hundred million Americans have been obsessed—sometimes appropriately, sometimes not so much—with the little COVID-19 virus that’s been rampant around our world. Jane and I got our second booster—our fourth Pfizer shot—on Monday. I don’t want to complain, but my arm still hurts.

There’s something about the human condition, is there not, that causes each of us to spend a considerable amount of time contemplating our physical bodies. If it isn’t one thing, it’s three.

“My hair has not only turned white; it’s turned loose.”

“Do these jeans make me look too fat?”

“How many prescription medications do you take?”

It’s always been that way. For example, those in the early church, those who experienced that first Easter “in the flesh,” so to speak, quickly became aware of the resurrection of Jesus’ body. His post-Easter appearances weren’t just movements of the Spirit. Those who saw Him, saw Him in a resurrected body; they didn’t just sense His presence among them. That’s why, in my meditation last week, I emphasized the importance of the Resurrection. To be sure, Jesus’ suffering and his willing physical death on the cross show us that He was fully human, while also being fully divine. It was the Resurrection of His body, however, that altered the trajectory of the cosmos forever.

As noted at the top of this meditation in the text I pulled from  the Gospel lesson appointed for the Second Sunday of Easter (RCL, Year C), for one of the disciples, Thomas, seeing the resurrected body of Christ was so important that he said he would not believe until the tangible flesh of his Lord was standing before him. In the decades that followed Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension, Christians spoke of the resurrection of the body, not just because some had seen the risen Jesus in the flesh before his Ascension, but also because they believed that at the eschaton—the end of all time—God would raise their own flesh in the same manner. As Paul would later write:

So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable [1 Corinthians 15:42, NRSV].

Indeed, almost 2,000 years after our Lord’s death and resurrection, many of us each Sunday repeat the words in one or more of our historic creeds:

… I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen [Apostle’s Creed].

Alas, I sometimes wonder if we mean those words. That is to say that for many of us so-called “modern” folks, the resurrection clause within the Creed conjures up Hollywood images of the formerly dead ambling around on Ninth Street or elsewhere. That such a doctrine would be at the core of our Faith seems almost weird. I’d dare say that when it comes to the resurrection, not that of Christ, but resurrection for the rest of us, a majority of 21st century Christians have some sort of spirit, as opposed to body in mind.

For example, the issue came up a few years ago in a Sunday school class I was leading at Trinity Avenue Presbyterian here in Durham. Those of you who know my penchant for “trick” questions know to be wary when I start suggesting answers that, at least on their surface, make complete sense. I told the group I wanted their thoughts, that a significant number of Christians see human beings as being bifurcated beings—part physical, and part spiritual.

These Christians posit that our physical bodies are susceptible to “decay,” but our “spiritual” essences—some folks refer to this spiritual side of humanity as one’s soul—is freed from our bodies at death, going on to live eternally. I then asked them if any within the group agreed. The response was an almost unanimous “Yes.” Then I pulled out the rug from beneath them, telling them that as popular as that line of thought might be within the Church, it isn’t consistent with orthodox Christianity. Did I just pull the rug out from under any of you reading this?

I know, I know, Paul seems to draw a distinction between the flesh and the spirit, with the former being weak, prone to sin, etc., while the latter is not. True, but when Paul writes about that flesh/spirit dichotomy, he isn’t speaking about the resurrection of the body; he’s talking about our natural tendency toward sin. He isn’t describing the physical body as a “container” of sorts for the immortal spirit within us. Paul believed and taught in the resurrection of the dead.

We know from John’s Gospel that [t]he Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” [John 1:14]. In Jesus Christ, the Divine became human. He breathed real air, ate real food, and drank real wine (not unfortified grape juice). He tenderly touched others and healed them. He wept following the death of his friend, Lazarus. He was physically and psychologically uncomfortable as He prayed in the garden near the moment of His final confrontation with authorities. Nails were pounded into His flesh. He whipped and beaten. He died and, through the Grace of God, was resurrected as the first fruit of the new creation. Jesus Christ was all about the human body.

Jesus also knew that while the Word had become flesh, His disciples would need new flesh after His departure. They would need something real—not something merely ethereal. Spiritual formation is fine—I took an entire course on it in Divinity School—but Jesus wanted to leave something with his followers that was so real that it wouldn’t depend upon some sort of spiritual conjuring, some sort of blissful reminiscence, or some assortment of doctrinal papers that they could study and to which they might adhere (recall that the Gospels weren’t written down until decades after His resurrection).

I’ve chuckled with some of you by reminding you that “Jesus didn’t do Powerpoint.” He did not offer His disciples nice little homilies in the form of “three points and a poem.” Instead, He was all about the human body, frail and susceptible to decay as it is. In His last days, He gave them tangible offerings that they could touch, things they could taste, things they could experience in the flesh. He gave them offerings that forced them to be together, forced them to not only gaze upon each other, but to reach out and touch one another.

Where they had dirty feet, Jesus showed them what it was like for the master to react as a servant in washing their feet. Where they were hungry for spiritual food, he provided it, but he did so in the form of tangible bread, broken for them, and wine, poured out for them, as His body would be broken, and as his blood would be spilled, for them. They sat at table together and took in the aromas of that Last Supper, took in the bouquet of the wine, took in the proximity to his earthly body, and took in his new commandment, that they love one another as He had loved them.

One of the lessons that he left with them—and, therefore, with us—is that our bodies are the primary method through which He reaches out to us. With each of us, He practices a form of lower case “i” incarnation, a literal form in which the Word becomes flesh—but this time, it becomes our flesh. As John reveals in his Gospel:

Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them [John 14:23].

Christ’s promise is that He (and the Father, through the presence of the Holy Spirit) will abide with us if we obey His teaching. To obey His teaching is to walk the same path that He walked. It is a pathway littered with the people whom this world has discarded—those who have the wrong color of skin, the wrong zip code, the wrong parentage, the wrong future. It is a pathway littered with those who are discarded because their birth would be untimely, expensive, inconvenient, or demanding. It is a pathway that is littered with crosses, none of which are as heavy as the Cross He bore, but all of which need lifting and carrying nonetheless.

To walk His pathway can be scary, not only because His is a pathway that the world wants everyone to continue to ignore, but because it is as we move along that pathway that we see that Jesus Christ is just as willing to inhabit our human lives as we was to inhabit His own. He is just as willing to initiate a lower case “I” incarnation in you and in me. When any of us do that—follow His pathway and not our own—we quickly come to a realization that we have become His Easter people, the latest renditions of His Word made flesh.