Preached on Sunday, April 22, 2012 at Christ & Saint Stephen's Church. The lectionary readings that this sermon is based on can be found here.
It certainly seems like spring today. There’s no denying it. Our April showers are here, and a good thing; they’re badly needed. The temperatures are rising, the flowers are up and blooming. And the box of summer shorts is down from the top shelf of my closet .
But today, in our gospel reading from Luke, it might seem, not like springtime, not like Easter, but a bit like Halloween. We have in our reading today, as we do during Eastertide, an account of a post-resurrection appearance by Jesus to his disciples.
Of course, the disciples are quite surprised and shocked to see the recently dead and buried Jesus in their midst. And they have a reaction similar to one we might have. They think they’re seeing a ghost. Our Halloween and horror movie ideas about what ghosts are, what they look and act like are very similar to what people in the first century would have thought. Ghosts are the spirits or the emanations of the dead, our superstitions tell us. They are ethereal, ephemeral, gossamer beings, translucent and transitory.
But Jesus is quick to disabuse the disciples of this notion. “Look at my hands and feet,” he says, which bear the wounds of his crucifixion. He challenges them, “Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” No, this appearance of Jesus’s is not the stuff of a ghost story, or a campfire tale.
Jesus makes the point, and it’s worth noting with care, that he is not a spirit, but a resurrected human being. This is a flesh and bone person who has risen from certain death.
And not just any death, but a shameful one. A public execution at the hands of the Roman overlords of Israel, with the complicity of the religious elite. And the crime he has committed, at least as far as the religious authorities are concerned, is blasphemy, the threat of violence against the sacred Temple at Jerusalem. The marks that Jesus’s body bears can be none other than those of someone executed by crucifixion by the pagan occupiers of Palestine; pierced hands and feet, wounded by the nails driven into them.
There are so many things about crucifixion that would have been unclean and ungodly for first century Jews. The proscriptions in the law against coming in contact with blood, and crucifixion was a bloody, bloody death. The uncleanliness of the corpse. The taboos against nakedness were flagrantly violated by crucifixion, which took place in public, before men and women alike, and in most cases, the naked corpse was left exposed as a warning to others.
This body that Jesus presents to the disciples is one that has been shamed, one that bears the marks of that shame on its hands and feet. Not some ghostly spirit from a Halloween haunting, but the actual body that has been tried, convicted, whipped, spat upon, ridiculed and executing in the most ignominious of ways.
Yet this body, this human body steeped in the shame of blasphemy and crucifixion, has been raised from the dead. This human body, this once dead corpse, is among us, among the living, asking for something to eat.
+++++++++++++++++++++
Our bodies are made of dust, as Genesis tells us, they are solidly, heavily of this earthly realm. And educated Greco-Romans would have thought that the elemental materials of the earth and our bodies are the antithesis of what one might find in the afterlife, in the spiritual realms of the heavens. Jewish and Greco-Roman beliefs agreed that this fleshly existence must be quite different from whatever might lie in heaven or in the life to come. Surely those realms were places of ethereal spirits and diaphanous gods.
Quite a number of years ago, the singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell wrote, “We are stardust, we are golden… We are billion year old carbon…” Her understanding of our fleshly make-up is informed by our scientific understanding of the universe, and it is not at odds with the early Christian and Greco-Roman understanding. A worldly thing, made of stardust and atoms, and billion year old carbon. Our bodies are small microcosms of the universe in flesh and bone.
And it is just this that is resurrected in Jesus. God has not abandoned the creation, he has not restricted it to a merely worldly existence. God has resurrected the body of Jesus, and we believe, will one day resurrect ours. And in so doing, God has sanctified all of creation.
On this Earth Day, I remind you that in Genesis, at the end of each day of creation, God looked upon all that had been done and pronounced that it was good. And so, too, with the resurrection. This flesh and blood body of Christ, upon which the shame of the world had been cast, is raised, redeeming all of creation, all that God has pronounced good, along with it.
We are stardust, we are billion year old carbon, along with the rest of creation. And as our reading this morning from the First Epistle of John promises us, we will one day be like Jesus, resurrected in the flesh. No matter the hardship or the pain or the shame we have experienced. In fact, those things along with our bodies will be redeemed.
Theologian Lyle Dabney puts it this way:
(I)n raising our mortal body, God will redeem not just that body, the locus of our existence, but the entirety of our embodied life: the whole of our relationships, our experiences, our encounters, all that makes up our identity. (1)
I invite you to let that sink in for a bit, think about that this week. Every shameful moment, every wrong turn, every indignity… Broken hearts and limbs... Disappointments, losses, aches and pains both physical and emotional, and spiritual hurts as well, redeemed, renewed, and taken unto the very presence of God; for just so are you loved by God, in all your humanness, all your fleshliness and all your fleshly failings.
'See what love the Father has given us,' says John. So loved, that you and all that is in you is redeemed and made fit for the kingdom of heaven itself. Such is the implication of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Such is the promise of Easter.
And when that idea has sunk in a bit, when you’ve had a chance to let the promise of Easter take root in your heart, then I know you’ll want to do as Christ asks us to do; to go forth from this place and proclaim in Christ’s name, that repentance and forgiveness of sins has come to all nations.
Such is the truth in Christ Jesus. Such is the promise of Easter; forever and ever, world without end. +Amen.
(c) The Rev. Mark R. Collins
[1] D. Lyle Dabney, “’Justified by the Spirit’: Soteriological Reflections on the Resurrection,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 3/1 (2001) 61-62.
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