There’s a lot going on in the lives of
the remaining eleven disciples . . . three days before, the leader of their
movement had been spiked to a cross, he’d been hung up to die, which—on the
face of it, at least—had put an end to the whole thing. Not that any of them
had actually seen his death, you understand: they’d all run off like scared
bunnies when they nailed him up, leaving only the Marys and several other women
as witnesses. Now, on the evening of the first day of the week—Sunday, we’d
call it today—they were huddled up in an upper room for fear of the religious
authorities, as it says over in John, and they were talking about reports that
he’d been seen alive, first by Simon and now by a couple of others on their way
from Jerusalem to Emmaus. They told the eleven what they’d experienced, and how
they’d known Jesus in the Eucharistic act, when he took and blessed and broke
and gave them the bread.
And so it is with no small amount of
nervous excitement that the eleven, their companions and the visitors from
Emmaus chatter on into the night, and Behold! The man himself appears, or at least
what looks like
him, and this is way
beyond their ken, way beyond their understanding, and Jesus can see that right in this moment,
they’re more afraid of him than the authorities, so he says to them “Peace be
with you,” just like over in John, “Peace be with you,” he says, wishing them
shalom, wishing them to be at peace, both in mind and in body and in spirit . .
. and they are startled, and terrified and they think he’ a ghost, a spirit, in
Greek pneuma, and
everybody knows that’s
not a good thing . . . Ghosts were the remnants of human beings, and if they
hung round after death . . . well, something was definitely rotten in Judea.
And Jesus—being, well, Jesus—knows what they’re
thinking, and with a heavy sigh, he goes about proving he’s not what they think he is. “Why are you
frightened,” he asks, “and why do doubts arise in your hearts?” And we can see
that there’s two questions here (a) why are they scared and (b) why do they
have doubts, but they’re not unrelated. In fact, if (b) hadn’t been true,
neither would have been (a). That is, if they hadn’t had doubts, they wouldn’t
have been frightened. And they shouldn’t
have had doubts, Jesus had told
them three times,
already, that he was going to be killed and rise up on the third day, and if
they’d really believed
him they’d have known
he wasn’t a ghost, and come to think of it, maybe that was Thomas’ problem, too
. . . maybe he wouldn’t have felt compelled to put his hands in those scars if
he’d believed what they’d been told in the first
place.
And I guess a fair question would be:
why? Why didn’t they believe that the man they followed, the man they believed
to to be the heir of David, Son of God, anointed king and redeemer of Israel
would be executed like a criminal then be raised on the third day? Well. As far
as the execution bit goes, his followers believed him to be the Messiah—or the
Christ, which is Greek for the same thing—and they’d bought into the common Messianic
hope, to wit that the Messiah—anointed King in the Davidic line—would redeem
Israel. And by redeem, they meant that he would deliver Israel from Roman rule
and reestablish it as a glorious, sovereign nation. In other words, the Messiah
would be a very human, earthly King, mighty and word and deed, and lead the
nation against their enemies. If he were dead,
that obviously wasn’t going to happen.
As far as the resurrection goes, the very idea was outrageous: not only was it
impossible to imagine, it was repugnant as well. The idea of a resuscitated
corpse, running around Judea, must have horrified them, not the least because
corpses were considered unclean. And if you touched one, you became unclean as well,
unfit to associate with your fellow Jews, not to mention participate in Temple
and synagogue activities. Besides, thinking of a dead body come back to life
was downright icky, not to mention more than a little spooky.
So while I guess it’s easy to fault the
disciples in hindsight—and plenty have done so over the past two thousand
years—I don’t know that I blame them, I might very well have been the same way.
At any rate, Jesus goes about trying to prove he’s not a ghost “See my hands
and my feet,” he says “Touch me and see . . . a ghost doesn’t have flesh and
bones as you see that I have.” And with that he holds out his hand and his
feet, he thrusts the evidence in front of him, asking them to open their eyes
and really look, and open their hearts to really see.
And there they are . . . the nail holes,
the gash in his side, the mark of the thorn on his head, and yet he is alive .
. . it is life that stands before them, indubitably, without a doubt, without
question . . . he takes a piece of boiled fish and he eats it, everybody in the
Middle East knew
that ghosts don’t eat. He has overcome death, beaten it at its own game, and
it’s more than that: he has incorporated it into life itself . . . here he is, standing in front
of them, clearly alive, and yet there are the nail-holes, there is the sword
rip in his side . . . death—embodied by those marks—has not only been conquered, it’s been
integrated into life . . . there he is alive, but he’s also dead at the same
time . . . there are the marks to prove it. Death has been subsumed by life,
it’s been overcome by it, devoured by it . . . standing there, eating a little
light lunch, and yet bearing death on his hands, Jesus is the embodiment of
this subsumation . . . he is a sign that death is no longer opposed to life,
because he has incorporated it into his body, which, as we all know, is life
itself. As Paul might say, in death there is no longer any sting, because
Christ has restored it to its rightful place as part of existence, part of life
itself.
Talk about your Good News for modern man
. . . Christ has incorporated death into life, he's subsumed it, just taken it
right on over . . . and can you imagine death's
relief? No more of that grim reaper stuff, no more skulking around. Maybe he'll
be the happy
reaper, or the ebullient
reaper, wearing not black but bright sky-blue, or tasteful earth tones, or
maybe a nice fuchsia top – after all, death knows no gender, you understand.
Death’ll be lonely no more, maybe join a singles club, go out once in a while. And all
those Ingmar Bergman wannabees will have to pick on someone else for a change, maybe
Mother Earth or somebody, ‘cause death won’t have to mope around in whiteface
any longer . . . death is no longer fearsome, no longer terrifying, it’s part
and parcel of existence, just a friendly gatekeeper on the road to the next
stage.
But by showing his nail-scarred hands,
Jesus does more than just prove he’s not a ghost, more than just show he’s
subsumed death. By showing that his resurrection is bodily, he affirms the goodness of that body, and
by extension, the goodness of our own
as well. In part, this was a natural outgrowth of Jewish theology, which views
the body and spirit or soul as inseparable, integral parts of one another. One
of my professors, the redoubtable Walter Brueggemann, would beat us about the
head and neck if
we translated the Hebrew word nefish
as “soul,” as almost every English Old Testament translation does. To the Jews,
there was no
separate soul.
Unlike in Platonism, one of the dominant
philosophies of the day, which held that matter—the body and all of creation—is
an imperfect copy of ideal
forms or archetypes,
entities in the Divine realm. And because
they are imperfect—no Memorex in those days—the job of the soul, upon death,
was to ascend from matter to a “higher” plane, the realm of the archetypes. And
in the latter part of the first century, Christian thought became infected by
platonic ideals, you can see some of it in the writings of Paul, and in the
later New Testament epistles. And while there’s nothing wrong with Platonism per se, the notion that the
body is an imperfect copy of some ideal, and that the aim of everything is to
get to that ideal, has been perverted to support all kinds of oppression. The
conquistadors in Latin America would baptize their conquests before slaughtering
them, because it was better to be a dead Christian—ascended to the heavenly
realm—than a live, bodily heathen. A similar argument has been used to keep
abused women with their husbands—‘cause marriage is sacred and the man is its
head—because they will get their reward in heaven for being an obedient
punching bag on earth.
But by insisting on a bodily resurrection,
Christianity affirms the worth of the human body and, by extension, all bodies. Indeed, as
Teilhard de Chardin would point out, all matter itself has innate worth and
beauty. It signals to us all that creation is not fundamentally flawed, it’s
not a sub-standard copy of some heavenly reality. As we learned “in the
beginning”—and in modern physics texts—matter was created out of nothing, it was
something from nothing. Why else would God call it “good?” Amen.
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