Sermons: Easter

Easter Day, March 23, 2008

When we read the accounts of Jesus Christ’s Resurrection in the four Gospels we must be strike by a feeling that is quite different from the exuberant and joyous strains of our Easter Sundays. “Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia,” we sing. Our hymns and prayers resonate with expression of great thanksgiving and hope. And yet we do well to remember that for Jesus’ family and his Apostles the first day of the week, that first Easter Sunday, was for them a day of unknowing, confusion, bewilderment and uncertainty. The family and friends of Jesus were in mourning, trying to deal with what seemed a tragedy, attempting to cope with the dashing of all of their deepest hopes. When Chirst Jesus rose from the dead, they did not know who he was. Mary Magdalene thought that he was the gardener. The men walking on the road to Emmaus thought they had been conversing with a stranger. The disciples, hiding in the upper room, for fear of the Jews, thought that they had seen a ghost. “O Blind, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets had spoken.”

These accounts of Christ’s Resurrection seem very strange to us. There is so much emphasis placed upon flesh and bones, the physical details of Christ’s returned body. This is what makes the concept of the Resurrection as hard for us now as it was for men in the time of Christ. We can face the dying body of Jesus, and the soul within which animates it and preserves it until the point of expiration. But we then lose the two. They seem to separate. The body seems to decompose. And most people, in some way, think that the soul lives on in some manner and in some dimension. But that the two should somehow be brought together seems far beyond the stretch of our imaginations. Christ’s body is in the tomb. His soul is elsewhere, in Hades, they thought, we think.

But Resurrection is something quite different. It is not the living on of the soul as the body decomposes. It is not the presence of the ghosts of Christmas past. It is not the presence of ghosts at all. “A spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have,” says Jesus. Resurrection is about flesh and bones; and this is the problem not, as it was then. Religion, people say, is about spiritual things- as if the spirit or soul can live independently of the body. “I am a spiritual person,” you say. I am sure that you are. And when the body becomes that vehicle through which you act like a beast you show what kind of a spiritual being you really are…..a beastly one. You see, God never intended that the spirit and the body should be separated from one another. Lazarus was raised up from the dead, but that was different. Resurrection is not survival. “It is sown a natural body, and it is raised a spiritual body.” And this is our Christian hope: we look for the perfecting of nature and not the destruction of it. We look for a spiritual transformation in which nothing is lost. “Behold I make all things new.” We are to be made new, remarkably and unimaginably new, “in the moment in the twinkling of an eye.”

We are not pure spirits. We are spirits and flesh and bones. We have unique features and appearances. We have individual personalities and identities that each unlike every other. What Christ desires to give to us is the victory over all temptations to sever the soul from the body, the spirit from the flesh, and God from ourselves. What Christ desires to do is to give us that unity and oneness that reveals that God is not only near, but that “he dwells in us and we in him.” What Christ wants for us is what he held together in himself even in the throes of his agony and death. He wants to give to us that beautiful and harmonious unity with the God, where the heart becomes the center of the human being in which God and man meet and are made friends once again.

It is in Christ’s Resurrection that we find the overcoming of our alienation from God. It is in Christ’s Resurrection that we find the overcoming of a state in which we are beings whose bodies and spirits seem divided from one another. We wish to be clothed with the tabernacle of God’s presence, that our hearts and souls along with our bodies might be one with God. “For we groan,” says St. Paul, “earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with the house that is from heaven…for we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened; not that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up in life.” (2 Cor. 5)

Resurrection belongs to the completeness of our salvation. Christ Jesus always holds the two realities, the love of God and the love of man together in his heart. He has carried this with him to the Grave. Out of the grace he will raise a transfigured body. His Resurrected Body will be that flesh that is translucent to the Spirit. The body, in other words, will reveal the spirit completely and utterly to those who believe.