Easter 3

Sermon preached by the Revd Canon Richard Ames-Lewis

 What really happened at the Resurrection? In what form was Jesus Christ raised from the dead? Was his risen body “spiritual”, a kind of ghost who could pass through locked doors, make himself known at the breaking of bread and then disappear? Or was he “corporeal”? Bodily? Certainly, he was visible: Mary Magdalene looked upon him through her tears on that first Easter morning. The disciples on the road to Emmaus found him walking with them on the road. Yet his visible presence, however real, came and went. As he broke bread he vanished from their sight. Spiritual or bodily? As in all things to do with God it is never either/or, always both/and.

 This is what St Luke is anxious to show us in today’s gospel passage. He is describing the same resurrection appearance as that which we heard in last week’s reading from St John’s gospel. In that reading, the risen Lord comes through a locked door to the eleven disciples. He says, “Peace be with you” and then addresses especially Thomas, inviting him to touch him, to put his hand into his side.

 Now in this reading today, again Jesus stands among them. Again, he says, “Peace be with you”. But Luke departs from St John. We read here that the eleven and their companions were startled and terrified, and thought they were seeing a ghost. Jesus says to them, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as I have.” Jesus then asks “Have you anything here to eat?” and they give him a piece of broiled fish.

 Why, in his narrative, did Luke include the broiled fish? Why did he feel it was necessary for his audience to hear about Jesus not only being given a piece of fish, but also taking it and eating it in their presence? The details are surprisingly exact, quite a contrast with descriptions of Jesus’s other resurrection appearances which often have something of a hazy aura about them. Luke is keen to include the tradition that after his resurrection Jesus was known to eat and drink with his disciples. We find this in Acts 10.41, where the description of the gathered disciples eating and drinking with the risen Lord seems to verify that the Lord is risen indeed; and makes a kind of continuity with the Last Supper. So Luke is keen to tell us that Jesus had a body, needed to eat and needed to eat with his disciples.

 Luke is also concerned with his Jewish audience. Whereas the Greeks tended to think of reality in terms of abstractions and universal truths, to the Jews reality was always particular and concrete. This is especially the case with understanding death. Either you are alive, or you are dead, and if you are dead you have passed into sheol, the Old Testament underworld.

 In that great psalm, Psalm 90, reflecting on death, we read “You turn us back to the dust and say ‘Turn back, O children of earth… you sweep them away like a dream, they fade away suddenly as the grass…. So teach us to number our days, that we many apply our hearts to wisdom” Ps 90. 3, 5, 12. To this way of thinking a disembodied spirit could only seem like a ghost, not a living being. But Luke is concerned to show his readers that this risen Jesus is alive, that death has been overcome and resurrection has happened.

 There was possibly another reason for Luke’s inclusion of the broiled fish. Luke was aware that his audience would have encountered the heresy of Docetism. This was the idea that Jesus only seemed to be divine, that he was born human, that divinity descended on him at his baptism and withdrew at his crucifixion. This was an insidious teaching, and it began to take root in the first century. “Who is the liar, but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ?” says St John in his epistle; “See that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit”, says St Paul to the Colossians, “according to human tradition and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.” (Col 2.8,9). Luke is determined that his account of the risen Christ should leave no room for doubt, that the humanity and the divinity of our Lord can never be separated. Jesus did not seem to be there. He was there, in body, mind and spirit.

 These concerns are food for thought for us.  Where do we stand on the bodily resurrection of Jesus? As we imagine ourselves in that room with the gathered disciples, with Jesus standing among us; as we imagine gazing at his hands and his feet, remembering the agony and bloody sweat of the passion, as our terror and dread gradually turn to joy, what do we think has happened? How far do we deny Jesus’s humanity, keep Jesus’s body at a distance, preferring to think that this is a spiritual event?

 For we still have not answered the question what really happened at Easter. What happened is that Jesus, in his body, inaugurated the resurrection. This was something God did that was new, something that had never happened before, which is why it is described as “new creation.” It began as Jesus burst from the tomb, it is still going on and we are part of it.

 We tend to think of resurrection in phrases like “life after death”, or “going to heaven”.  But this misses the bodily nature of what has happened. Resurrection means a new “embodied” life in God’s new world. St Paul struggles to thrash this out in 1 Corinthians 15. The nature of the new embodied life will be different from that which we know now. He uses the analogy of the sown seed. In just the same way as a seed sown in the ground, by germinating, produces a new body different yet appropriate, so, by dying and rising again, Jesus has embodied new life, different yet recognisable. In an act of new creation, parallel only to the original creation, God makes a new type of material, no longer subject to death, out of the old one.

 And we are part of it. I love the idea of our being “incorporated” into Jesus’s resurrected body, for the word “incorporated” is a bodily image. We are born again into Christ’s body, incorporated into his risen life, by our baptism. As St Paul puts it

“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptised into Christ Jesus have been baptised into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”

Ro.6,3-5.

 We enact this liturgically in the Easter vigil. The flaming paschal candle, carrying the five wounds of the crucified, symbolises the presence of the risen Lord. It is dipped into the water of the font as together we affirm our baptismal promises.

 This new body of which we are part, the body of Christ, belongs both in earth and in heaven; or you could say that in Christ heaven and earth are one. At the moment our bodies are earthly only; Jesus’s new body is at home both in earth and heaven. But we, baptised into Christ, bestride two worlds, here we have no abiding city but our citizenship is in heaven.

 And if God can do this, if he can so redefine the laws of nature to bring new life out of death, he can do other things as well. He can allow us to be in Christ, and Christ bodily in us. 

To paraphrase the prayer of St Teresa of Avila:

“Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth, but yours.
Yours are the eyes with which he sees,
The feet with which he walks,
The hands with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands.”