Resurrection of the Body?

This Easter has got me thinking, again, about what exactly our 'hope' in Christ is and what we expect to happen when we die. This came to a bit of a mini-crisis while I was studying at Regent College. One of my classmates spoke boldly in one morning tutorial session to say that "Christianity does not promise the immortality of the soul! That is platonism. Christianity promises something completely different - the Resurrection of the Body!"

Now, I was born and raised in the Church, and thought myself fairly astute when it came to basic understandings of the Bible and Christian theology. Yet this took me aback. I went searching for memory verses. (Soul... Soul... Soul... Immortality... hmm...) After some discussion I left even more unsettled. Well, what is the soul after all? I mean whatever it is Jesus must have it. Yet still, the risen Jesus - the Gospels emphatically make clear - was not a disembodied soul but an EMBODIED person. Hmm...

And whatever promise we may claim in terms of 'everlasting life' (which seems to be the Biblical name for 'immortality' - perhaps platonism is tempting after all) this promise is ultimately based in the Risen Christ. That same man Jesus, mistaken for the gardener and found frying fish on the beach, was three days previous carrying a cross through the streets of Jerusalem. The resurrection body bore the scars of the crucifixion body. And he, according the New Testament, is the 'foretaste' and 'archetype' of the New Creation. Whatever shall ultimately happen to us after death is going to happen according to the model set by Jesus! The 'seed' that was 'sown' in death gets a new body fit for eternal life, at least this seems to be the metaphor chosen in 1 Corinthians 15. The 'physical body' gets a new 'spiritual body' - but that 'spiritual body' goes on being a 'physical body' too! And the hope really is that what God did in and for Jesus he will one day do for the whole creation. That 'all things' (see Colossians 1:15-20) as created by God 'will be' and in fact 'already are' redeemed by God and brought into the Kingdom of God which is the New Creation. This is a hope I can hope in!

This is most beautifully and provocatively laid forth in a poem by John Updike called 'Seven Stanzas at Easter.' I first read this years ago and stumbled upon it again recently. May it move us all closer to the mystery of Christ whose Body was raised, and the hope of the New Creation.

'Seven Stanzas at Easter'

Make no mistake: if He rose at all

it was as His body;

if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules

reknit, the amino acids rekindle,

the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,

each soft Spring recurrent;

it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled

eyes of the eleven apostles;

it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,

the same valved heart

that--pierced--died, withered, paused, and then

regathered out of enduring Might

new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,

analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;

making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the

faded credulity of earlier ages:

let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,

not a stone in a story,

but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow

grinding of time will eclipse for each of us

the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,

make it a real angel,

weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,

opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen

spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,

for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,

lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are

embarrassed by the miracle,

and crushed by remonstrance.