According to the Bible, it’s the doctrine by which Christian faith stands or falls. But from the place we give the resurrection in our preaching and teaching, would anyone know? This Easter, we come to terms with the bodily aspect of the resurrection.
He’s more like Casper …
Some time ago, a member of a Bible study group I was leading arrived with an interesting question: ‘Last Sunday in a sermon I heard that Jesus is still flesh and blood. That’s not true, is it?’
The doctrine of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead has been getting an abnormal amount of publicity this past year or so. It is a point on which liberal theologians have had a great deal to say, and as a result many evangelicals have come to see the bodily resurrection of Christ as a test of Christian orthodoxy. But do we reflect this in the place given to the resurrection in our own thinking and speaking? And what exactly do we believe about it? We affirm that the tomb was empty, that Jesus had risen and gone, but many Christians remain in a state of confusion over what the exact significance of this is, and over what happened next.
More recently in another Bible study on the topic of ‘Heaven’ we began with a show of hands over whether Jesus is now a body or a spirit. The results: spirit 11, body 0. (“He’s not invisible, though—more like Casper the Friendly Ghost” volunteered one person helpfully!) Where and how does the resurrection of Jesus fit into our belief?
It often seems that while in principle we uphold the resurrection as a fundamental feature of Christian belief, we struggle to find space for it in our thinking, and even in our gospel presentations. “Jesus came into this world to die for you, said the evangelist at a men’s dinner I attended a while back, and this is certainly true—I was glad to have it so starkly put for the sake of my non-Christian guest—but there was no mention that night of the resurrection. Does this matter? Well, it is certainly a long way removed from the excited sermons in Acts, which place such stress on the resurrection as the decisive fact about Jesus that we are sometimes left a little embarrassed about their lack of atonement emphasis. Of course, the first Christians did not understate the importance of Jesus’ death for them. Paul summarised the gospel as “the message of the cross” (1 Cor 1:18) but he also wrote to Timothy, “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David. This is my gospel …” (2 Tim 2:8).
The New Testament writers delight to proclaim the resurrection of Jesus in all its physicality as the definitive victory over death, as the great vindication of Christ who went to the cross as the humble servant of God, and as the beginning of the great resurrection of the dead and therefore the basis of all Christian hope. If we bring only the announcement of Jesus’ death, we have only half the Easter message, and we have drifted from the apostolic gospel—the apostles certainly didn’t have a lot to say on the first Easter Saturday!
Jesus’ body today
And then there’s the matter of the nature of the resurrection. ‘Bodily’. The tomb was empty because the same body of Jesus which had been laid lifeless in it on Friday had been raised to life and had left on the third day. We are rightly dismissive of attempts to spiritualise, psychologise or otherwise dilute the stark fact of Jesus rising to life and leaving the tomb as a raised human being. We know that there was something decidedly special about the raised Jesus—the Gospel writers are entirely unembarrassed about his ability to appear without warning, to go unrecognized, and to disappear equally suddenly. But the earliest apologist for the thoroughly bodily nature of the resurrection was Christ himself: “Touch me and see”, he challenged his disciples, “a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see I have” (Lk 24:39). Luke records that he proceeded to eat with the stunned group.
Where uncertainty often arises is in the relation between the Jesus with ‘flesh and bones’ eating with his disciples that day, and the Jesus whom we worship today as Lord. It is the question which was raised in my Bible study. We tend to have a very ‘spiritual-not-physical’ approach to most things that occur after the resurrection, including our own salvation. We know that Jesus’ bones aren’t lying in Palestine, but it seems inconceivable that Jesus could have gone to heaven in any bodily, physical sense. However, there isn’t much ambiguity in the Gospel account. Luke moves straight from the ‘flesh and bones’ encounter to Jesus leading the disciples to the region of Bethany and being “taken up into heaven”. What was true of Jesus’ body in the room that day with his disciples is true of him as he reigns at the right hand of the Father. As I once heard a conference speaker cheekily remark, ‘We Christians are the ultimate humanists—we unashamedly worship a human being!’ This has some important implications for us.
First, Jesus did not cease to be human when he rose from the dead or when he was taken to heaven. It’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? The Word did not become flesh as a temporary measure, required by the circumstances of the moment. It was a permanent act of God’s grace that he should become and remain a real human being. This is what the conference speaker was driving at. The one at the right hand of the Father, “who speaks to the Father in our defence”, is the raised and ascended human (and divine) Lord Jesus. This risen human Jesus is the basis for much of the encouragement of the book of Hebrews—that Jesus has to become like us to exercise his ongoing high-priestly ministry over us. “Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted” (Heb 2:18). “He is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them” (Heb 7:25) and so on. There is a human at the right hand of the Father.
We began by noting the publicity surrounding the nature of the resurrection. Given the church backgrounds of the key people involved in these debates, it is no surprise that the Anglican article IV has been much-quoted. But it may be that we are only reading the first clause, and need to attend again to the rest of it: “Christ did truly rise again from death, and took again his body, with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of man’s nature; wherewith he ascended into Heaven, and there sitteth, until he return to judge all Men at the last day.”
A place for our future bodies
This points us toward the next implication. The resurrection of Christ is the basis for our Christian hope because when we look back to the resurrection, according to the New Testament, we are looking into our own future. What has happened to our Lord will happen to us. “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in his own turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then when he comes, those who belong to him” (1 Cor 15:22-23). This is not resurrection in some spiritual but not physical sense. It is bodily, as Christ’s resurrection was. Indeed, as those who by faith are in Christ, Paul writes that God has already “raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms”. It is specifically our bodily resurrection which we still await, so that “as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so we shall bear the likeness of the man from heaven” (1 Cor 15:49). This should shape our thinking about the character of eternal life.
It is typical for us to think of eternal life in terms of a spiritual reality called ‘heaven’ where we shall exist as spiritual realities, rejoicing in the presence of our spiritual Lord. But if our Lord is not merely spiritual, and if we shall be like him, we need to adjust our understanding of our own future. We shall be bodily as he is. You will be you. I shall be me. Resurrected. This can be a rather bewildering piece of news. When we came upon this in Bible study, one woman asked with obvious disappointment, “So am I still going to be me in heaven”? I think she was looking forward to a change. And there will be a change, according to the Bible, but it will not be a change from physical to non-physical or from bodily to ghostly, but as Paul says, from perishable to imperishable, from dishonour to glory and from weakness to power. Joni Eareckson Tada in her recent book Heaven: Your Real Home shows the pastoral implications of this truth. A paraplegic, she has more cause than most to consider the place of bodily existence in the purposes of God, and the book is driven along by her vision of the resurrection of the body and physical completeness in line with the biblical vision. Bodily resurrection is not the threat of an eternity with your bad back or wobbly thighs—it is the hope of the perfecting of the real, bodily you. That is the only ‘you’ there is. The future is physical.
But there is a final aspect to think about, which Joni doesn’t quite grasp in her book. This is the whole question of ‘going to heaven’. Beginning with the nature of Christ’s resurrection, we have come to a point where we see that our own future will be physical. What does this tell us about heaven? Joni gets as far as seeing that eternal life will be physical, but as we read the Scriptures we see that the overwhelming Christian hope is less a matter of us departing to heaven, and more a matter of Christ returning and fulfilling his intentions for our world. Now admittedly this is an area in which the New Testament gives tantalizing clues which can be hard to combine into a detailed account. The overall thrust is clear, though. God’s plan is to redeem, renew and restore the creation, and us along with it. The future is not about God writing off physical reality as a good idea gone wrong, any more than he has written off the human race. Rather, through Christ he is determined finally to bring about his purpose for physical reality, “that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Rom 8:21). God has not renounced his commitment to the physical world which he has made.
Return to the return
The New Testament encourages us to look forward to the great journey—but it is not our journey to heaven, but Christ’s return to earth which will bring the consummation of God’s purposes. That is the great hope. Yet the hope of Christ’s return has largely disappeared from our Christian thinking, replaced by the hope of our trip to heaven. I’m guessing that this is due to a combination of our tendency to shy away from physical aspects of Christian hope, and also a shift in focus as Christians have abandoned the expectation of the return of Christ in their own lifetime. As Christ delays, the question arises, “Where are those who have died in Christ?” and the answer to that question becomes our own hope. We are assured that they are ‘with Christ’, and yet the New Testament focus remains not on the temporary issue of where they are, but on the big issue—when Christ returns, they will be raised. Both dimensions are clear in Philippians. Musing about the possibility of his premature death at Roman hands, Paul can say “I desire to depart and be with Christ” (Phil 1.23). But departing to be with Christ is not the ultimate Christian hope. Rather, when contrasting the perspective of believers with that of the “enemies of the cross of Christ” in chapter 3, Paul points not to his departure but Christ’s return: “Our citizenship is in heaven, and we eagerly await a saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who … will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body” (Phil 3:20-21). Not to heaven, but from heaven is the key idea.
It may be that we have replaced the hope of Christ’s return to redeem and transform with our own desire to depart and be with him. The expectation of Christ’s return is a great driving force in the New Testament, not only as the ultimate hope of believers, but as a basis for ethics. From Jesus’ parables of the servants awaiting the master’s return, to Paul telling the Thessalonians that “this day should not surprise you like a thief” to Peter’s exhortation to “make every effort to be found spotless”, the emphasis is on living in the light of Christ’s return. As with the resurrection of Christ, it is our evangelism which indicates our core beliefs, and it is worth reflecting on whether it is the return of Christ or the hope of heaven which features in our evangelism.
I was struck to read in Australian historian Tim Flannery’s accounts of his research expeditions in Papua New Guinea, Throwim Way Leg, that when Christian revival came to some communities the men would abandon their customary work in expectation of the imminent return of Christ. While this is not the mature Christian way to await Christ’s return, it certainly shows that the gospel they embraced taught them to expect the Lord’s return. How many new converts in your experience have had such a sense of Christ’s return that they were likely to make the error of those New Guinean Christians?
The physical resurrection, the ongoing humanity of Christ, our bodily resurrection, the renewal of all things, the return of Christ … the common element is the physical, material nature of all these doctrines. It may be that with our preference for spiritual realities we have cultivated something of a blind spot for such physical doctrines. And given our tendency to read these crucial physical doctrines in spiritual terms, it is no surprise that as evangelicals we constantly struggle with other ‘physical’ issues: confusion over what to teach regarding the value of work, environmentalism and social justice. Yet the Bible’s teaching, guided by the doctrines of creation, incarnation and resurrection, demonstrates God’s commitment to physical reality. He redeems rather than abandons. There is a measure of real continuity between this world and the next.
