Dr. William A. Ritter
First United Methodist Church
Birmingham, Michigan
Scriptures: Luke 24:36-43 and 1 Corinthians 15:35-50
April 18, 2004
“Come over and see this picture of Jesus,” she said. It was several years ago. I did not know the lady well. I anticipated that she had either painted or purchased a likeness of Jesus. Instead, she handed me a photograph. It had been passed on to her from her mother. “Now wait a minute,” you say. “A photograph of Jesus?” That’s what she contended she had. Then she told her story.
Several years earlier, her mother had been taking photographs in her garden with an old camera. Perhaps because the camera was old, or because the day was cloudy, or because the woman was an inexperienced photographer, most of her photographs had not turned out. But there was one unlike the rest. It, too, was blurred. But the longer one looked at it, the more the blurred image coalesced into an amazing resemblance of Jesus Christ.
Now mind you, it has been several years since I saw it. I neither recall the specifics of the image nor my response to her revelation. But she was convinced that a miracle had transpired. She believed that the primitive photographic equipment had indeed caught the likeness of Jesus standing in her mother’s garden.
I am not terribly good at blurred images. I seldom see what other people see. I can go to a movie or read a book and uncover multiple levels of meaning. But the material has to be verbal. Give me something visual and I draw a blank. A psychiatrist would have a difficult time evaluating my responses to a Rorschach text. One ink blot looks pretty much like the rest. Several years ago, I was a Lenten speaker in a church on the other side of town. The pastor was a man who collected great art. Portions of his church resembled a gallery. He was also a gifted sculptor and his works regularly appeared in local exhibitions. We were standing in his office and he was showing Kris and myself first one piece and then another. I was trying to look intelligent, figuring out how many ways I could say “That’s interesting” without sounding dumb. Actually, Kris does this better than I do. But I’m not sure whether it is because she knows more about art, or can find more ways to say “That’s interesting.”
Finally, he showed us a piece he had recently purchased for his private collection. It consisted of three basic geometric designs….one red, one yellow, one white….connected at their triangular sides. Then he said: “You know, the unbelievable thing is that when my secretary saw this, she said I had finally purchased something even she could paint.” Leading me to think, “My sentiments exactly.” So you can see why I’m a very poor choice when it comes to the evaluation of blurred photographs.
But to whatever degree there was a resemblance, I found myself wondering why a photograph allegedly taken in the twentieth century depicted a Jesus who looked like he belonged in the first century. Last Sunday the choir told us that Jesus is “King of Kings and Lord of Lords, forever and ever.” But whenever we image him artistically, we picture him with the hairstyle, beard and clothing of a first century Jew. I mean, were Jesus to show up in your garden, might he not look like a gardener? Or somebody dressed for a garden party?
Upon seeing Jesus outside the tomb on Easter morning, Mary Magdalene assumes he is the gardener. Which could have been a problem with the light, given that John (unlike the other gospels) suggests that Mary came to the tomb “while it was still dark.” Or her misidentification could have been the result of limited expectations. She expected to see him dead, not living. Were I to go to White Chapel with flowers for the grave of my father, he is the last person I’d expect to see standing behind me.
The post-resurrection appearances of Jesus have long interested me. Paul suggests to the people of Corinth “that he appeared to Peter, then to the twelve, then to more than 500 at one time, then to James, then to the apostles, and lastly (as one untimely born) also to me.” Nobody is quite sure what the words “untimely born” mean. The best guess is that they reflect Paul’s lack of connection to either the earthly Jesus or to the original apostles. But Paul wants to state that his experience of the risen Lord is no less real than anybody else’s, in spite of the fact that it occurred neither in Jerusalem nor Galilee, and well after all previous sightings and reportings.
When you read the accounts of the appearances, Mary was not the only one who had trouble recognizing Jesus. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus meets the eleven on a mountain in Galilee where “they saw him and worshiped him, but some doubted.” But by the time we get to the Gospel of John, “some doubters” have been reduced to one….namely, Thomas….who utters his famous proclamation about the need to see nail marks and open wounds on the hands and side of Jesus. In Luke, the risen Lord falls into step with a pair of unnamed followers (walking with them several miles to a village named Emmaus). But even though they speak of things concerning him, there is no recognition of him, until they sit down to supper with him.
Whereupon Jesus “vanishes from their sight.” They then walk seven miles back to Jerusalem, locate the remaining eleven disciples (along with others who are with them), retell the road to Emmaus story, only to experience Jesus suddenly standing among them.
Which frightens them, given that they perceive him as they would perceive a spirit….an apparition….even a ghost. Jesus calms things down, shows them his hands and feet, invites them to touch him, and then wonders aloud whether they have anything to eat. Broiled fish being on the menu that evening, that is what they give him. And that is what he eats….eating it “before them,” Luke adds.
Clearly, one unique burden of the appearance narratives is to depict Jesus as having a body…. which, in some ways, is like his original body, yet in other ways different than his original body. In some ways, Jesus’ post-resurrection body is most ordinary, yet in other ways it is most extraordinary. On the one hand, Jesus invites touching and can be viewed eating. On the other hand, there is a “now you see him, now you don’t” quality to his appearing, and even locked doors prove no barrier to his coming and going. Jesus is not merely resuscitated. His resurrection body is not his old body, reanimated. But there is sufficient continuity with his old body so as to make identification possible. “Yes…. yes….now that I look more closely, that does appear to be Jesus.”
Are these stories fabricated? If they are, says Paul, we might just as well go home, because the whole thing’s a fraud. No, the stories are not fabricated. Perhaps they are “flavored” in the endless retellings that precede the formal recordings. But not fabricated. For a number of days, people saw something. And then they didn’t. With the Ascension (seemingly known only to Luke) as the point of demarcation between seeing him and then not seeing him.
Leading to the question: “So what about us?” If we are to be “raised with Christ,” in what form shall we rise? Or to put it more visually: “What shall we look like?” Bringing us to the Apostles’ Creed which tells us that we shall have a body. Every four or five Sundays, we say (at the creed’s conclusion):
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
(say it with me) the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting.
So what does that mean? Well, it is easier to say what it does not mean. It does not mean that we shall have a reanimated version of our old body. Some Jews in Jesus’ day felt that such would be the case. A patch here. Some paste there. Restored, good as new. Earthly body and resurrection body….one and the same.
But Paul seems quite clear in his word to the Corinthians that “flesh and blood” (meaning this flesh and this blood) “shall not inherit the kingdom of God.” Which, I suppose, comes as bad news to those cultures where elaborate tombs are built for the dead and then stocked with food and drink in case they should awake and find themselves hungry or thirsty.
I suppose the story about Jesus having holes in his hands and side feeds into the notion of reanimation. But Paul flatly rejects the idea, and finds his words echoed by Handel’s soprano when she sings about “the worms destroying his body.” And presumably ours, too.
Were we to believe that “the resurrection of the body” means this body, it would be hard to get comfortable with the idea of cremation. Why burn up something we might need again? But the truth of the matter is that everybody is comfortable with cremation. Catholics. Evangelicals. Mainline Protestants. Cremation has been blessed by everybody from Billy Graham to the Pope (albeit with fainter praise in some circles than others). But the religious opposition to cremation that I knew at the beginning of my ministry has all but disappeared. As I said in my Steeple Notes article last week, fully 75 percent of the end-of-life services I do are memorials following cremation, rather than funerals preceding burial.
The other thing we do not believe is that resurrection will leave us disembodied. In other words, the fruits of resurrection will not be “pure spirit” or the “pure soul.” Greeks believed in the immortality of the soul. Greeks also felt negatively about the body. For the Greek, the immortality of the soul involved the obliteration, extinction and complete dissolution of the body. “I am a poor soul,” one of them wrote, “temporarily shackled to a corpse.” The Greeks believed that when someone died, the body simply dissolved into the elements of which it was made. But the “divine spark” (the soul) returned to God and was “absorbed in the divinity of which it was a part.”
This idea of “absorption” permeates many views of life after death….suggesting that our individual spirit will eventually become part of the Great Spirit, or that our individual soul will become part of the Oversoul. So prevalent is this idea that it even finds its way into beloved Christian hymns. In an otherwise lovely lyric we sing:
O love that wilt not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee,
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.
That’s absorption language, don’t you see. Upon my death, my little stream will flow with millions of other little streams into one great river….or, better yet, into one great ocean.
Which is picturesque, says Paul. But wrong. Paul argues:
We will not be disembodied.
We will not be absorbed as part of a great heavenly merger of souls.
Neither will we get our old body back again.
But we will get a body.
Paul doesn’t know what to call it, so he calls it “a spiritual body.” And Paul doesn’t know how to describe it, so he talks about the perishable putting on the imperishable, and illustrates it by pointing to the way seeds die in the ground in order for stalks to rise from the ground. Paul is straining here. He knows he lacks words. So what is he trying to do? I’ll tell you what Paul is trying to do.
He is trying to say that individuality will survive death….that you will still be you and that I will still be me….and that things like personality and identity will achieve immortality (including everything essential to recognition). We will know and be known.
Paul is not talking about reincarnation. We shall be who we were, albeit in a body (a package) appropriate to our new mode of existence. We believe in the resurrection of whole persons. Whole persons include personalities. And given that personalities are expressed through bodies (twinkling eyes, furrowed brows, shrugged shoulders, sprightly steps), we believe in a resurrection body. Which will be new. But which will have recognizable continuity with our present body.
Our body is necessary now. Some form of a body will be necessary then. Our body is not evil now (how could it be, since it was deemed sufficient to house Jesus?), and it will not be evil then. To believe in a resurrected body is to say some very positive things about this present body.
Prior Aelred, an Episcopal monk who is part of a monastic community in the southwest Michigan town of Three Rivers, notes that most visitors to the monastery treat both worship and spirituality as “cerebral”….while the monks, who probably know as much about worship and spirituality as anybody since it is their lifestyle 24/7, approach things more physically. Writes the Prior:
We monks have the opportunity to reflect on this when we have guests from various Protestant traditions worshiping with us. For any number of reasons, they seem to regard worship as an exclusively mental process and seat themselves on the chairs in the chapel and remain fixed there throughout the service, while the community engages in what the actor (and Episcopalian) Robin Williams describes as “pew aerobics.” And at the time of the English Reformation, there were Puritans who strenuously objected to kneeling for communion, insisting that the minister bring them the sacred elements while they remained seated in their pews. Which is indeed the practice of a great majority of Protestant churches to this day.
Ironically, the monks also do two hours of physical labor in the garden….daily….and make no distinction between yard work and prayer work in what is commonly called the Order of St. Benedict.
So what does that say for hammering and shingling as spiritual exercises (which occupied over forty of our senior high youth this past week in Memphis)? Were they not engaged in “spiritual exercises?” If so, might not a similar case be made for step aerobics, karate and yoga which we teach in our Christian Life Center on a weekly basis?
Which brings me to cooking, eating and drinking….activities of the body if ever there were any. When you go back and reread the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, you will note that three of them involve food:
· Jesus cooking breakfast for Peter and six others on the shore of a lake called Galilee.
· Jesus being recognized over supper by the two Emmaus-bound travelers.
· Jesus asking for something to eat in Jerusalem and then digesting a broiled fish before their very eyes.
Enjoying food is a great bodily pleasure. Not the only one, but a great one. And isn’t it interesting that eating figures so prominently in Jesus’ reappearing, given his multiple references to banqueting in the Kingdom. Where I expect to be joined by others at the table….except for my grandmother, who will not be sitting but circling, telling everybody (but especially her beloved Billy) that they should “eat more.”
I believe in the resurrection of the body. And, for the record, I do not believe that the blurred image in that lady’s photograph was Jesus. It was too skinny.
Note: In dealing with Paul’s imagery of 1 Corinthians 15, I consulted a number of commentaries. Virtually all agreed that Paul was struggling to “express the inexpressible.” But all agreed that his intent was as I have depicted it in this sermon. Indeed, for the clearest restatement of Paul’s language, read William Barclay’s exposition of Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians.
As for the words of Prior Aelred, they can be found in the Easter version of his “Abbey Letter,” St. Gregory’s Abbey, Three Rivers, Michigan.
