A Sermon on
the Feast of the Resurrection of our
Lord
by Dr. Robert Crouse
King’s College Chapel, 1988
“Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself:
handle me and see;
for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me
have.”
Luke 24
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Each of the Evangelists treats the events of the
resurrection of Jesus somewhat differently, but they all give the impression
that those events were unexpected, bewildering, and even dismaying to his
followers. Occupied with mourning, trying to assimilate what seemed to them
a tragedy, trying to accept the bitter end of all their cherished hopes,
they had no eyes to see his resurrection. At first, they could not even
recognise their friend. Mary Magdalene, weeping at the sepulchre, mistook
him for the gardener; to those walkers at Emmaus, on Easter evening, he
seemed at first a stranger. The disciples, in Jerusalem, huddled in an
upper room, “were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen
a ghost.” “O blind, and slow of heart to believe all that they prophets had
spoken.”
The Gospel accounts of the resurrection appearances of
Jesus make very strange reading; especially in their insistence upon all the
incidental physical details. They will never let us forget that they are
talking about flesh and bones. That, of course, is what made it all so
difficult, and still makes it so difficult. Any thoughtful person, ancient
or modern, would perhaps be prepared to think that the spirits of the just
have some sort of immortality: “their works do follow them.” Their spirits
somehow live on. Even a modern pagan, without undue sentimentality, would
probably allow some truth to the assertion. And I suppose we all harbour
some vague hopes of that kind of immortality: in the memories of our
friends, or our children, or posterity in general. And perhaps we even
believe in the immortality of the soul in quite a literal sense.
But all that is not resurrection. “A spirit hath not
flesh and bones, as ye see me have.” Resurrection is a matter of flesh and
bones; and that is the problem. Religion, surely, is concerned with
spiritual things; or, at least, we suppose it should be so; and all this
concern with flesh and bones seems inappropriate. “The flesh lusteth
against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh”, says St. Paul, “and
these are contrary the one to the other.” We all know something of the
truth of this assertion. Why, then, this exaltation of the flesh, and the
source of so many inconveniences and troublesome demands? Why revive
all that? “Whence comes this direful longing for the light?” Aeneas askes
Anchises.
But resurrection, as the Gospel stories present it, is
really something other than a return to earthly body, something other than
the revival of a corpse: it’s something quite different, for instance, from
the raising of Lazarus, or of the widow’s son at Nain. In resurrection, the
strife of spirit and flesh is ended, and body becomes the clear and
translucent expression of spirit. It is not mere survival, but
transformation: “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual
body,” says St. Paul. And it is in precisely that sense that resurrection
is the very keystone of Christian hope: we look for a gracious perfecting
of nature; we hope for the spiritual transformation in which nothing is
lost, but all is made new: unimaginably new, God-given, “in a moment, in the
twinkling of an eye.”
The doctrine of the soul’s immortality, espoused by the
wise men of philosophy and the seers of our religions is, no doubt, a true
and important doctrine. But, alas! We are not pure spirits, as angels are;
we are flesh and bones, and the completeness of our salvation demands that
that, too, be saved: that all its tiresome weaknesses and perversities be
overcome; that all be transformed in resurrection. Our hope of heaven is a
hope of the perfection and unity are completeness of all we are; and the
body, unimaginably renewed, is part of that eternal life and blessedness.
“For in this we groan,” says St. Paul, “earnestly desiring to be clothed
upon with our house which is from heaven…for we that are in this tabernacle
do groan, being burdened; not for 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 salvation.
Dante, in the “Paradiso”, makes the point this way:
And when we put completeness on afresh,
All the more gracious shall our person be,
Reclothèd (revestita) in the holy and
glorious flesh;
Whereby shall grow the unearned gift and free
The Highest Good bestows – that gift of light
By which we are enabled Him to see.
All this is very difficult, indeed – no easier, really,
for us than for the first disciples. “How are the dead raised up, and with
what body do they come?” asked the ancient sceptics; and St. Paul’s
audience, in Athens, anxious to listen to practically any new thing, mocked
at the idea of resurrection. It’s a mysterious business, certainly, and
beyond imagining; and, apart from the fact of Jesus’ resurrection, and the
precise and careful witness of the scriptures, who would dare to believe
it? It is for that reason, I think, that the Gospel records of the
resurrection insist upon every detail as precious: the position of the
grave-clothes in the sepulchre, the touching of Jesus’ hands and side, his
eating and drinking with the disciples, and so on. “A spirit hath not flesh
and bones, as ye see me have.”
The apostolic witness founds our Christian hope; and
that we, too, might be heirs of resurrection, we take, in faith, the bread
of eternal life and the cup of everlasting salvation – “the medicine
specific of immortality,” as St. Ignatius of Antioch called it – that the
body and blood of the Risen Lord might preserve both body and soul unto life
eternal.
Amen. +
