Please note:
This sermon was preached in Rome and followed the Revised Common Lectionary
readings for the Fourth Sunday after Easter that year. Dr. Crouse
spoke more generally on the resurrection of the body, which is most relevant
to the Gospel for the Octave Day of Easter in the Traditional Lectionary.
A Sermon for the Fourth
Sunday after Easter
by Dr. Robert Crouse
All Saints’ Rome, 1995
RCL
If the spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the
dead dwell in you,
he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also
quicken your mortal bodies
by his Spirit that dwelleth in you.
Romans 8.11
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Our Gospel lesson today is a continuation of the story we
began reading in last week’s Gospel: the last of Jesus’ resurrection
appearances recorded in St. John’s Gospel – the story of a miraculous catch
of fish, breakfast on the beach, and the Risen Lord’s final commission to
St. Peter, to feed his flock, in words you can see inscribed in golden
mosaic in St. Peter’s Basilica. It’s a story pregnant with almost
inexhaustible symbolic and sacramental significance; but also, like the
other resurrection stories, disconcerting in its emphasis upon the
physical. Pure spirit, after all, does not eat fish.
There are many aspects of Christian preaching which were
readily accepted in the ancient world, by both Jews and Greeks. Convictions
about the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of men were by no means
peculiar to the Christians. The notion of the immortality of the soul was
commonplace. Christian moral teachings seemed to contain nothing very new
or startling; they seemed to be recommending just what the greatest of the
pagan moralists also recommended. In such matters, St. Paul, speaking to
the citizens of Athens, knew that he could call upon the support of the
Greek poets: “’In God we live and move and have our being’, as one of your
own poets has said.” (Acts 17.28)
But the apostolic witness was to something beyond all
that; something very disconcerting: it was witness to the bodily
resurrection of Jesus, and that was deeply troubling. It seemed absurd.
The ancient Hellenistic world cried out for a “spiritual” salvation, whereby
immortal souls might escape from the prison of the body to a realm from
which all physical, transitory things would be excluded. In the greatest
literary work of Roman antiquity, the Aeneid of Virgil, there is a wonderful
scene in which Aeneas, the hero (and mythical founder of Rome) journeys
through the underworld and meets the spirit of Anchises, his father, in the
fields of Elysium. His father shows him a host of souls, gathered at the
edge of a river, preparing to return from Paradise to earth, and Aeneas
cries out in protest:
But, O my father, is it thinkable
That souls would leave this blessedness, be
willing
A second time to bear the sluggish body.
Trade paradise for earth? Alas, poor
wretches,
Why such mad desire for light? (Aeneid
VI, 719)
His father explains that only after drinking the waters
of the river Lethe, in which all memory is annulled, are the souls willing
to enter again into a mortal body, the source of all the destructive
passions of the soul. And so the conflict of body and soul, of spirit and
matter, goes on in endless and hopeless cycles. Only in forgetfulness can
it be borne.
The resurrection of Jesus was not a return to mortal
body. It was not a resuscitation, as with Lazarus; but neither was it the
escape of immortal soul. It was the transformation of the body, the
reconciliation of flesh and spirit. The Risen Lord was not a ghost: “A
spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have.” (Luke 24.39). The
disciples were incredulous. Clearly, in spite of all Jesus had said, they
expected no such thing. They hoped to embalm his body, and preserve it as a
sacred relic. Their immediate reaction to the resurrection was fear and
dismay. After all, they knew the limits of the possible. “Except I shall
see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of
the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe”, said
Thomas (John 20.25). But they did see, and they believed, and their lives
became a witness to the resurrection.
But what does that witness really mean? I think that for
many modern people, as for the ancient world, the resurrections seems not
quite acceptable. We would accept more readily a more “spiritual”
salvation. Men die, but their ideals live on. Flesh decays, but the human
spirit is unconquerable and triumphs over the ravages of time. We live on
in our posterity, and find in that a kind of spiritual immortality.
But that supposedly “spiritual” immortality has a
terrible emptiness about it, a terrible incompleteness and inconclusiveness.
As St. Paul says to the Corinthians: “If after the manner of men I have
fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise
not? Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (1 Corinthians 15.32).
And I think we all really know, all too well, the truth of those famous
lines of Isaac Watts which we sang here last Sunday evening:
Time like an ever-rolling stream
Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten as a dream
Dies at the opening day.
The doctrine of the resurrection testifies to the
wholeness of man’s salvation in Christ, which must include the redemption of
the flesh; it is a redemption in which nothing can finally be lost, except
sin. Our longing is “not to be unclothed, but to be clothed upon” (2
Corinthians 5.4). To be clothed upon, as Dante puts it in the Paradiso, “la
carne gloriosa e santa” – “the holy and glorious flesh”. If Christ be in
you, says St. Paul, “the body is dead because of sin; but the spirit is life
because of righteousness. But if the spirit of him that raised up Jesus
from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall
also quicken your mortal bodies by his spirit that dwelleth in you.”
The manner of that quickening transformation is beyond
all explanation, “and (as St. John says) we know not what we shall be, but
we shall be like him (1 John 3.2). God has established resurrection in
Christ, and what is Christ’s belongs to those who are his. “For our
citizenship is in heaven, from whence we look for the Saviour, the Lord
Jesus Christ: who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like
unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to
subdue all tings unto himself” (Phil 3.20-21).
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