The Resurrection of the Body

We are barely into the Easter season, and there are many signs that we need resurrection more than ever.  On Easter Sunday itself, the world reeled in horror at the carefully orchestrated explosions in Sri Lanka that killed hundreds of Christians as they worshiped, and injured even more.  A violent earthquake in the Philippines damaged Clark International Airport and destroyed buildings, trapping people in the rubble.  The Judicial Council of the United Methodist Church met to rule on the constitutionality of the changes to the Book of Discipline that were passed in February at the called General Conference, their conclusions causing great dismay to many of us who had hoped for a different outcome.  And I had a funeral this week for one of my elderly church members, a widower who died of grief because he simply couldn't go on without his wife.  Devastation, destruction, disappointment, and death have a firm grip on the world we live in, and when, as a Christian, you seek direction and guidance and hope, where else do you turn but to Easter, to resurrection?

What then do we make of statements that paint it as a story of hope and love triumphing over the pain and sorrow of death but only as a beautiful symbol?  What do we make of explanations that are long on metaphor and short on radical new life? The gospels speak of a risen Christ whose hunger and thirst for physical food and drink are like our own but whose newly transformed body is capable of things that defy logical explanation.  The apostle Paul struggles to help the Corinthians wrap their heads around it, and he grapples with the limits of the words of finite humanity in order to point to the incomprehensible actions of an infinite God. I have stood at the graves of many and preached many a funeral -- and many an Easter -- sermon. But I cannot say how Christ's resurrection happened nor can I draw a picture of heaven. I don't know what happens and when, but I trust that the One who took on human flesh and dwelt and died in a human body and was resurrected in a human body is no ghost or feel-good memory, and I trust that my eventual newly raised self will also bear some resemblance to the present one, although in a perfected and incorruptible version.

John Wesley naturally pondered these things, as well, and when asked to explain them to curious or grieving questioners, his responses included confident, rational pronouncements where you can almost hear his unspoken " Well, duh!" as he writes in his sermon "On the Resurrection of the Dead" --

The plain notion of a resurrection requires, that the self-same body that died should rise again.  Nothing can be said to be raised again, but that very body that died.  If God give to our souls at the last day a new body, this cannot be called the resurrection of our body; because that word plainly implies the fresh production of what was before.

He goes on to assert that God can certainly reform the dust of a decayed human body back into the same body as before since God had after all created Adam from the dust of the earth in the first place!

But he also attended to these matters with rather less lofty but still confident statements such as these expressed in a letter to Mary Bishop --

I do not know whether the usual question be well stated, ' Is heaven a state or a place? ' There is no opposition between these two; it is both the one and the other. It is the place wherein God more immediately dwells with those saints who are in a glorified state...

But what is the essential part of heaven?  Undoubtedly it is to see God, to know God, to love God. We shall then know both His nature, and His works of creation, of providence, and of redemption. Even in paradise, in the intermediate state between death and the resurrection, we shall learn more concerning these in an hour than we could in an age during our stay in the body. We cannot tell, indeed, how we shall then exist or what kind of organs we shall have: the soul will not be encumbered with flesh and blood; but probably it will have some sort of ethereal vehicle, even before God clothes us ' with our nobler house of empyrean light.' ~ John Wesley (letter to Mary Bishop, April 17, 1776)

Perhaps Wesley found it unnecessary to speculate overlong as to the exact dimensions of the resurrected body or the exact nature of its organs or lack thereof, or perhaps he simply did not think it necessary to go into all that in a personal letter.  Either way, in both the sermon and the letter, he displays a sure confidence in the God who called all things into being and raised Jesus from the dead, finding in his faith a guard against the fear of death, which will indeed pull down the "house of clay" only to give way to the mighty act of God in raising it up again to be "infinitely more beautiful, strong, and useful" (On the Resurrection of the Dead).  

That is explanation enough -- and ground enough for faith -- for me.

(top picture of Isenheim Altarpiece, Resurrection; bottom photo taken by me of a portrait of John Wesley in the Duke Divinity School library)