Odd Body

Luke 24.36b-48 narrates the scene immediately following the Risen Jesus’s appearance to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. No sooner does the breaking of the bread open their eyes to the presence of the formerly dead Jesus before them than the resurrected Christ “vanishes from their sight” (Luke 24:31).

An odd body.

Those two Emmaus-bound believers respond to the revelation by forsaking their itinerary to hasten and tell the apostles, “the Lord has risen indeed!” In the penultimate pericope of Luke’s Gospel, the apostles and the disciples are in the midst of puzzling out this news when, just as suddenly as he had vanished from their sight, “Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, "Peace be with you."

An odd body.

To prove to them that he is not a ghost, Jesus offers them the wounds in his hands and his feet. Seeing as he’s not an apparition, the disciples reciprocate by offering him hospitality. They give him some broiled fish to eat, which he does. Nevertheless, though the Risen Jesus is not a ghost neither is as he was before he died, for when he leaves them Jesus does not walk off into the distance. Presumably, he leaves in the manner in which he came— he vanishes.

An odd body indeed.

The Risen Jesus is both continuous with who he had been and somehow also surpassingly different.

In scripture’s longest— indeed the Bible’s only— meditation on the doctrine of the resurrection, the apostle Paul asserts with an inflexible alacrity, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.”

Paul’s argument is so thoroughly resolute and bracingly clear it begs the question if any have ever read him given the manner in which, on the one hand, believers make bodily resurrection an essential of orthodoxy and, on the other hand, skeptics balk at the whimsy of the amino acids of Pilate’s victim rekindling into Mary’s boy. Paul, who was himself encountered by the Risen Jesus, is quite clear.

The news of Easter is not that the crucified corpse of Jesus came back alive.

Therefore, the promise of Resurrection for us is not simply the hope that our dry bones will live again.

Paul puts the mystery of resurrection in terms of the distinction between perishability and imperishability:

And I say this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. Look, I tell you a mystery: Not all of us shall fall asleep, but all of us shall be changed, In an instant, in a glance of an eye, at the final trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable thing must clothe itself in imperishability, and this mortal thing must clothe itself in immortality. And, when this perishable thing shall clothe itself in imperishability and this mortal thing clothe itself in immortality, then will the saying that has been written come to pass: “Death has been swallowed up in victory (1 Cor. 15.50-54).

The contrast is between a soma psychikon (a body ensouled) and a soma pneumatikon (a body that is of a spirited nature, made to live entirely by pneuma, ie, deathless spirit). It’s a contrast, as the epistle makes clear, between an earthly origin and a heavenly one.

Resurrection is neither resuscitation nor reanimation of the material body one has in the fallen world.

It is not, in fact, analogous to the raising of Lazarus or to Ezekiel’s valley of the dry bones.

It is instead a radically different kind of life.

The resurrection body will be an altogether different kind of body. Christ’s resurrected body, therefore, is already an altogether different kind of body. Our bodies are not the prototype of a future model to come. The hope of the resurrection body is not like a the difference between an iPhone SE and an iPhone 14 ProMax, even maximally imagined.

Christ’s risen body is the first fruit of a new and future creatio ex nihilo.

We get the resurrection dogma wrong exactly to the degree we take our fallen soma psychikon as the definitional starting point.

Better then to ask a more fundamental question:

What is a body?

And of course our starting pointing must be Christ’s own words, “This is my body.”

What is a body?

Simply, essentially— availability.

A person’s body is that person himself or herself insofar as he or she is available to others and also to himself or herself. If I disappeared, for example, I would no longer be accessible. I may be able to impact you still, but you would not be able to respond to me. There would no longer be any means for relationship.

It’s in this most basic sense of availability that scripture speaks of the body of the Risen Christ. The body of the Risen Christ is how the Lord Jesus makes himself available to us and makes us available to him and this body, scripture is clear, is the loaf and cup surrounded by his faithful.

Whenever Paul, for example speaks of the “body of the Risen Christ” he’s speaking of the bread and the wine of the church’s eucharistic meal (1 Cor. 10:16).

This means of availability thus makes clear that Paul referring to the church as “the body of Christ” is no mere metaphor and it makes it clear why the sacrament of communion is both aptly named and justly at the heart of the church’s life. Indeed, in the same letter to the Corinthians, Paul stipulates the parallelism:

To “discern” the loaf and the cup on the table is to discern the church.
To discern the body of believers is to discern the bread and the wine.
And to discern either the body of believers or the loaf and the cup is to discern Christ personally present in his own body (1 Cor.11:17-29).

As the late Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson puts it,

"To say that Christ’s body is present as the bread and the cup is therefore to say that these indisputably available things, the bread and the cup, are his availability: that where they are present he not only has us before him but allows us to have him before us, not only touches us but allows us to touch him, not only sees us but allows us to see him. It is to say that as these things he gives himself to us as an object of our experience.”

The mutuality of this availability is critical as well. As Hegel noted, if someone were present to me as subject only and not also as my object in turn, I would just so be that person’s object only and not a subject over and against him or her. Such a personal presence, even if the person was Jesus, would enslave me.

Thus, the necessity of Easter, for a disembodied presence of Jesus to us today would not be enlivening or enlightening.

It would be enslaving.

For the crucified Jesus to live now by pneuma, by deathless spirit, as the first fruit of our own soma pneumatikon, means that he lives at once at the Father’s right hand but also he lives in between my fellow believer and me; he lives in loaf and cup on the table in the church and also he lives in the church for he is its head. All of these availabilities constitute his risen body. Such a definition of a resurrected body is a far cry from the formerly dead Lazarus stumbling out of his tomb and it’s a good deal more mysterious than me waking up from death to see my dearly departed again. But if “everlasting life” simply names the life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, any account of the resurrected bodies we await should be no less mysterious.

I told this story in a Christmas sermon a couple of years ago:

Back in Advent, after the Christmas Pageant, one of the children in the cast came up to me in the fellowship hall.

“I have a question,” she said.

“What’s your question?”

“So…Jesus is alive?”

I nodded. She thought about it for a moment. Clearly this hadn’t been her question.

“Well, if Jesus is alive, then how come we can’t see him?”

I knelt over and leaned in towards her and I whispered, like this was a secret too special to share.

“Actually,” I said, “you can see him; in fact, you did see him just last Sunday.”

“I did?”

I nodded.

“Yes, of course,” I said, “He was that bread on the table and the cup next to it. Jesus is alive and that’s the form— one of them, anyway— his body takes now.”

She nodded.

“Oh, cool,” she said.

And then she ran off as quickly as a magi from the manger.