THIRD SUNDAY OF EASTER 2009 YEAR B

HOW REAL IS THE RESURRECTION?

April 19, 2009
Lk 24, 35-38

The gospel today, from Luke, raises questions a lot of people have and never put words on. The
main one is: did Jesus really rise from the dead? What do you mean by really? Yes, it is hard
to put words on that. The answer is unequivocally yes, he did rise really. The consequences are,
indeed, hard to spell out. Dead bodies stay dead, dont they?

I think the whole drift of the scriptural evidence is that some unparalleled phenomenon happened
to Jesus. It is not like something we are familiar with, and we cant use our ordinary language to
talk about it. But it is something very real. It is not just an impression, or a conviction, or a gift
of faith given to disciples to think like that about Jesus. It really happened to him.

On the surface, there are seeming contradictions in the accounts of it. No New Testament writer
ever thought that the risen Jesus would die again. Having died once, he dies no more. But Luke
describes, in todays gospel, the risen body of Jesus as something you can look at and see,
something you can touch and hold, since it is flesh and bones, with hands and feet. It is a body
that can eat. But it does not occur to Luke that such a body can die, and normally will die, and
neither Luke nor anyone else imagined God intervening all the time to stop that happening. A
risen body, and especially that of Jesus, would naturally and by its own make-up, be unable to die
again. So what does Luke mean by describing it as he does? Again, how real is it really?

Even the laws of physics demand that bodies such as those we have or any bodies made
of the matter in our universe will disintegrate. You cant live a risen life, or eternal life,
with a body like that. You cant turn God into an eternal blocking system stopping nature
be what it really is. If you did take on the same sort of body after your death, it could
only be another round of the same mortal kind of life.

The scene is set amid a number of stories of recognition (thats almost the title Luke uses). Here
Luke insists that it is really Jesus, really he, that is recognized. Not a ghost, but the alive, real
man. Thats the point leave out the tricky questions! [I find it interesting that according to the
New Testament record, it was the holy women who first recognized Jesus risen. And yet, all the
consequent recognition scenes in which men meet Jesus, are written up as if they were the first! I
suppose each one was unique in its own way] Luke, following Mark, stresses the fact that
those who recognized Jesus were more than just afraid, they were scared out of their wits.
Literally, I think. They were saying things that did not make sense to someone in their right
mind. Mark has them saying nothing (a good option). Luke makes them say things, but without
much rational coherence. Herbert McCabe says they recognized Jesus as the man they had sort
of known and thought they knew, but didnt really know until now.

Let me make the problem even harder. A resurrection is not something that can be verified
empirically. Theres no hard object at five paces. At the same time, I think it is more than an act
of faith in a paradox that doesnt add up. It is a real thing for the person risen, not just a
subjective persuasion in the person who believes it. So how can it be real?

Id like to go back to a thought that came from the church Fathers in the east in the early centuries
(Origen, Gregory of Nyssa). They talked about spiritual senses. They didnt mean pious
feelings. They meant that we all have a kind of loving awareness of things that the hard-wired
left brain doesnt know anything about. In this loving awareness, we can picture things that
strictly are not subjects for pictures. We do so to make as real as we can for ourselves what we,
much deeper down, know is real in ways that are beyond all our pictures. It is, you could say,
subliminal. It is like a stream of life and wonder. It is like touching an original un-spoilt world
that we dont usually live in.

Lets use a contemporary Irish poem to illustrate it.

He stumped us, this Jesus of yours, with his

Walking on water, fandango, entrechat, glissade;
Birthing, imagine! In a dark cave, out of all knowing, then
He walked the hard-baked earth of Palestine, but not
As you walk, or as I, for behind him the healing flowers grew,
The rosebay willowherb, chamomile, the Johns Wort;
We noted, too, that he could walk through walls,
Appearing suddenly in the midst of folk as if
He were always there, waiting that they might notice him.
Oh yes, this too, he walked on air
Leaving them gasping upwards as he rose
Higher and higher, like a skylark, walking
Into the invisible. That was later. But humankind
Will not be cheated of its prey for we claimed him,
Nailing him fast to a tree, that he could not move
On water, earth, or air, and we buried him in the underearth.
Where, it is said, he took to walking once again,
Singing his larksong to the startled, to the stumped, dead.

John F. Deane, Words of the Unknown Soldier

What this way of perceiving does is get very close to the flame inside us that is the very life we
live by. As life moves forward for us, that flame is rising to new levels. When we have the
experience of recognizing a risen person, that recognition intensifies the rising of that flame
inside us, and we know. The question isnt actually, how real is the resurrection? but how do
we perceive the resurrection of someone to be real? Thats the answer to that part of the question.

Thats why to deal with Jesus resurrection the early disciples used a kind of poetry they never
used before (and neither did anyone else). They touched Jesus. They felt the pulse in his veins,
in his wounds. They saw him break bread and eat it. They never forgot the taste of that bread.
They knew deep down this was He who had broken bread with the poor of Galilee.
Whenever they did that in the future, themselves, they were doing this new poetry and telling
themselves he was there, with them, doing it again.

Its real all right. I find it sad that some believers today get insistent on a literal, physical realism
of the risen body of Jesus. As if that were the only reality! I find it sad because the resurrection
was more than that, and they are missing the point and the real mystery. I find it just as sad when
others accuse those who use this real-poetry of just making up fables and such like. I find it sad
because they dont hear the real music within, or the real mystery the really real reality.

Surrexit Dominus VERE He has risen REALLY and made us more REAL than we ever were.