Resurrection: You Are the Body of Christ

Now you are the body of Christ
and individually members of it.
I Corinthians 12:27

In the days surrounding Easter I encountered many articles about the resurrection.

A recurring theme was the assertion that belief in the resurrection was essential to being a Christian, and that was followed by the insistence that believing in resurrection meant believing in “bodily” resurrection. And lest there be any confusion, the writers wanted to make it clear that by bodily resurrection they meant the literal, material body of Jesus.

Characterizing the resurrection in literal terms is theologically clumsy, but it is also biblically suspect.

If the resurrection is about the literal, material body of Jesus, then why didn’t Mary recognize him when she saw him in the garden outside the tomb? And how is it possible that Cleopas and the other disciple could talk with him for hours on the way to Emmaus and sit down with him at dinner, and still not recognize him? And when Jesus came to them on the beach, while they were cooking breakfast, why didn’t they know who he was?

Finally, if we can get by all of the strange contradictions, we come to the ascension. Can we really believe that Jesus literally rose up into heaven? Do we believe that his body levitated up into the clouds?

These are not mistakes in the narrative. The Gospel writers knew what they were saying. They were trying to describe something that was fundamentally indescribable. Biblical language is always symbolic. But there is more going on than can be explained in terms of symbolic language.

In order to understand what they were saying we need to read the story backwards.

The New Testament would not exist if its authors had not encountered the risen Christ. They met Jesus in the form of the risen Christ and then they wrote about how that came to be and what it meant. They were looking back and asking, “How did we get here?”

And that message transformed the world. Literally. 

The little band of fearful followers who went into hiding after Jesus’ crucifixion grew so rapidly that within a few hundred years they numbered between a quarter and a half of the population of the Roman Empire.

In an excellent essay in the WallStreet Journal on the day before Easter, Roman Catholic scholar George Weigel explains:

“How did this happen? How did a ragtag band of nobodies from the far edges of the Mediterranean world become such a dominant force in just two and a half centuries? The historical sociology of this extraordinary phenomenon has been explored by Rodney Stark of Baylor University, who argues that Christianity modeled a nobler way of life than what was on offer elsewhere in the rather brutal society of the day. In Christianity, women were respected as they weren’t in classical culture and played a critical role in bringing men to the faith and attracting converts. In an age of plagues, the readiness of Christians to care for all the sick, not just their own, was a factor, as was the impressive witness to faith of countless martyrs.”

True story.

Without the resurrection this would have been impossible.

Their encounters with the risen Christ convinced them that they could live differently. They lived as he lived. They recognized that the Kingdom of God really was among them and they lived that way. They lived the way that they did because they were convinced that Jesus had been raised from the dead.

In the words of the angel in Matthew’s Gospel, “He is risen as he said.”

For the first Christians the resurrection was both the foundation of their faith and an event that they found to be thoroughly incomprehensible.

To speak of resurrection in literal terms reduces its meaning and ignores the biblical record. Resurrection is not about flying bodies or a resuscitated corpse. Easter transcends and transforms our normal categories.

In his earthly ministry, Jesus’ message was that the Kingdom of God was as hand. Weigel argues that the early Christians came to believe “that the cataclysmic, world-redeeming act that God had promised had taken place at Easter. God’s Kingdom had come not at the end of time but within time—and that had changed the texture of both time and history. History continued, but those shaped by the Easter Effect became the people who knew how history was going to turn out. Because of that, they could live differently. The Easter Effect impelled them to bring a new standard of equality into the world and to embrace death as martyrs if necessary—because they knew, now, that death did not have the final word in the human story.”

In his second letter to the Church in Corinth Paul proclaimed that “when anyone is in Christ, that person is a new creation. The old has passed away and a whole new world has begun.” (II Corinthians 5:17) Everything has changed. For the early Christians this was the reality of the resurrection. 

In his first letter to those same folks in Corinth, just before he launched into those immortal words about love as the most important characteristic of Christian living (even more important than faith), he reminded them of the meaning of the resurrection: “You are the body of Christ.”






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