What is resurrection for?
What is resurrection for?
An esoteric 'belief' one assents to with one's intellect, so as to be set apart from the rest of the world?
Oh, it is the source of many memes and jokes this time of year, certainly. Zombies and otherwise.
This week's gospel story is post-resurrection Jesus appearing to his students and friends -- the people who loved and missed him profoundly, who needed him. It's the 'walks into locked rooms' Jesus. Thomas isn't there the first time, but Jesus comes another time, soon, and tells Thomas to touch him, to feel the wounds and scars of the trauma inflicted on it by Roman power in a shameful, painful death. Still there.
What is this resurrection *for*?
Whom is it for?
John's gospel calls this Jesus' 'glorification', and one might be forgiven for assuming, then , that this resurrection is *for* Jesus -- like a reward for good work.
This 'glorification', though, this resurrection, is for us.
Where was (and is) the body of the resurrected One? Risen into the Body of the People, into the Body of the Church. Then (the 'early church') and now (us! baptized and eating the crumbs of the body to become ever more The Body).
What is it for?
How do we become ever more 'the resurrection' of the Lord?
How do we come to know ever more deeply the 'power of Christ and his resurrection,' as Paul writes?
Coming to 'know' it more is what it is for -- and living into this is what it means to 'believe' in it. It requires our whole lives -- both in commitment and in whatever longevity is given to us to live into it...
...for it is for our embodiedness, for us, this resurrection. For our common life here: to learn and relearn what it is to live without fear of death, to live, to come more fully alive in God's image, for the renewed life of the world. Fully, in the fullness of Time, but also Right Now.
Thomas, in this story, recognizes Jesus by the scars his body (still) bears. I am reminded of Ulysses returning from the wars and wanderings - recognized in the bath by an old nurse by the old scars on his body.
Oh, the Body remembers. History is written and carried on and in the Body.
The Body of Christ.
Your Body.
My Body.
We read an early letter attributed to the Apostle Peter: God's mercy in the action of resurrection (what God does and seemingly is in the world) "...has given us a new birth into a living hope...."
And, in learning to live into this, he writes, to become this even in part, is to live into faith, which is to 'receive our salvation,' our healing, now. To begin to.
Always we begin again. Not just because we are annual people (that old earth, spinning around, circling the sun, come round once more...), but because this is our condition. But, what a blessing, to have to practice.
Practice resurrection.
If we have come to that, then it is time to share Wendell Berry's 'Mad Farmer Liberation Front: Manifesto' again. The whole poem is here, but here is the ending:
...Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
...As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go.
Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.