Preaching through the Creed recently, I have again been reminded that contrary to the belief of not a few Christians, God does not frown upon physical matter. When the creed affirms “I believe in the resurrection of the body", it looks forward to the Resurrection Day, when we will be resurrected in the body.
Notice how very carefully concrete the creed puts it. It does not talk about “the resurrection of the dead” but “the resurrection of the body”.
The resurrection will find us not bodiless phantoms, ephemeral and ethereal. Rather, we will have real tangible bodies.
Our Lord himself rose bodily. He ate and drank with them over a period of 40 days. He said, “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me and see for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have” Lk 24:39. The teaching is plain. - just as the resurrected body of Jesus is in every sense a real body, so will ours be.
John Updike has a poem called Seven Stanzas at Easter. In it he has a fine line that says: “Make no mistake, if He rose at all, it was His body”. Then, in a most detailed and graphic way he talks about the reversal of the dissolution of our bodily cells; the re-knitting together of the molecules; the re-kindling of amino acids; he talks about the hinged joints of the thumb and toes; and the “valved heart”. Updike, whether a Christian or not, is theologically sound. And Seven Stanzas is a most fascinating poem!
When Jesus says, “Destroy this temple and I will raise it up in three days”, he is talking about his bones, muscle tissues, tendons, sinews and all. He is talking anatomy. Cadaverous as it may sound, he has in mind his tibia and fibula, his radius and ulna, ileum, femur, clavicle, sternum, scapula; biceps and triceps and all!!
C.S. Lewis puts it in six simple words: “God loves matter. He created it”
Have you ever thought that of all the analogies God could have used to express our entrance into new life. He chooses to use something as materialistic as water. And he gets our entire body to participate in an act of immersion in water. It is no wonder that Philip Larkin the poet describes baptism as a “joyous, devout drenching”. Let us not forget that Archbishop William Temple describes Christianity as “the most materialistic religion”.
In the wooden manger at Bethlehem, we encounter real baby skin, real baby burps and smell. On the wooden cross the nails impaled real flesh and tendon. On the morning of His resurrection, it was a real slab of granite that was rolled away, not one fashioned from papier-mâché. Jesus spat real slimy saliva into his real hands, rubbed it over the blind man’s defected eyes so that light rays may again hit his retina. And so were the leprous scabs flaky and the fishermen’s catch fishy.
Other religions may disparage physical matter. Not Christianity. Our Lord thought nothing demeaning about matter. Quite unlike the ancient Greeks and some Hindu sects, the Bible does not look at the body as merely the “container” for the soul; something inherently evil. So while the Greeks sought the redemption from the body. Christians seek the redemption of the body.
Consequently, very ordinary things can become endowed with deep spiritual significance. The bread and wine at a communion feast come to be invested with deep significance and sanctity because they become associated with someone's act of love for another
In the same way, the Victoria Cross, as metal, is worth no more than a few dollars. But to the parents of the brave soldier who died saving his nation, it is priceless. The old armchair, to the eyes of the second-hand dealer, is worth a couple of dollars but to the sons and daughters of the family, it is "father's armchair" and they wouldn't trade it for anything.
And there things in this world which strike deep spiritual chords within us. Great music, the surge of the sea, the smell of wood smoke, the woods carpeted with bluebells, the flight of geese south when the cold sets in, the golden hues of autumn leaves, and a hundred other things can touch and move our human spirits in a way science is powerless to explain.
It's as though there is another dimension and as J.B. Philips says, "this physical world is shot through and through with spiritual realities". We see the spiritual in the material.
In other words, there is splendour in the ordinary.
# posted by Andrew @ 8:30 PM
