Touch and See: The Resurrection of the Body and the Life Everlasting

          “Why can’t we touch God?” one of the puzzled Preschoolers asked after my “resurrection lesson” in chapel this week. “And why can’t we see God?” piped up another one, with concern in his voice. While I muttered something about God being too marvelous and powerful to touch except in our hearts, I wished that I could have taken back my words after reading today’s Gospel lesson. “Touch me and see,” says the resurrected Jesus to the frightened and disbelieving disciples. The kids were definitely onto something with their questions.

          Of course, we adults have trouble with the resurrection, too. We have trouble believing it; we have trouble conceptualizing it; we have trouble describing it. You might think that our struggle with the resurrection is just a modern reaction, born of a scientific worldview and distance from the event itself. But look at the disciples: everyone from Mary Magdalene and the women at the tomb, to Thomas, to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, to the whole group gathered in today’s lesson … they are all afraid and disbelieving when confronted with their risen Lord. The ink that has been spilled and the theological arguments that have been fought over explaining the resurrection fill whole libraries, and still we doubt and scratch our heads. A ghost--we can deal with that. A spiritual, disembodied feeling in our hearts--we know about those. A resuscitated body, even that--we can understand medically. But a new kind of body—a body that can walk through walls, yet still eat fish—come on, you’ve got to be kidding me! Unlike my preschool friends, I’m much more comfortable with a God that I cannot see and touch, than I am with a God wrapped up in this strange, improbable kind of body.

It’s not just about Jesus, either, you know. When we say in the Creed each week that we believe in the “resurrection of the body and the life everlasting,” we are saying that we believe that our bodies will at some point rise again, that we too will join Jesus in this new kind of embodied life after death. The resurrection of the body is a central tenet of our Christian doctrine, yet it is one that we sensible, rational-minded Episcopalians keep tucked away in the shadows of implausibility. "Wouldn't a purely spiritual resurrection seem more logical--for us, as well as for Jesus?" we wonder. Don’t we read in the Bible itself that the desires of the flesh are occasions for sin? Aren’t our bodies what pull us away from God in the first place? Surely an unchangeable God wouldn’t have much use for our frail flesh? Doesn’t God love our spirits best, our clever minds and our loving hearts? Why not be done with bodies as soon as possible? With all of the half-naked bodies on billboards and the money spent on fashion and plastic surgery and the time spent at the gym, I know that we human beings are interested in grooming and “perfecting” our earthly bodies, but I’m not so sure that we believe that God loves them enough to give them everlasting life.

I remember that I didn’t have much use for my often sickly, always uncoordinated body, when I was younger. My arms were the puny ones that always collapsed in Red Rover; my feet were what tripped me up in dance class; and my lungs were what kept me home with asthma when I wanted to be out having fun. It was my mind that was my friend. It allowed me to escape my unreliable body in books and in the world of imagination. It was what brought me attention and approval at school. If I had to pick something to keep for eternity, it would be my disembodied mind or my ethereal yet loving soul. My body I could do without.

It wasn’t until I had children, I think, that I gained any appreciation at all for my body. The miracle of pregnancy and birth created in me a respect for what the body could do, for the way in which we are all so carefully and wondrously made. Indeed, when I think about Incarnation, about God “taking on flesh,” I think first of the baby Jesus. His silky smooth baby skin; his perfect little fingers and toes; his sweet baby smile …. If God is going to take up residence in some kind of body, the fresh, new, adorable body of a baby just might suffice. God entering the world, loving the world, through the miracle of birth at Christmas—I have no problem with that kind of Incarnation. But our Christian faith does not just stop with Christmas. Like our bodies, the body of the sweet little baby Jesus must ache and bleed, must suffer and die.

Therefore, Jesus returns to his disciples with his body, with the same frail, wounded body that had hung on the Cross. With a body that is hungry for some supper. With a wounded body that they are invited to see and to touch. This new, post-suffering, post-death body is also part of Incarnation. The triumphant God did not shed flesh as soon as He could. The triumphant Easter God did not come out of the tomb as a golden beam of light or a soft and loving breeze. The risen Christ came to the disciples, presenting them with his beaten-up body to touch, rather than filling their minds with some kind of spiritual enlightenment. Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “Touching the truth with our minds alone is not enough. We are made to touch it with our bodies. I think this is why Christian tradition clings to the reality of resurrection, even when no one can explain it to anyone else’s satisfaction … The resurrection of the dead is the radical insistence that matter matters to God.”[1]

Matter matters to God. This is the lesson that we are to draw from the stories about bodily resurrection. On this Earth Day, that is an important lesson for us to hear. Not only does God love and sustain the human bodies that God created, but God loves and sustains the whole earth, the sun, the moon, and the stars, as well. Theologian Sallie McFague rather controversially calls the creation, “God’s body.” For McFague, the whole creation is the sign of God that we can touch and see, and with the universe as a metaphor for God’s body, our care for creation takes on a whole new level of importance. If Christ appears to us eating fish and bearing wounds, sanctifying our hungers and our suffering and inviting our touch, can Christ also not hold out to us a hand scarred by mountaintop coal removal? Can he not ask us to touch him as we place our feet in the cool, clear waters of a sparkling stream or on the warm, soft ocean sands?

To our doubts about the loveliness of our bodies, to our doubts about God’s commitment to our world, to our doubts about the strength and durability of Incarnation, to our doubts about the truth of Resurrection, Jesus says, “touch me and see.” To our preschoolers I should have said what I say to you today: taste God in the crisp wafer and in the wine that burns as it runs down your throat. Touch God in the warm hand squeezing yours as you pray together. Feel God in the cool, moist earth that you turn with your trowel as you pull away the weeds. Bask in God as the sun shines warm upon your neck. Watch God as the warm, sudsy water washes away the dirt on that wall or pew. Hear God in the laughter that rings out across the fields. Smell God in the red rose’s perfume. Sure, God is more than sunshine and roses. But matter matters to God. All that pertains to bodies, matters to God. The resurrection of the body tells us that our salvation, our healing, our eternal life, is to be found there. Life is not just for the soul and faith is not just for the mind. Touch and see—and you will have the strength to testify.

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[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World, 62.