‘The spiritual is in the material’

WE recently celebrated Easter, and I want to talk about bodies. Not celebrity bodies – as in, “Does my bum look big in this?” – nor in ethereal bodies divorced from spirit, but just bodies. Bodied bodies.

Let’s cut to the chase: what about the body of Jesus? What we do know for sure is that he was born in the flesh. Christian faith is in-carnate, enfleshed. The eternal Word is made flesh, embodied. Christianity is almost brutally materialistic.

Forget the images of a blue-eyed, white Jesus that have haunted brown-painted – job lot from the Ark? – Presbyterian church halls for centuries. We don’t know what Jesus looked like, or walked like, or talked like. Our Saviour might have had a limp, or a lisp. He and his disciples might all have had halitosis.

On Good Friday, the body of Jesus was stretched out and nailed on wood. Real nails. He was naked – no loin-cloth – utterly vulnerable. In the words of the hymn, he ‘emptied himself of all but love’.

“ Some people argue that God could not have raised Jesus in the flesh. That seems to me to be a strange thing to say about a creator God. Others make the case that the Resurrection story is simply a metaphor.

So what happened to the body of Jesus on that first Easter Sunday? One of my favourite writers is John Updike. I go along with his wonderful poem Seven Stanzas at Easter:

Make no mistake: if he rose at all

It was as His body;

If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,

The amino acids rekindle, The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,

Each soft spring recurrent;

It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the

Eleven apostles;

It was as His flesh; ours.

Some people argue that God could not have raised Jesus in the flesh. That seems to me to be a strange thing to say about a creator God. Others make the case that the Resurrection story is simply a metaphor. But a metaphor of what? At some point, there has to be “cash value” for the language we use. A metaphor can illuminate, but it cannot save. Updike again:

Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence, Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded

Credulity of earlier ages:

Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache, Not a stone in a story,

But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of

Time will eclipse for each of us

The wide light of day.

Interesting that a poet should make the case for a material event in real time. Another of my favourite writers is Flannery O’Connor, a Roman Catholic novelist from Georgia. She tells of how once she was at a sophisticated dinner party when the subject of the Eucharist came up. One of the guests said it was merely a symbol. O’Connor wrote later: ‘I then said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it”. That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me.’

Bodies, who needs them? We do. Jesus did. They enable us to live and love. They let us down. The spiritual is in the material. Thank God for that.

This article appears in the May 2017 Issue of Life and Work

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