The Literal, Bodily Resurrection

In a world of constant bad news, today, there is good news! What is this good news? Is it that Christ’s spirit rose again? That His soul now lives? That Jesus lives in my heart? No, friends, those assurances alone are too paltry for the kind of joy we have today. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

Lisa Miller wrote an insightful Newsweek article on the Resurrection published in 2010. She points out that in the time of the philosopher Plato, there were those who couldn’t bring themselves to believe that God would literally raise dead bodies to life again. It seemed too incredible. So Plato came up with this idea called “the immortality of the soul.” Miller explains this belief this way: “After death, the soul—unique and indestructible—ascends to heaven to be with God while the corpse, the locus of our senses and all our low human desires, stays behind to rot.” In other words, soul good; body bad.

Unfortunately, I think all too many Christians have adopted such a belief as their own. I guess it’s easier to believe that God would have our soul live on while our body is destroyed. It’s difficult to believe that God will take decaying bones and flesh and reconstruct them. It’s difficult to believe that God will take cremated ashes and turn them into a body again. But that is exactly what we as Christians believe that God will do.

After all, as Christians we believe in the Creator God. God made the heavens and the earth. He formed the first human beings out of the dirt and the mud. Why would it be so difficult for Him to take bones and ashes and bring them back together again, new and better than ever? (This truth brings us back full circle with the truth we initially encountered all the way at the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday.)

In her article, Lisa Miller also points out that a way people try to get around their struggles with believing in the resurrection is to look at it as a metaphor instead of a literal fact. She says, such folks:

imagine “resurrection” as a metaphor for something else: an inexplicable event, a new kind of life, the birth of the Christian community on earth, the renewal of a people, an individual’s spiritual rebirth, a bodiless ascension to God. Progressives frequently fall back on resurrection-as-metaphor, for it allows them to celebrate Easter while also expressing a reasonable agnosticism. They quote that great theological cop-out: “We cannot know what God has in store for us.”

The intellectual flabbiness of this approach causes agonies for such orthodox Christians as N. T. Wright, the Anglican bishop of Durham, England. “People have been told so often that resurrection is just a metaphor,” he once told my editor Jon Meacham and me in an interview for this magazine. “In other words, [Jesus] went to heaven, whatever that means. And they’ve never realized that the word ‘resurrection’ simply didn’t mean that. If people [in the first century] had wanted to say that he died and went to heaven, they had perfectly good ways of saying that.” The whole point of the Christian story is that the Resurrection really happened, Wright insists.

Jesus was literally raised. This is the teaching of the Scriptures. His disciples did not just imagine Him to be alive as some sort of wish fulfillment, for how would most of them be willing to die as martyrs for a belief that they knew to be false?

Not only was Jesus literally raised, but He was bodily raised. He was not a ghost or a spirit alone for His body was no longer in the tomb. The women who followed Him were able to clasp his physical feet and worship Him. The heavy stone that had been rolled in front of the tomb was rolled away when the women arrived at the tomb. Angels literally appeared to the followers of Jesus who came to the tomb, to tell them what had happened.