Resurrection is Dirty
Over the last few weeks of COVID-19 lock down, I’ve had the chance to teach from outside on hiking trails instead of from behind a pulpit in our worship center. Don’t get me wrong, I like preaching in our sanctuary, but each time I’ve been outside filming, the psalmists words have come to my mind:
The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech,
and night to night reveals knowledge.
Something about being outside opens my ears and heart to hear God. After all, creation is his pulpit. The Psalms claim that he speaks, yes even shouts, through his creation. There is something sacred about this world, about creation. I think Elizabeth Barrett Browning captured the sentiment when she wrote,
“Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God, But only he who sees takes off his shoes; The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”
I guess I’ve sat around for much of my life eating blackberries. The season of COVID-19 is opening my eyes to the bushes that are afire with God all around me.
Lately this reawakening has been drawing my mind to resurrection. Allow me to explain.
Resurrection Sunday is THE day for Jesus followers. It’s the church’s Super Bowl Sunday. After all, Christianity would not exist without the resurrection. That’s not an overstatement, that’s reality. If the early followers of Jesus wouldn’t have seen the resurrected Christ, they wouldn’t have had a message to share. It was the core of everything they taught and central to the good news they spread.
While resurrection is foundational to the gospel, ironically, it’s a message that modern day Jesus followers must recapture. The original power and promise of resurrection has been overtaken by our present obsession with heaven. Don’t hear me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with heaven. Heaven is great. I can’t wait to go there. I’m confident my mom is enjoying it right now! However, resurrection has little to do with heaven. In fact, resurrection has more to do with earth than heaven; more to do with skin than souls; more to do with renewing this earth than escaping it.
Resurrection is... dirty.
In our present longing for heaven, we have turned the original message of resurrection into a promise of eternity in a disembodied state. The original message of resurrection was an affirmation that God’s creation is good and that God is so passionate about it that he is going to redeem it and restore it - not destroy it. Resurrection is about eternal life ON EARTH. I love the way N.T. Wright made this point when he wrote,
“Resurrection isn’t a fancy way of saying ‘going to heaven when you die.’ It is not about ‘life after death’ as such. Rather, it’s a way of talking about being bodily alive again after a period of being bodily dead. Resurrection is a second-stage postmortem life: 'life after life after death.’”
Life after life after death; I love that! Elsewhere Wright said, “heaven is great, but it’s not the end of the world.” When we die we will be absent from the body and present with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8) - we’ll be in heaven, we just won’t stay there. When we turn Jesus’ resurrection into a message about going to heaven when we die, we miss the point completely.
The early Jesus followers would have lost their minds at the thought of such a proposition. You know who would have loved the idea of turning resurrection into a hope for heaven? The gnostics. The gnostics were deemed heretics and a nemesis of the early church. They had one central, defining message: matter is evil and spirit is good. The gnostics would say things like, “it doesn’t matter what you do with your physical body, what God is interested in is your spirit.” The gnostics were proponents of a disembodied spirituality and they would have loved the idea of eternity as a disembodied spirit. The gnostics would have loved the idea of our highest hope being going to heaven when we die. They’d beat their chest and affirm that had been their message from the beginning. Separate the spirit and the body. Make the message of Jesus about something other than real life. Yes they’d say, that’s what we’ve been talking about the whole time.
But that wasn’t what resurrection meant and it’s not what resurrection means. Resurrection was an affirmation of the goodness of creation and the body. Genesis 1:31 summarizes how God felt about his creation
31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
He saw the physical matter he had made and claimed this it was good. Even through creature is broken, it’s still blessed. Even though it’s fractured, it is still good. Even though we’ve turned our back on God, he never turned his back on us.
Catch this, Jesus walked out the grave on Easter morning with a physical body. If his message and our hope would have been about going to heaven when we die, he would have risen as a disembodied spirit, but he didn’t. In fact he said to his followers, “touch me… put you hands in my side…” Not only was Jesus’ body physical, it maintained some familiar markings from his earthly life - the scars from his crucifixion. To be sure, his body was different - he could teleport and walk through walls - but it was still physical and it was still his body, only restored and redeemed. The scriptures claim that you and I will be raised in the same way (1 Col 15:20-23) - with a physical body that has continuity with the body you have now. I’d like to request a few changes, but I’m banking on the 2.0 model of Ryan Paulson being a drastic improvement.
Through the resurrecion, God is sending a message. He is affirming the goodness of his original creation; in fact, he’s doubling down and stating that he isn’t going to start over, but rather he’s going to redeem. Resurrection declares that God is not giving up on us, but rather he’s restoring us. One of my favorite passages in the scriptures is Revelation 21:5 where Jesus says,
“Behold, I am making all things new.”
It struck me a few years ago that Jesus didn’t say, “Behold, I’m making all new things.” He isn’t starting over, he’s fixing what’s broken, raising what’s dead, and bringing home what’s lost.
Resurrection declares to us that matter matters to God. It means that creation matters to God. It means that dirt matters to God. It means our bodies matter to God. It reminds us that God is in the restoration business. He’s restoring you, and me, and his entire creation.
Resurrection is dirty… He is making ALL THINGS NEW!