Monday Meditation
The New Testament is emphatic about the bodily resurrection of Jesus. In John’s gospel, Thomas vigorously declares he will not believe until he see the evidence of Jesus’ scars, and actually touches his wounds. Jesus appears and presents Thomas with his wounded hands and invites him to put his hand in the open wound of his side. (John 20). In Luke’s telling, Jesus appears and offers a blessings of peace to the disciples, who are understandably frightened, thinking him a ghost. As is often the case, Jesus dismisses their fear and mildly chastises them for doubting. “Look at my hands and feet, that I myself am he. Touch me and see. For a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you can see that I have.” With a wry sense of humor, he looks at their astonished faces and asks, “Do you have anything to eat?” They quickly round up a piece of fish which he eats. (Luke 24) The same thing occurs in John’s gospel where describes the risen Jesus making breakfast for the disciples.
So it’s impossible to avoid the testimony of the gospel that the risen Jesus had a body. Exactly what kind of body, is a mystery. It is one capable of appearing through locked doors or showing up on the shore instructing the disciples to throw their fishing nets for the best catch. (John 21) For his part, Saint Paul declares that Jesus appeared to over 500 people, including him. These assertions of John, Luke, Paul are echoed throughout the New Testament. Scholars have debated the bodily resurrection for centuries. Some modern scholars have replaced it with various versions of “spiritual experience” or simply dismissed the actual resurrection of Jesus while declaring the myth of the resurrection reveals “the Christ” who illuminates human life, and whose teaching provides meaning and purpose.
One poet, among many, who reflects upon the physicality of the resurrection of Jesus, is Denise Levertov. Here is her poem
“On Belief in the Physical Resurrection of Jesus.”
It is for all
‘literalists of the imagination,’
poets or not,
that miracle
is possible,
possible and essential.
Are some intricate minds
nourished
on concept,
as epiphytes flourish
high in the canopy?
Can they
subsist on the light,
on the half
of metaphor that’s not
grounded in dust, grit,
heavy
carnal clay?
Do signs contain and utter,
for them
all the reality
that they need? Resurrection, for them,
an internal power, but not
a matter of flesh?
For the others,
of whom I am one,
miracles (ultimate need, bread
of life) are miracles just because
people so tuned
to the humdrum laws:
gravity, mortality —
can’t open
to symbol’s power
unless convinced of its ground,
its roots
in bone and blood.
We must feel
the pulse in the wound
to believe
that ‘with God
all things
are possible,’
taste
bread at Emmaus
that warm hands
broke and blessed.
Denise Levertov (The Stream and the Sapphire)
Matthew Boulton of the Salt project offers this comment on the poem. “Christians approach the mystery of Jesus’ resurrection from a wide range of angles, and Levertov offers an intriguing option. Just as she can’t accept that Jesus’ resurrection is “just a symbol,” she also declines to say it’s “just a fact.” For her, it’s a mysterious blend of both: a stirring symbol, a sign that “with God all things are possible” — and also an event rooted “in bone and blood” for our sake, since many of us, Levertov reasons, will only be persuaded if we feel the wound, taste the bread. We are physical creatures who live in a physical creation; not only physical, of course, but not less than physical, either.
And after all, is it any less astonishing that God became flesh in the first place?”