Your Body Will Rise

Like a good who-done-it detective story, in Christianity there is always a body involved. Just consider the central tenets of our faith:

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Incarnation

Nativity

Crucifixion

Resurrection

Ascension

Assumption

 

On each of these great Christian feasts, a body is central to the plot, being conceived, born, killed, raised or glorified. That is why the Catholic Church has always been opposed to the generalized spiritism of each age, unwilling to wish away or dismiss the flesh as a mere appendage of the superior spirit.

 

The Catholic mind has always kept body and soul together, going so far as to claim that where one or the other is lacking, there is no human person.

There are souls in heaven, hell and purgatory, but human persons – body and soul -- are found only on earth. In fact, death is defined as the separation of the soul from the body, and we are told by saints as great as Thomas Aquinas that even a soul in heaven is incomplete, longing to be reunited with its body on the last day.

Which brings us to the topic of this Holy Week: the Resurrection of the Body.

 

A campus chaplain once explained to a group of students that Easter was the most perplexing of Christian feasts, though we're told it's the central celebration of our faith. After all, he said, we all can relate to the birth of a baby at Christmas and the suffering that comes with death on Good Friday.

But a body rising from the dead -- who has ever seen or experienced that? Where do we go to find an example?

 

With the Resurrection, we enter the realm of true faith – "the assurance of things hoped for and the promise of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1).

Indeed, at the center of our Catholic faith is an event that even those who saw the risen Christ did not at first dare to believe. Mary Magdalene came to the tomb to wrap the body of the Crucified One, and when she found the tomb empty and Jesus standing nearby, she did not see that it was He. Only when He utters her name are her eyes opened to the living Christ.

“Why do you seek the living among the dead?” the angel said to the woman at the empty tomb.

Thomas doubted when he heard that Jesus was alive. Jesus appeared to show him his wounded hands and side, and Thomas said what we all should say in awe as Jesus comes to us at Mass in the consecration, “My Lord and my God.”

Jesus did not rebuke him for doubting, but said, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”

That’s you and me.

We have not touched his sacred hands or side, nor have we seen Him walk through the door into our midst – yet we believe. That’s our Easter faith, based not on a vague, pervasive “spirit of life within us,” as the New Agers might have it, but based on a body. A body that was dead and laid in the tomb and was seen after three days to be alive again.

Yet there is a persistent claim in some Christian circles, dating back to the time of St. Paul, that Jesus did not really rise bodily. He rose “in the hearts of his disciples” and “his spirit lives on in his believers.” The Catholic faith is totally opposed to this notion, this heresy.

Yet St. Paul writes,  “If Christ is not risen, then your faith is in vain” (1 Cor. 15:14).

We are all about the bodily resurrection. We profess explicitly that the soul of Jesus was reunited with the same body that hung on the cross and lay in the tomb. In rising from the dead, his body is glorified, but it is the same body that was born of Virgin Mary.

Catholics often are accused of despising the body by denying its pleasures, and it’s true that the body and its sensual appetites must be placed under the control of the rational soul. But, in the end, it is the Catholic Church that is the great defender of the flesh, declaring that the body is not only an earthly good but a heavenly presence. It has a dignity that will last for an eternity.

As surely as we will die, we will rise again on the last day, when Jesus will judge the living and the dead. We will rise not as souls alone, but as human persons, body and soul, and we will live forever in our own skin – in heaven, we hope, with God’s grace.

This is our Easter faith. We are Catholic: matter does matter, and bodies do rise.

(Check this blog after Easter for a further reflection.)

Comments

[Mike Thompson]

I find it intresting that we have a problem with the resurrection of the body. This is something we profess to believe each time we attend a Mass. We say the words without listening to what we have said we believe,I always close my eyes during the profession of faith and say the words as I am telling the Father this is our Faith this is what we believe.