Easter 3-April 18, 2021
Rev. Bernadette Hartsough
Alleluia Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed alleluia. We are still in the Easter season. Although the bunnies and the Easter chocolate are gone from the stores, we continue to reflect on the great mystery of Easter. The core of our faith.
Today we have a resurrection appearance in the Gospel of Luke. All of the resurrection appearances are similar. This resurrection appearance has everything including references to the coming of the Holy Spirit which will happen in the Book of Acts. Jesus stands among the disciples, bids them shalom, and then asks them why they are frightened. I have always thought that this was a strange question for Jesus to ask. Of course, they are frightened. They saw Jesus get arrested. Then they knew he was crucified, had died, and been buried. It would be like suddenly seeing a close friend or a loved one who had died stand before you in the flesh. You could touch the person and eat a meal with them. Of course, they were frightened. I think all of us would be a bit frightened.
These resurrection appearances are notable because Jesus is not a ghost or a vision. Jesus has a resurrected, transformed human body in this scene. Something new has happened to Jesus’s body yet it was still a human body. This scene was important in the early centuries of Christianity when the early church tried to formulate how Jesus saved us. Jesus had to be fully human, so his resurrection had to include his fully human body. Jesus showing his body to the disciples which enabled them to believe but it also connected Jesus to the human disciples. He was human again not a spirit. He was one of them. His body was important and so was their bodies. Jesus’s body was resurrected, and the disciples’ bodies would be resurrected.
Jesus’s resurrection of the body does not fit what the disciples expected.
The disciples through their fear thought that they were encountering the dead not the living. In the ancient world there were various notions of resurrection, like resurrection of just the soul. Here God is doing something new. The risen Christ is the Jesus who died. This is crucial to our faith. Christ was not just a spiritual Christ from the past. He was a Christ who took on the suffering of others and who was engaged with the world. Jesus showing his resurrected body with the scars forever links Easter with Good Friday. We follow the one who bore the cross. We follow the suffering and dying messiah. This experience that the disciples had of the risen Christ became the foundation of the gospels and of the church. It is still our foundation today. Christ knew that his resurrected human body was a symbol of our salvation and it was symbolic of the importance of our human bodies.
Our bodies created by God are how we live in this time and in this place. Our bodies are how we know the world through our mind, our senses, and our spirit. All three of these; our mind, our emotions, and our physical body are connected. In this passage, Jesus addresses the total of our humanity. He starts by addressing the disciples emotional state, their fear. He goes on to use their intellect to understand the prophecies and to build their spirits. Finally, he sends them out to witness to these things using their physical body. Jesus knew that the disciples were human and would use their human bodies in their time and place to witness to the resurrection.
I have the privilege to see bodies on the verge of death. To see a body that was once young and strong now weak and struggling and to see the scars and wrinkles reminds me that Jesus promised us that these bodies, all of our bodies will be resurrected.
This passage also reiterates that human bodies are good. Some scripture passages have been used to suggest that our bodies cause us to sin. That our bodies are bad. That spiritual disciplines are superior to the bodily acts. I have always struggled with this because our mind and our souls reside in our bodies in this world. They are a part of the same being and they are interconnected. We know that physical exercise affects our emotional state, stress affects our physical body, and spiritual practices affect our emotional and our physical health. Jesus came back in a resurrected body. Doctrine that suggests that our bodies are bad or that some bodies are more desirable than others has perpetrated abuse, shame, and violence to the human body.
Many times, the abuse to our bodies is self-inflicted. Bulimia, anorexia, feelings of not being good enough, pretty enough, manly enough, thin enough, the list goes on and on. We are enough. As Christians we know that God created us, and it was good, very good. We are to embrace and accept our earthly body.
I think we can learn from people with physical challenges. They learn to adjust to the change in their body and to learn to accept it as a part of who they are. These people in wheelchairs, the blind, the deaf, the paraplegics have become witnesses to endurance and strength. Many have gone on to do amazing things. They have learned to be enough.
We view bodies in different ways. Our country has a history of giving people with light skin more rights and privileges. Armenians immigrated to the United States from the Middle East. Armenians had to go to court twice to prove their whiteness, which would give them access to citizenship and permanently ensure their safety from the ethnic discrimination and genocide they had faced in the Ottoman Empire. Since they looked “white” they were granted asylum. The interesting thing about this is that most people are a mixture of ethnic groups. Race has been constructed according to appearances. If you look white, you are labeled white.
Teaching in Gary among mostly African Americans I was ignorant of the shades of blackness. I had to be taught how to see bruises on skin darker than mine and how to tell if a child looked sick. I learned about the shades of brown: dark, medium, and light. At first, I couldn’t see the differences. It took time to learn them. I also learned how slaves in our country were assigned different jobs based on the shade of their skin.
Yellow bodies of the indigenous people of America, the native American’s were clearly labeled by their black hair, the shape of their face, and their yellow-tan skin tone.
We judge people and react based on how their bodies look, whether it is someone with a physical challenge, different shaped eyes, or a different skin color. The only way we can control our reactions and accept others is to get to know them. Getting to know them and accepting them breaks down the barriers and the judgements.
The gospel today with Jesus’s resurrected body tells us that all bodies are welcome into Christ’s saving power of the resurrection. These different bodies are what makes up the church and gives the church strength. This is how the church becomes the body of Christ -right now- in the world.