Texts: Acts
I’m going to break my own preaching rules today. Usually, I give you a story first to get you interested then try to hang onto you while I add a bit of theology. This time I’m reversing the order: theology first and then the story. More worrying still, I want to start by talking about the two main creeds of the Church, the longer Nicene Creed, which we’ll be using today, and the much pithier Apostles Creed, which we used during Lent.
From time to time over the years various people have confessed to me that they find difficulty in reciting the Creeds. The more candid ones among them have said things like, “I mean, who really believes this stuff?” What I usually try to do in these circumstances is to sit them down, put each of these two Creeds in front of them, and go though them item by item to discover which items are giving the problems. And almost without exception I find a common answer for each of the Creeds.
In the case of the Nicene Creed, the common stumbling-block is the line which reads “[He] was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary”; which of course is churchy language for what we call the virgin birth (or the pedantic call the virginal conception). So the Nicene Creed gives us trouble at Christmas. On the other hand, the stickingpoint with the Apostles Creed comes in the third paragraph, which invites us to say “I believe in…the resurrection of the body”, which means it gives us trouble at Easter.
The strange thing is that both Creeds contain a statement about Christmas and Easter. The Nicene Creed, however, fudges the issue of Easter by referring to the “resurrection of the dead” not “the body”. The Apostles Creed says of Jesus that he was “born of the Virgin Mary”, which isn’t too difficult, but only after saying that he “was conceived by the Holy Spirit”, but for some reason that doesn’t seem to stick in the craw. What does in this case is the resurrection of the body.
So in this Easter Season, what can we say about the resurrection of the body; and an interesting place to start might be to ask ourselves which of the resurrection stories we have in the Scriptures we are comfortable with, and which of them make us more uneasy. In particular, do we become more uneasy as the stories become less surreal or supernatural, and more “real”?
If we think about the resurrection stories in general, I think we get a picture of the Risen Christ as being visible, but not quite physical. We are struck by the difficulty even his closest friends had in recognising him. Think of the disciples on the road to Emmaus who walked and talked with him for some time without twigging who he was. And he now has the ability to appear and disappear at will, including the ability to suddenly appear inside a locked room. In other words, the more different he appears to be after the resurrection from the way he was before his death, the more it seems right to us.
But now we are confronted by Luke with another resurrection story, which gives us a rather different picture. This time the Risen Christ is altogether too physical. He eats broiled fish “in their presence” (there’s that emphasis on eyewitness again). Then he says: “It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.”
Here’s the difficulty, surely, for those who struggle with the Apostles’ Creed and its statement about the resurrection of the body. The Risen Christ in this story is embodied, is physical in the ordinary sense. And we shouldn’t really be as surprised as we are, because the other resurrection stories make the same point, only perhaps more subtly. When Jesus appeared among them in the locked room, what did he do? He showed them his hands and side. Then he breathed on them. And the next week when he came back for Thomas’ benefit, he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”
And, of course, the Risen Christ walked along the road to Emmaus, he didn’t float!
The inescapable message of the biblical record of the resurrection, it seems to me, is that Christ was raised in the body. That’s why the whole thing starts at the empty tomb. If the resurrection is purely spiritual, then why is the tomb empty? If Lloyd Geering is right – if the bones of Jesus of Nazareth lie somewhere in Palestine – then these biblical accounts of the Risen Christ are false, and the Apostles’ Creed is wrong.
We believe in the resurrection of the body because Jesus was resurrected in the body.
Well, that’s most of the theology over, so let’s turn to the stories – yes, there are two for you this morning. The first is given by St Luke in the second volume of his wonderful work, the volume we call the Book of Acts. It’s a story designed to answer the great question about Easter: so what? Even if we accept the Easter story as we have it – even if we believe that in some way we can never understand or explain Jesus was raised from the dead, what difference does that make in the real, everyday dusty world in which we live our real, everyday dusty lives?
Luke’s answer is this: it means all the difference in the world. It means that the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth continues uninterrupted by his death. And in the story of the healing of the crippled beggar outside the temple gate, from which today’s reading is taken, Luke the master storyteller gives us one example of this. You’ll remember that Peter and John were going up to the temple to pray. Now a man crippled from birth was being carried to the temple gate where he was put every day to beg…
Stop there and think for a moment how easily Luke has jogged our memories with those few words. A crippled man being carried? Ah, yes, that’s an easy one – the man carried by his friends and lowered down through a whole in the roof. And then there’s the crippled man at the pool of Bethesda who had no one to help him into the pool. He’d been crippled for 38 years. This guy was crippled from birth? Then that reminds us of the man born blind, who was given back his sight.
Jesus’ ministry is now being carried on by his disciples in his name, with the same astonishing results. And here we have another story of a body being raised up. A real, physical body. Taking him by the right hand, he helped him up, and instantly the man’s feet and ankles became strong. He jumped to his feet and began to walk.
That’s the difference Easter makes in the real physical world. And it continues to this day. Last Thursday I came across another example. We had a Board of Trustees meeting at Koputai Lodge, and our manager had arranged for one of the residents of the Lodge to come and tell us his story. He was now better and leaving us to go and live in a flat near family.
This man had been quite unwell, and had needed treatment at Wakari. After that, he didn’t feel ready to move straight back into the community, so he had come to us at Koputai for some months. As I heard his story I realised that I had met him very early on in his time with us, but up until this point of his story I hadn’t recognised him. He seemed so different.
He spoke very highly of all that Koputai had done for him; and then I asked him to sum it all up. In a nutshell, what was it that Koputai did for you? Well, he said, I was really down when I came here, but Koputai has put me back on my feet.” I can’t say the bells rung for me immediately – it’s a common enough figure of speech, after all. But they certainly did later that evening when I picked up my bible to start thinking about today’s readings.
“Koputai has put me back on my feet.” That is exactly what happened to the beggar outside the temple gate. He was put back on his feet. That’s resurrection, that’s Easter in action. – in
Easter is all around us, today and every day, here and everywhere. Our job is to see it, and tell the world about it. Amen.
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