Or, do ghosts eat fish?
By Nanette Sawyer
Gospel Reading: Luke 24:36b-49
For Sunday, April 22, 2012: Year B—Easter 3
I believe the testimony of the disciples who experienced Jesus’s presence with them after his death. I believe that something real happened. I don’t think the accounts were simply “made up” stories, or figments of their imaginations. But what happened there? How did people try to explain it at different times and in different contexts?
Comparing Stories
When thinking about resurrections, including Jesus’s resurrection, I often turn to Paul’s writings on the topic in 1 Corinthians. This letter is one of the earliest written books of the New Testament, written in the early 50’s, less than 20 years after Jesus’s death and resurrection. Luke, as we know, was probably written sometime in the 80’s, some 50 years after the resurrection.
In chapter 15, Paul describes how the resurrected Jesus appeared to Cephas, then the Twelve, then 500 brothers and sisters, then James, and finally to Paul himself (1 Cor 15:5-8). He doesn’t distinguish these appearances in quality or type. Does he equate them? When Jesus appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus, was it qualitatively the same as Jesus’s appearances to the others? Did Jesus have a different body then? Or was it the same as the resurrected body that all the others saw?
Perishable and Imperishable
Paul addressed the church at Corinth in the first generation after Jesus’s death. Many of them had believed that Jesus would be back a second time before any of them died. But some had already died (1 Cor 15: 6, 35, 51), so was the whole thing wrong? If they died, and their bodies were buried and began decaying, how could they be resurrected? Some feared that they could not.
Paul argues that the physical bodies won’t be restored, but that a different kind of body exists, “a spiritual body” (1 Cor 15:44). After all, “flesh and blood can’t inherit the kingdom of heaven. Something that rots can’t inherit something that doesn’t decay” (1 Cor 15:50, CEB, Common English Bible).
When we’re resurrected we won’t have bodies “made of dust” like Adam, Paul says. We’ll have bodies like Jesus’s resurrected body—not a physical body, but a spiritual body, a heavenly body. (1 Cor 15:49, but see the CEB translation, too.)
Alive or Dead?
So what was Jesus’s body like, when he reappeared after being in the tomb for three days? Was the decay of Jesus’s physical body undone? Did it never begin to decay? Or did Jesus rise up in a different body, a heavenly one, a spiritual one, a glorified one? If Jesus’s resurrected body was “imperishable” could it have been physical? And if it was not physical, was it “real”?
Paul seems to argue that Jesus’s resurrected body wasn’t physical, and I think we need to consider that in relation to Luke 24. However, by the time the gospel according to Luke was written, different things needed to be emphasized, different concerns needed to be addressed.
Not a Ghost
In this Lukan passage, Jesus distinguishes between himself and ghosts. He’s not a ghost because he has flesh and bones, and he proves it by eating fish. In the gospel of John, Jesus cooks and offers fish to the disciples after his resurrection, but he doesn’t eat it. Why is it so important to Luke to prove that Jesus is not a ghost?
What if the point here is not to show that Jesus’s body is physical, but to show that Jesus’s body is alive; that Jesus is alive? A ghost, on the other hand, is dead. A ghost does not need to eat. Jesus’s appearance was was not the result of sorcery or necromancy, not a figment of the imagination and not a vision of a dead person. This was really real aliveness.
The Hardest Question
Which leads me to ask, does “life” require a physical body? How about eternal life—does that require a physical body?
Nanette Sawyer is the founding pastor of Grace Commons (formerly known as Wicker Park Grace), an emerging faith community that gathers in an art gallery on the west side of Chicago. Ordained in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), she has blogged at The Christian Century’s lectionary blog, the Emergent Village Blog at Patheos, and at nanettesawyer.com. She has a Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and an MDiv from McCormick Theological Studies, where she has also taught as adjunct faculty. She is the author of Hospitality: The Sacred Art.
