“Since the earliest Christians began preaching, belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus has been central to Christian proclamation,” writes Pilgrim Theological College’s Robyn Whitaker.
“We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come.” (Nicene Creed)
In the post-biblical book, the ‘Apocryphal Apocalypse of John’, the author imaginatively describes the disciple John quizzing Jesus about the afterlife. One of the topics that takes up several chapters is the nature of resurrected bodies. “In what form will they rise?” asks John. Jesus declares that everyone will return as a thirty-year old. In response to further probing by John, Jesus then reveals that everyone will be resurrected as the same race, gender, and appearance. No longer are there variations in physique or skin colour and I’ll leave you to guess which gender we will all be (hint: it’s a text written by men where all the main characters are men). This radical uniformity leaves John wondering how on earth we will recognise each other in the afterlife. Fair question.
Resurrection is perhaps the most wonderful, and weirdest, of Christian beliefs. That God raised Jesus from the dead defies scientific explanation and rational argument. Yet, since the earliest Christians began preaching, belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus has been central to Christian proclamation.
Even though many in our world might scoff at such a belief today or interpret it as merely symbolic, the bodily nature of Jesus’ resurrection, and ultimately our own, is important for the way we think about hope, healing, disability, our bodies, and the future. Moreover, failing to consider the ways we talk about and imagine resurrection leaves us in danger of doing harm to one another now.
While much could be said about resurrection theology, I think there are two broad areas of importance for contemporary Christians. The first is the meaning of Jesus’ resurrection as God’s ‘no’ to the injustice of state-sanctioned murder and the power of sin in the world. It tells us something about the very nature of God. Secondly, Jesus’ resurrection is the ‘first fruits’ (1 Cor 15:20), a promise that the rest of us will be resurrected one day too. Death is not the final word for us. These two sides of resurrection are good news, but it is the second part of this I want to address here – our bodily resurrection.
Jesus’ body
When we talk about resurrected bodies in the afterlife, heavenly bodies, we often assume they are perfect. Perhaps we imagine them as a perfect version of ourselves, capturing us at an age when we felt good about ourselves or were at our most successful. Thirty is appealing for some of us! Or we might imagine ourselves as what we were like before an illness or pain set in. At a communal level, what that ‘perfection’ looks like differs depending on our own location in the world, our cultural background, and our influences.
This assumption of perfection is interesting given that Jesus own resurrected body is described in the gospels as being scarred: it bears the marks of his life, suffering, and manner of death. One of the most curious things about the gospels is that we get far more descriptions of Jesus’s body after his resurrection than during his earthly life. Jesus’ earthly body was seemingly not anything that warranted comment. We have no clues that he was physically special in any way, nor particularly different. Indeed, we have no physical description of Jesus at all. Until, that is, he is resurrected.
“The challenge for us, is how we create communities where every individual body feels welcome,” writes Robyn Whitaker.
According to the gospels, the first preachers to proclaim “he has been raised from the dead” are Mary, Mary Magdalene, and the other women who go to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body. In John’s gospel, Mary sees and speaks with Jesus but thinks he is a gardener. That is, he is not easily recognisable. Something about him has changed.
Jesus’ resurrected body presents something of a conundrum. The gospel writers describe Jesus as simultaneously recognisable and not. He eats and speaks like others around him, yet can also walk through walls and appear through locked doors. He is not a ghost – the gospels are very clear about that and want you to know he can be touched – but he is also different, not bound by physical limitations.
Most shocking of all, is that Jesus’s resurrected body bears the wounds, the scars, of his death. In Candida Moss’s book, ‘Heavenly Bodies; Resurrecting Perfection in the New Testament and Early Christianity’, she analyses the descriptions of Jesus’ wounds in the Bible and compares them with other ancient medical texts. She argues that the terminology used indicates something more like scars. That is, the marks on Jesus’ feet, hands, and sides are not open wounds – there is no blood or moisture – they are more like sores that are healing over. As scars, they remain a lasting marker of the trauma he has suffered and a sign that healing is possible.
Given that death on a cross was shameful in the ancient world, we might expect the resurrected Jesus to be perfected and have all signs of the crucifixion erased. That is not the case. In fact, it is the opposite. The wounds that reveal Jesus’ shameful death are the precise things that allow Jesus to be identified by his followers. They are, it seems, intrinsic to who he is. Even resurrected, Jesus remains the wounded, crucified Messiah.
What does Jesus’ resurrection mean for our own bodies?
While Paul warned that excessive concern over the nature of resurrected bodies was a fool’s errand (1 Cor 15:35-36), some attention to the assumptions we make and the way we talk about bodies in the afterlife is important because of the implications for life now.
Scholars who work on biblical interpretation and the implications for thinking theologically about disability note the importance of Jesus’ body, and particularly interpretation of his post-resurrection body, for the ways it has shaped understanding of bodies, illness, and healing. One of the themes that has emerged from this scholarship is that our desire for perfect bodies in the afterlife can be damaging to people here, suggesting that to be holy or god-like is to be free of illness, impairment, or disability.
The aforementioned Apocryphal Apocalypse of John was not the only ancient Christian text that expanded upon the gospels with imagined conversations or trips to the afterlife to answer questions about what it will be like. These texts were circulated by Christians for centuries and both reflected and shaped attitudes and theologies. While we might laugh at the idea that we will all be raised as 30-year-old men of the same race, the idea that everyone is conformed to some ‘ideal’ human form in the afterlife is dangerous. Particularly when that ‘ideal’ form becomes white and male.
American scholar Eric Harvey calls this kind of theology ‘heavenly eugenics,’ a reference to the tyranny of uniform ‘normalcy’ in afterlife. This uniformity can take many forms: age, racial conformity, physical conformity, and gender conformity. It is not simple unity. It is the radical eradication of the difference that is part of God’s created order. We do not need to look far back in history to recognise that the effects of such heavenly uniformity bleed over to earth in devastating ways.
“The resurrected, yet scarred, Saviour is God’s promise that death will be transformed into life, pain into joy, and new life with Jesus is beyond anything we can imagine,” writes Robyn Whitaker.
Why does this matter?
Bodies carry our identity. We are embodied beings, not floating souls or spirits. We know one another in our physical forms and our bodies, for all their beauty and disappointment, shape who we are and how we are in the world.
I spent a large part of my adult life, from the ages of 14 to about 35, living with an invisible and debilitating illness. I know what it is like to feel your body has let you down. That illness is not something I’ve spoken about much, mostly because uteruses, pain, and blood are not for casual café conversation. But as someone who has battled, at times, crippling and unpredictable pain and multiple medical procedures, the idea of a future perfected body that is pain free is incredibly appealing.
So what happens to bodies like mine? Or the person who is hearing impaired or who cannot walk? Whether disability remains in the afterlife is a matter that is hotly debated by scholars working on theology and disability. To say disabilities disappear implies the kind of heavenly eugenics mentioned above where the perfected human becomes an able-bodied one. On the other hand, for those whose impairments have been a source of great suffering, hope that healing and transformation from that which limits us is part of God’s good news.
It is important here to distinguish between bodily difference, including difference in abilities, and pain. If we take Jesus’ body as a symbolic for what is possible, we might surmise that the things that are central to our identity remain, but any source of pain or suffering is healed. For Jesus, being crucified is part of who he is as one who loved the world so deeply that he was willing to die. Yet, the wounds that have healed over suggest that his trauma and suffering has been transformed by God and are no longer a source of pain or physical limitation. As the Book of Revelation promises about the future,
“Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.” (21:4)
Why still claim the resurrection then?
Some of you may be thinking that if we just got rid of any unscientific notion of bodily resurrection we wouldn’t have the kinds of problems mentioned above. At one level, I can see the appeal of that. Yet, if we imagine an afterlife that is purely spiritual, we risk denying the importance of our bodies here on earth. This ancient Greek notion that a soul leaves the body at death was strongly rejected by early Christians, in part because it did not reflect Jesus’ resurrection. It also did not align with existing Jewish understandings of humans as spirit-body beings created by God. That our physical bodies will be transformed in some way in the resurrection is a radical affirmation of the created order and God’s care for all creation. It reminds us that bodies matter and what we do to them and with them matters.
Claiming no resurrection at all is different again. It is the denial of a belief that has been central to Christianity for over 2000 years, proclaimed in the Scriptures and in the churches Creeds across denominational bounds. Belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus cannot be extracted from Christian faith.
Ultimately, none of us know precisely what levels of transformation or continuity will mark the afterlife. But we can ensure that bad theology and naïve notions of “perfection” do not cause harm in our communities here. The diversity of our bodies and indeed the created order and the place of difference within the human community are good news.
Australian scholar, Louise Gosbell, reminds us that thinking about resurrected bodies and disabled bodies has a communal aspect. “Redeemed bodies”, she writes, “are bodies that are no longer out of kilter” with their surrounds. When they find their home with God, all bodies are home. For her, New Testament writings about the resurrection allow us to glimpse “what the future resurrection will look like when we can live in perfect communion with God, with one another, and with our own bodies.” The challenge for us, is how we create communities where every individual body feels welcome, included, and treated as an important part of our communal Christian body here on earth.
As we look for the resurrection of the dead this Easter perhaps we might pause to think about our understanding of the “life of the world to come” and how it shapes our attitudes here and now. We do so remembering that the resurrected, yet scarred, Saviour is God’s promise that death will be transformed into life, pain into joy, and new life with Jesus is beyond anything we can imagine.
Robyn Whitaker is Associate Professor of New Testament, Pilgrim Theological College, and Director of The Wesley Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Policy
