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A sermon preached in Salisbury Cathedral by Canon Edward Probert, Chancellor on Sunday 26 April 2009
Acts 3.12-19, Luke 24.36b-48
"THEY GAVE HIM A PIECE OF BROILED FISH"
Acts 3.12-19, Luke 24.36b-48
You may have had very busy and eventful last 2 weeks, but in church terms time has stood still: we are still in the season of Easter, the reading we’ve just heard from the gospel is set by Luke in the late evening of the day of resurrection. So if you think you’ve been busy, spare a thought for the group of people around Jesus as told by Luke, who within a few hours had encountered the empty tomb, had a conversation with an angel, talked long and deep with their Lord on the road before grasping who he was when he broke bread at Emmaeus, had rushed back to Jerusalem and who now met him again, pronouncing peace. They had a lot to digest, and though these were people who had already shown the emotional freedom and courage to set aside their existing attachments and follow Jesus, they now had to grasp the far more unsettling message that their lives, and the life of the whole world, would now be utterly changed.
So it’s right that we as a church are taking our time to reflect on that resurrection - it is the ground on which our life is built. We can’t ‘do’ the resurrection on Easter day and then get on with the rest of life: we have to stay in the resurrection so as to be able to live.
We can’t avoid the fact that the gospel writers found the resurrection of Jesus quite puzzling. If you have ever sat down and gone through these parts of the four gospels and tried to make a single coherent narrative from them, you will have soon found it impossible, and if we add the powerful witness of St Paul in his letters, the picture becomes even more complex. You can see that these people knew beyond doubt that something had happened, something utterly life-changing, something which energised and emboldened people as described in the Acts of the Apostles, something which spread good news like the most virulent infection; they knew that somehow Jesus was alive, and that everything was different. Beyond that broad idea, when it comes to the detail of what happened, there’s very little agreement. Except in one point: in different ways, all the gospels labour the point that Jesus was no ghostly apparition. They tell us the tomb was empty; that he ate fish, broke bread, let them touch him, put their fingers in his wounds. He was very much embodied. It’s interesting that they labour this point, because of course they also tell us that his friends walked along in conversation with him for several miles without knowing him, that he appeared in locked rooms, that he suddenly disappeared from their sight – all things which sound much more like the ways we think of disembodied ghosts.
So why this focus on the reality of the body? Why, at this moment of crescendo, do we come to the frankly mundane sounding sentence: ‘They gave him a piece of broiled fish’?
One of the real dangers for people of faith is that we fail to recognise the importance of the physical, tangible world of which we are part – that we make our faith ‘other worldly’. This has always been a danger – right back in the early centuries of the church when Gnostics denied that God had made the physical world, believed that it was evil, and taught that we had to be saved out of it. But Christians have always believed that all of this is God’s creation, and that it is (at the very least potentially) good. And we know from experience that our bodies are important to us; they can both affect and reflect our inner spiritual condition – pain and pleasure can have spiritual consequences.
Of course we also live with the contrasting danger, of utter obsession with the material world, with the possibility of being absorbed in meeting its needs and desires, and keeping it as we wish it to be and to be seen. This is another impoverished form of life, which has missed out on so much of the realm of imagination and spirit.
And above all we hold a faith that Jesus was both man and God; that in the person most abundantly alive the physical and the spiritual were perfectly joined. So complete was that life that it could not be crushed by death; the scars of life simply were means to ever fuller knowledge of life. This was a life that welled up, poured out, could not be contained. That power of life spilled over into the transformed lives of the confused people who met Jesus that Easter day, and through them to even us, maybe confused in our own ways, but no less near to the fullness of God’s life in Christ.
We, like him, are of the body and of the spirit; the resurrection tells us that the true life is one which does not oppose the physical, but goes beyond it. With our bodies, and our hearts and minds, we are called to live to God’s glory.
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So it’s right that we as a church are taking our time to reflect on that resurrection - it is the ground on which our life is built. We can’t ‘do’ the resurrection on Easter day and then get on with the rest of life: we have to stay in the resurrection so as to be able to live.
We can’t avoid the fact that the gospel writers found the resurrection of Jesus quite puzzling. If you have ever sat down and gone through these parts of the four gospels and tried to make a single coherent narrative from them, you will have soon found it impossible, and if we add the powerful witness of St Paul in his letters, the picture becomes even more complex. You can see that these people knew beyond doubt that something had happened, something utterly life-changing, something which energised and emboldened people as described in the Acts of the Apostles, something which spread good news like the most virulent infection; they knew that somehow Jesus was alive, and that everything was different. Beyond that broad idea, when it comes to the detail of what happened, there’s very little agreement. Except in one point: in different ways, all the gospels labour the point that Jesus was no ghostly apparition. They tell us the tomb was empty; that he ate fish, broke bread, let them touch him, put their fingers in his wounds. He was very much embodied. It’s interesting that they labour this point, because of course they also tell us that his friends walked along in conversation with him for several miles without knowing him, that he appeared in locked rooms, that he suddenly disappeared from their sight – all things which sound much more like the ways we think of disembodied ghosts.
So why this focus on the reality of the body? Why, at this moment of crescendo, do we come to the frankly mundane sounding sentence: ‘They gave him a piece of broiled fish’?
One of the real dangers for people of faith is that we fail to recognise the importance of the physical, tangible world of which we are part – that we make our faith ‘other worldly’. This has always been a danger – right back in the early centuries of the church when Gnostics denied that God had made the physical world, believed that it was evil, and taught that we had to be saved out of it. But Christians have always believed that all of this is God’s creation, and that it is (at the very least potentially) good. And we know from experience that our bodies are important to us; they can both affect and reflect our inner spiritual condition – pain and pleasure can have spiritual consequences.
Of course we also live with the contrasting danger, of utter obsession with the material world, with the possibility of being absorbed in meeting its needs and desires, and keeping it as we wish it to be and to be seen. This is another impoverished form of life, which has missed out on so much of the realm of imagination and spirit.
And above all we hold a faith that Jesus was both man and God; that in the person most abundantly alive the physical and the spiritual were perfectly joined. So complete was that life that it could not be crushed by death; the scars of life simply were means to ever fuller knowledge of life. This was a life that welled up, poured out, could not be contained. That power of life spilled over into the transformed lives of the confused people who met Jesus that Easter day, and through them to even us, maybe confused in our own ways, but no less near to the fullness of God’s life in Christ.
We, like him, are of the body and of the spirit; the resurrection tells us that the true life is one which does not oppose the physical, but goes beyond it. With our bodies, and our hearts and minds, we are called to live to God’s glory.