About that Wounded Side ...

I don't want to take attention away from Drewdog's attempt to engage us on the “ontological” aspect of what a Christian is. I'm mulling on how to tackle that one. But, while I muddle through that one, I thought I'd toss out a datum on the collateral discussion of the bodily resurrection.

Like every other minister of the gospel of any kind whatsoever, this past Sunday I had some things to say about this. All of them were, I trust, utterly orthodox, conventional, traditional, Biblical; no Marcus Borgian hoohaw about bodiless resurrections.
Without going into a full-blown apologetic for the bodily resurrection of Jesus, I pointed to a couple of facts that argue powerfully for this notion.

On one hand there is the scandalous particularity of the incarnation itself. When the Eternal Son of God becomes incarnate, it's a whole 'nuther ballgame – theologically, philosophically, every-other-wayically. God now has hair on a head and a beard. He has eyes, and they have a color, as does his hair and beard. God has arms and legs, hands and feet, flesh and blood. And, it's not just any old flesh and blood. It's Jewish flesh and blood, taken from the body of His mother. God has a mother now! She birthed him in a scandalously particular place named Bethlehem, at a specific time in history.

You don't go very far with these ideas before you create enough hostility, scandal, and outrage to get yourself crucified. And, then there's the ultimate (up to that point) particularity – God dies.

This kind of thing will spin off in all sorts of directions for fruitful meditation. But, I want to keep the focus on the body. Without a body, there's not death. Jesus gets a body in the first place, precisely so he can die. Spirits don't die; bodies do. Bodies live because a spirit united to them (see Genesis 2 for the details). The spirit departs and the body's dead, as James tells us (Jas. 2).

Ooooookay. The particularity of the Incarnation doesn't “prove” the bodily resurrection, but it is powerfully ... uh ... suggestive, right? I mean what kind of “recovery” or “victory” over death is it if it doesn't entail a bodily resurrection?

And, it is a resurrection of a particular body (in Jesus' case), not a recreation or a renovation or a resuscitation. The body that died is the body that rose from the dead.

How do I know that this is what the Apostles are reporting?

Well, several things – there is sufficient gross continuity between Jesus' body before death and after resurrection that he's recognizable. He was a male before death, and a male after death. His visage either side of death is so similar that the disciples on the Emmaus Road must have their faculties of perception hindered, lest they recognize Him before He pleases.

And, then there's that business with the nail prints in his hands and feet – acquired before death, but present after resurrection. If that's not continuity between the pre-death body and post-resurrection body, I don't know what is.

And, here's the datum I'm still pondering, as I've never seen it treated before – the wound in his side. THAT, dear readers, was acquired AFTER his death but before his resurrection. Yet, it's still there after his resurrection. What do you make of that?

Maybe there's not much to make of that, other than this: that the body of Jesus, his “bodiedness” is so critical, so necessary, so irreducibly a part of his identity that in the resurrection he cannot have a body that lacks this detail, even though he never had it when alive.

What do you make of this?

BQ