In The Flesh
An Earth Sunday sermon by Currie Burris
John 20: 19-31
April 23, 2006
On the evening of that very first day of the resurrection, Jesus came and stood with the disciples in the place where they were hiding in fear. The very first thing he said to them was “Peace be unto you.” Then he showed them the nail marks in his hands and the place in his side where the spear had pierced him. The disciples recognized him immediately. He then repeated, “Peace be unto you,” to allay their fears and put them at rest.
Then he did an amazing thing. He breathed on them, and he gave them the Holy Spirit. He breathed on them . . . You can almost feel and smell the warm air from inside his lungs washing over them. The gift of the Holy Spirit, that most spiritual, untouchable, uncontainable, unfathomable of gifts is given with the most personal, intimate, most physical of expressions—the breath of life. It’s real. It’s body and soul.
Thomas was not there when all this happened. When he came to the room and heard from the others, he didn’t take their word for it. He said that unless he saw the nail marks, and he actually touched them, and placed his own hand into the wound on Jesus’ side, he would not believe that the resurrection had actually happened.
Then a week later, again in the upper room, Jesus came and stood with them. This time Thomas was there. “Peace be unto you,” were Jesus’ words. Then without waiting for Thomas to repeat his demand, Jesus offered his hands and his side for Thomas to touch. With this Thomas is satisfied. “My Lord and my God.”
Thomas not only needed to see Jesus, but he needed to touch, physically, the body of the risen Lord. He needed to be convinced that what all the others were experiencing was not a ghost, not an apparition, not an impostor, or not a group hallucination. The living Jesus was someone who could be touched, someone who ate and drank, who laughed and cried, who breathed, who coughed and sweated—someone who suffered, who bled and who really died. For Jesus to be Jesus, he had to be physical. He had to be a body.
John 1 said that the eternal Word of God—that which was from the beginning of all time and who, out of and through whom, all things heaven and earth were made—that Word became flesh and dwell among us. It does not say that the Word took on the ‘appearance of’ flesh, or ‘dwell within’ a body of flesh, or ‘seemed’ like a body or took on the ‘shell’ of a body. No, the Word actually became flesh. The eternal Word of God became a living, breathing human being.
Throughout Jesus’ life we see a real person with aches and pains, with joys and sorrows, someone who ate at banquets, who drank at weddings, who labored at work, someone who needed rest and refreshment, someone who no doubt had all the same bodily functions as you and me. He hugged. He kissed. In fact he was accused of being too physical—he was called a wine bibbler, a partier when all other prophets like John denied bodily needs.
He was a human being with a body and all its flesh, blood and bones. He ate with sinners. He drank water given to him from outcasts. He spat on the ground and put mud on the eyes of a blind man. His feet were washed with tears of a woman. He washed the feet of his friends. He was betrayed with a kiss. He was beaten and flogged. His flesh was ripped and torn. His body was crucified. His body really died. And when he was raised to new life, it wasn’t just his spirit, it wasn’t just his soul. His body was raised, flesh and bone.
Some of you have heard, no doubt, about a recently discovered ancient manuscript called the “Gospel of Judas.” It was found in a cave in Egypt. The fragments of the manuscript have been assembled and translated. Radiological dating confirms that it is not a modern forgery but really dates to about 300 years after Jesus’ birth. The book was not a real gospel, not written by one of the original followers of Jesus, but was probably written in the second century AD, long after the other gospels were written. It represents the testimony of a heretical offshoot of the early Christian church called the “Gnostics.” They believed that they had secret knowledge about God that no else possessed. They also believed that the physical body was evil and an illusion and that only the inner soul or spirit was real and good.
This Gospel of Judas claims to be the record of a secret relationship between Jesus and Judas, where Jesus secretly asks Judas to betray him in order to fulfill his predicted death and resurrection. In that book, Jesus says that in sending him to his death, Judas would be doing him a great service, freeing Jesus’ true spirit from the shell of a body that holds him captive. Here, Jesus longs to be free of the body so that his true nature could live. The Gnostics preached a message that shunned all things physical, a supreme detachment from all that was flesh and bone. They were declared heretical exactly because of this anti-body bias. The Gospel of Judas betrays the real Jesus who was always in the body, always flesh, and always was with and one of us.
Jesus was real flesh and bone because I am real flesh and bone. To be with us is to be with us in the body. We breath, we eat, we sleep, we work, we play, we love, we hate, we suffer, we grieve, we bleed, and we die all in the body. To be human is to be physical. To be spiritual is not and can never be separated from the physical. Spirit and body are united. The Word made flesh.
This is true for all living things, for all of God’s creation. This week we celebrate Earth Day, a day in which we raise up the interconnectedness of all living things. We sound a call for all of us to take care of the earth, to protect the web of life, and care for the systems of water and air, food and resources on which we all depend. As Psalm 24 says, “The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it; for he founded it upon the seas and established it upon the waters.” God created the world and there is no place in all the universe that does not bear the mark of the creator’s hand. All of creation is holy.
The pure physicality of the created universe is imbued with the holiness of its creator. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” (John 1:1,2) The physical incarnation of God in Christ is the crowning embodiment of the first act of creation.
I am convinced that all the environmental destruction we face today, the rape of the land, the pollution of the waters and the seas, the pollution of the air, the poisoning of rivers and streams, the destruction of whole species of wildlife, the warming of the planet’s atmosphere—at its core, all of it is the result of the denial of the holiness of God’s created world. We live in the world as functional Gnostics, treating the earth as a meaningless shell and denying the sacredness of real flesh and bone, embodied life. Love the earth, love God.
On that same day that Jesus was raised, he appeared to two of his disciples on the Road to Emmaus. Amazingly they did not recognize him as they walked next to them on the road. But as they sat down for a meal, as Jesus broke bread and ate it with them—as he physically shared with them the substance of bodily life—just like Thomas did later—they recognized him in the breaking of bread.
Some days later, again Jesus stood among them on the shore of Galilee as they were fishing. And again they didn’t recognize him at first. But after they hauled in a net-breaking catch, they saw him sitting on the shore, roasting some fish. “Come and have breakfast” Jesus said. And he gave them bread and some fish. Was it carp or tilapia? I can smell burning coals, the smoky scent. I can feel the chill of the morning air. I can smell the sweet smoky meat on the open flame. I can taste the bread and fish sandwich. And no one has to ask who it is, for now they know it is Him.