STEPHEN MOTYER

‘Is my spirit really the only bit of me that matters?’

“You don’t really believe that, do you?” I remember the squirming embarrassment as it came out that, yes, I really did believe in the empty tomb, vacated by the resurrected body of Jesus. She looked at me with a mixture of pity and incomprehension that I could sacrifice my intellect in this medieval way. I so wanted to be cool and sophisticated and intellectually sharp, and now I’d blown it.

Where does resurrection “point”? Away from intellectual openness and clarity, it seems, and towards the lunatic fringe where people believe 10 impossible things before breakfast every day, and on Sundays the most impossible of all – that a corpse, 36 hours after death in a hot climate, suddenly returned to vigorous life, and that this miracle somehow conferred deity on the subject.

Do I have to keep company with the lunatic fringe, to believe in the Resurrection of Jesus and indeed of me? Some Christians, of course, have found refuge in the Jenkins compromise – I refer to the former Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, who caused anguish in the Church of England 30 years ago by (apparently) referring to the Resurrection as “a conjuring trick with bones”, and by promoting the view that the Resurrection stories were the early Christians’ way of asserting their belief in the continued “livingness” of Jesus: they experienced him as alive among them, and to this experience the presence or not of a body in a tomb was (and is) irrelevant.

Attractive, cool, spiritual, nicely marrying “modern” scepticism to postmodern subjectivism – a view to keep the baying dogs of mindless supernaturalism behind bars. But it means selling out to Greek dualism, and I’m not sure that’s a price worth paying, much though I love the Greeks. Do I really want a view that makes my “spirit” the only bit of me – and of Jesus – that really matters? If I just connect with him “spiritually” then I have to leave my body behind – check my body into the cloakroom in the church porch so that I can get into the spirit for the worship.

Many of us do that anyway – but it’s not a good idea. It’s more cool, actually, to be brazenly bodies in worship: to dress up, to dress down, to wave arms or not, to fling ourselves around or stay still to feel him in our guts (our splangchna, our “bowels” where the love and longing of Jesus are felt, according to Philippians 1:8 – three cheers to the Greeks for this great word!) If the early Christians were into comfortable Greek dualism, distinguishing neatly between spirit and body, they might have been up for the Jenkins compromise. But they weren’t. They used words like splangchna to express their spiritual feelings.

Give yourself a pinch. That’s you. The point of resurrection is – God wants to give you life, in all your earthy bodyliness. So he gave it to Jesus first. It’s a good idea.

Stephen Motyer is a lecturer in New Testament studies and hermeneutics at London School of Theology

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LUCY BERRY

‘It’s the murder of precious, toxic and graceless ways of being’

Okay, for me, this is the point of resurrection. This is what I have come to believe; and what I manage to remember on bad days: Our resurrections come from killing the ways in which we separate ourselves from the love of Christ.

Resurrection is real; it’s possible and it’s personal. It’s the murder of our most precious, toxic, graceless ways of being; and their astonishing re-membering into something that can live. And it’s entirely non-cerebral; pain, not brain brings us to it. Acceptance of our isolation, recognition of our powerlessness, and the courage to hope are the tools which get us through it.

Most of us, Christians included, live our lives fighting resurrection; it goes against human experience of loss. We know that people die; we know that relationships die; we know nothing wonderful was ever lived twice. So we find bleak, irreverent ways of managing, and ultimately numbing, that human pain.

Here are some of the ways we may do it. We drink, (or eat, or exercise, or do drugs, or gamble, or work, or think) too much. Or we worship and idol-ise a human being. Some of us substitute sex for love. Or we wallow. Or purge. We rage. We theorise. Or we exercise servility. We sulk and bully. We envy and jeer. We withdraw. We withhold. We regulate. We deny joy by refusing hope and by risking nothing. Most dangerous of all, we judge. Not everyone does all these things; but most of us do some. If we do lots we reign as the tiny, shrinking gods of lonely kingdoms. And we do it because, though such control separates us from salvation now, it separated us from ancient pain – once.

If we cope this way, it’s not in our interests to believe in resurrection. For resurrection doesn’t happen on our terms. God doesn’t do terms. Resurrection is not something you negotiate.

So, of course, our temptation is to cling to these shabby old ways; to visit them, to cuddle them, to fondle them. And to theologise along the lines of: “Jesus died and rose again so that we don’t have to.” No. Jesus died and rose again so that we could trust the danger, the pain and the outcome.

So, I believe this: you consent to the murder of all your shabby, nasty darlings. And you wait in the dark, unclothed of childish things, for God-knows how long. In darkness you bear truths, remember happiness, pray honestly; after an unspecified time you collapse and succumb to hope and love. The tomb opens.

You see out, all self-built confidence destroyed, and risk a step forward; no longer a god, but God’s.

Lucy Berry is minister of Bethnal Green Meeting House United Reformed Church, London