(Luke 24:36-49)

The key to how I interpret this passage is Jesus having a piece of broiled fish and eating it in the presence of his disciples (Lk 24:42). This is one of three post-resurrection meals for Jesus. As well as this meal he had breakfast by the sea of Tiberias and an evening meal in a village near Emmaus. Jesus was hungry after all he had been through dying . He did not come back as a disembodied spirit but as a living, eating, talking, touching human being.

This idea of the physical nature of the resuurection can easily get lost in the sadness we might feel at someone’s death. At funeral services I will often hear different versions of the same idea which is that death releases our spirit and the spirit lives on in and around us. Death is nothing at all I have only slipped away into the next room, I am I and you are you; whatever we were to each other that we still are. One minister at a funeral service released some doves into the air as a dramatic illustration of this idea. I have done it myself. At the funeral of a young child drowned at sea, I wrote a poem comparing him to a sea gull that had flown away – ‘The dead are seagulls we see no more, so continue to cry but have peace inside.

This line of thought is attractive but it is almost certainly not main stream Christian thinking. It has more in common with the ideas of Platonism or Hinduism which thinks in terms of an indistinguishable human essence which is reborn after the person dies. It appears comforting but it does not offer me any real comfort because it is telling me that the only thing that endures and therefore the only thing that actually matters is spiritual. It appears to cut across the earthly, physical, passionate shared reality that has happened to me during my life – do these all disappear like a puff of smoke in the face of eternity? The idea that it is only the spiritual that survives drains the significance from what is happening here and now.

The Christian faith teaches that the physical as well as the spiritual side of who we are as we remains beyond the grave. Jesus’ resurrection appearances were as a physical being eating a meal with the marks of his crucifixion still visible. (Wright 2003:478) uses the phrase ‘transphysicality’ to describe this - a body that was still robustly physical but also significantly different from the present one.

History matters because human beings matter; human beings matter because creation matters; creation matters because the creator matters (Wright 2003:737)

The idea of a bodily resurrection draws a direct link between the temporal and the eternal since what happens to me now is a part of who I will become. The fact that Jesus wants the disciples to recognise that it his crucifixion body (Luke 24:39) means that the most gruesome of experiences remains a part of who he has become after his death. The present physical body is not fully affirmed but it is not to be abandoned as it stands. It is to be transformed, changed from present humiliation to new glory (Php 3:21). The promise of resurrection is restoration and fulfilment not avoidance and escape. Our life now is a glimpse of the eternal life which is to come