“Take off the grave clothes and let him go.”

Jesus Christ, John ch 11, vs 44

Welcome to our Thought for Easter week, and to our guest presenter, Revd. Canon Rosie Harper. For those who need reason and logic in which to ground their faith, I hope you will find her explanation of resurrection useful, also drawing on the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead:

“I wonder what you really believe about resurrection?

Around Easter time it’s all you ever hear about, and of course it’s a central doctrine of the Christian faith. We say the Easter greeting: ‘Christ is risen, He is risen indeed, Alleluia!’ We proclaim it every week in the words of the creed, and of course it’s always there in the prayers at a funeral. Of course you believe it — don’t you?

I suppose all of us have stood at the crematorium, or at a graveside with hearts well nigh bursting with grief, and it might have gone through your mind — it has certainly gone through mine — ‘what if it’s not true after all? What if the whole concept of resurrection is an illusion? What if this is really the end — and we won’t ever see them again?’ And, of course, that’s what a very large number of people — intelligent, sensible people all round the world — do think.

So: what is it exactly that we are claiming when we use the term ‘resurrection’?

In one story in the bible, the one about Jesus’s friend Lazarus, it seems fairly clear. Lazarus was dead: well dead, dead to the point decomposition, and in response to the command of Jesus he becomes alive again. There were people there, lots of people, and they saw it happen, and we now have the written witness reports. Lazarus would of course die naturally in the fulness of time. His resurrection was, as it were, temporary. It’s not really so problematic. You could choose to believe it, or not, but it is clear that if you had been there yourself you could have made up your own mind, because there was Lazarus, just the same human Lazarus, walking around and clearly alive in the same way as you and I are alive.

Resurrection like Jesus’s resurrection, resurrection which we rely on when someone we love dies, resurrection which entails heaven, that sort of resurrection is far more tricky.

So, what exactly might we think happens? Mostly we say that we simply don’t know. We say that it is a matter of trust. We know from the bible that it happens, and it is not within our ability to understand. Faith is needed, not reason.

Now while that is undoubtedly true, I don’t think that we can suddenly allow this to be a part of the Christian faith where we have to abandon our minds.

So which way shall we jump? Many thinkers, such as for example Plato and Descartes, have a model of personhood which is that the soul is the real me and it is trapped in the body which it drives, rather like a ghost in a machine. This soul pre-exists our conception and it survives the death of the body. In the fullness of time after death, this soul is united to a new body.

This is a very commonly-held view. It is one which has become part of the way we talk.  When someone dies, we say ‘she’s not really there any more, her soul has gone to heaven.’ Or think of someone who has a so-called ‘out of body experience’. This seems to happen at a time of extreme medical emergency, when someone could be deemed to have died for a short period of time. Such a person might describe leaving their body and floating above it. They might be able to see what’s going on and then, as they are stabilised medically, they re-join their body and return to normal. This might even have happened to you!

It’s really a sort of dualism which puts our souls in a different category from the rest of us.

Modern science has made this view much more difficult to hold. In particular, we might ask what is the relationship between our soul and our brain. We know that brain states can be affected by our bodies and that drugs can easily affect our minds. An operation can alter a person’s whole personality and memory. Given that the brain is the seat of our emotions, memory and actions, does this mean that our souls are similarly affected? Could my soul possibly survive if my brain does not?

Many people feel not. The view is called Monism and it has a holistic view of what it is to be a person. It means that, if we are to survive death as individuals, we must survive with our present identity retained. We must survive death as persons. So you see, when we die, when our body stops, then we are completely dead. There is no separate soul which floats off somewhere else. Then, when we are raised from the dead it is the whole of us which is raised.

Christianity has, since the early centuries when the beliefs of the Church were first formulated, always affirmed the resurrection of the body. This was remarkable, because the prevailing philosophical climate was dominated by Greek thought which tended to think in terms of the soul alone surviving death. It would have been logical for this emergent new religion to follow the same line. To claim that the body survived death in the face of the very clear evidence that dead bodies rotted and decayed could easily have made Christianity appear absurd.

There are two main reasons for this belief in the resurrection of the whole person. Firstly: Jesus himself. He had appeared to the disciples, and hundreds of others, not as a disembodied spirit, but as a resurrected person who could walk and talk with his friends and even eat food with them. He was, however, a special kind of person, since he could appear in a locked room. Pre-mortem Jesus seemed remarkably similar to post-mortem Jesus, even down to the imprint of the nails in his hands.

Secondly, Christianity has never denied the importance of the physical world. The incarnation is about God taking human flesh and making this flesh — and with it the world we live in — holy. The physical world is not in some way a second-class category in comparison with spiritual, disembodied souls.

It seems very clear to me that both the account of the resurrection of Lazarus and, of course, the whole of the Easter story are pointing us firmly in this direction. The very suffering, the physical agony of Christ seems to show that in his death as in his resurrection, the whole person of Jesus is involved. This seems theologically right and necessary, but it does leave us with the tricky problem of the irrefutable evidence that our bodies turn to dust after our death.

Well, let me try this example. I think it works.

In my study I have a computer. I have written this talk on the computer and then printed it out. I’ve preached these words as a sermon. When I went home, I took the physical copy, which by then was tatty, had coffee spilt on it and was a bit torn round the edges, and I put it in the bin. It will get burnt or end up in some landfill site. To all extents and purposes this sermon will be gone. But, of course, I can go to my computer and print out a new one. It will have all the same words, the same layout, spelling, punctuation and so on. It will be in every way the same sermon, except that it will be printed on a pristine new piece of paper. I could, if I wished, transmit it via satellite to, say, Sydney where an identical sermon would then be printed out.

A similar process might happen to us after death. God our creator knows our detailed specification, including all our DNA and our memories. So when someone dies, God could, using new materials, reproduce that person. St Paul talks of us having a new and glorified body, and there could be parallels here, possibly with defects in our bodies being rectified.

Now I really hope you are still with me, because the reason I’ve taken time to explore whether it is in any way reasonable to believe in resurrection is because it is so vitally important. It is the crucial truth of our faith. Paul knew it: if Christ is not raised, your faith is in vain — and there are times in all our lives when belief in the resurrection is what keeps us going. The belief gives us a deeper and stronger trust in God’s eventual plan for all of us. The resurrection is not a whimsical idea, a piece of magic, a concept you can only believe in if you throw your mind out of the window.

Of course, there cannot be proof which does not involve faith. If it was clear beyond any doubt, then we would have our free will to choose to love God taken away. But faith and reason go hand in hand, and they provide us with a glimpse of the great good that God in his love has in store for all who choose to accept that freely-given love. 

So, take courage in these days before Easter, and allow the risen Christ to draw close to you in your daily life in the knowledge that he really will be with you — for ever”.

Gavin Oldham OBE - and with thanks to Revd. Canon Rosie Harper

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