The Resurrection! So what?

St Andrew Dung-Lac & Companions: 1 Mac 6.1-13 and Luke 20.27-40
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory, Irving, TX

Our salvation as members of the Body of Christ is not a rescue operation. We are not like those cruise ship adventurers in the Antarctica who needed to be pulled from the ice flows: in immediate danger of death, helpless to help ourselves, and desperate for someone, anyone to throw us a life-line. Neither is our salvation as member of the Body of Christ a matter of “Me and Jesus,” just me and the Lord tooling around heaven on our private cloud, a VIP life in eternity where my boy Jesus takes care of me. Our salvation as members of the Body of Christ is a matter of the resurrection of the body, both mine and ours. Yours and ours. We are saved corporately. And the dogma of the resurrection of the dead, of the flesh, of the body spells this out for us. Our life here together prefigures or presages our perfected lives together in the Beatific Vision. We have died together in the waters of baptism. We have risen together out of those same waters. We live a new life together now as new creations, and though we will each die, we will rise again. From the dead? Yes. In the flesh? Yes. As a body? Yes. And we will do all of this b/c our God is a God of the living not the dead. Why? For God “all are alive.”

We would need several days and lots of good, strong Starbucks coffee (or several bottles of good bourbon!) to work our way through the biblical, philosophical, theological history of and all the nuances of what it means for us to be raised from the dead as a body in the flesh. Dogmatically, we know this will happen. What will this resurrection look like? I mean, with camcorder in hand and a crystal clear digital mpeg file to review later, what would a person rising from the dead actually look like? We have no idea. Well, that’s not entirely true. It would look like Jesus’ vacating his Good Friday tomb, but do we really know what that looked like? No. We only know that the tomb was empty on Easter morning. Nothing remained of our Lord but his burial garments and the inferno of faith possessed by those who spread the Good News of his departure. We know this: without the resurrection of Christ from the dead as a body in the flesh, there is no resurrection of his Body, the Church. We remain in the grave, dead and decomposing. We thrive then on the hope of our resurrection; that is, we prosper, abundantly flourish on the sure knowledge that just as we have died with Christ, risen with Christ, and lived with him to become Christ for others, our hope is that we will rise again with him on the last day.

So what? Good question. Here’s another good question: do you live right now “as if” you were already resurrected? Are you a glorified person? One who is radiant with the glory of God? Are you an indisputable sign of Christ’s coming, his death, and his rising from the dead? We can argue endlessly about the physics and metaphysics of our resurrection, but the point for us now, this morning, is take seriously, deadly seriously, how we live these gifted-hours as women and men who accept the Lord’s promise of eternal life. Are you living an eternal life now? Dependent on God’s generosity? Loosed from the bonds of rebellious passion? Freed from the death of sin? Are you a child of the living God, the One for Whom “all are alive”? If not, then you will end your gifted-days with King Antiochus, crying on your death-bed, “I know that this is why these evils have overtaken me; and now I am dying in a foreign land bitterly grieved.”