He didn't especially want
to do it. But he knew he didn't have that much of a choice after
all. The aging scholar stood in the study of the school he'd founded
in Caesarea; scrolls and manuscripts piled around him, and his new
stenographers sat nearby, waiting to take dictation. Origen was the
leading Christian thinker of the mid-third century. No wonder he'd
been chosen for such a thankless job. He'd been born and raised in
Alexandria, the dazzling city above all Egypt; his father had been a
literature professor who, as an outspoken believer, was beheaded in
one of the persecutions. Origen made ends meet by getting a job in
the church schools, and did his writing late at night. His genius
proved itself.
It was in those early
days as a young teacher that he'd managed to win back from heresy a
wealthy young government official named Ambrose. Ah, Ambrose – it
was his fault he had to do this now. Ambrose, now his patron and
sponsor, was always commissioning one book after another, and pressed
him into labor like the Egyptians did the Hebrews! “God's
taskmaster,” Origen grumbled – feh! Well, in time, both of them
left Alexandria – Ambrose retired as a deacon in Nicomedia, Origen
went to the Holy Land – but Ambrose's money bankrolled this
school Origen started there, so he had little choice but to heed
his friend's requests.
Usually, Origen didn't
much mind. He'd enjoyed writing the treatise on prayer, he'd had fun
with commentaries, but this last project was another matter. A few
years before Origen was born, an Alexandrian philosopher by the name
of Celsus had written a scathing attack on Christianity – the most
comprehensive one to date. The church had responded to this
so-called True Word by
saying... nothing. It had been ignored, but still had currency with
leading pagans. It was a challenge no one had dared take up.
Ambrose commissioned Origen to be the first to do it, over seventy
years after its publication. Origen personally thought it better to
let Celsus' book fade into obscurity, but he found its contents
insulting enough to raise his ire, and Ambrose wouldn't let up 'til
he followed through anyway, so... here he went. Origen gritted his
teeth as he read.
Celsus
had found a lot of things to criticize about the Christian faith,
which he considered a dangerous and base superstition for unlettered
simpletons, something no serious philosopher would ever take up. He
slammed Jesus as a petty magician and fraud, invented contradictions
left and right, sneered at fundamental truths, but the greatest
target Celsus found was the Christians' hope for their future: this
absurdity called bodily resurrection. Celsus found it nauseating.
Celsus didn't get why Christians were so hung up on the body. It's
irrational, he said, to be “so attached to the body” as to hope
to get it back – after all, bodies are impure. It's absurd to, “on
the one hand, make so much of the body as you do, to expect that the
same body will rise again, as though it were the best and most
precious part of us,” and yet on the other hand to willingly face
martyrdom and torture that wrecks the body (C. Cels.
8.49).
Celsus
fiercely lambasted the Christian idea as “absolutely the hope of
worms.” After all, what other kind of creature would want a body
back after it's been rotted? And what kind of body could be restored
to its original condition after complete decay? The body at that
point, Celsus thought, should just be tossed aside as “more
worthless than dung,” being “full of things it isn't pretty to
describe,” and no good and reasonable God would want anything to do
with them. More than that, no good and reasonable God would act so
“contrary to nature,” contrary to his own reason woven into the
universe, as to reverse the natural process of decay he ordained.
And surely no good and reasonable God would do a 'shameful' thing
like giving everlasting life to a body (C. Cels.
5.14). The very idea is stupid and obscene!
That's
what Origen heard as he read Celsus' book. Celsus had no room in his
philosophy for resurrection of the body. Neither had many of the
scoffers who'd faced Paul at Mars Hill. Neither did many of the
other critics of Christianity in Origen's days and the centuries to
come – they all focused in on this idea of bodily resurrection as a
problem, as an absurdity. The path of least resistance would, of
course, have been to say, “You're all so right, what a silly idea.
There is no resurrection; when we die, our immortal souls just live
forever in a celestial realm with God.” Which is what many
professing Christians today believe, and what many pagans believed,
but not, as it turns out, what the Bible teaches or what the
Christians of Origen's day believed. So for all the pagan
objections, still Christians gathered in catacombs, still Christians
treated kindly the relics of martyrs, still Christians insisted that
these very bodies were not bridges to be burned or temporary
'ornaments' for the soul, but crucial to God's plan for us – and
for our future.
Where
did they get ideas like that? How did early Greek- and
Latin-speaking Christians get so out of step with sophisticated Greek
and Roman culture? How have serious Christians today gotten so out
of step with popular American culture? It was from reading passages
like the one we read this morning, and many others. For the first
generation of Christian writers, bearing witness of what they
themselves had seen and heard, make clear that when God sent his Son
into the world, it wasn't as a mirage but in a real human body, in
real human flesh: “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh”
(1 John 4:2). The witnesses insisted that with their own hands they
had touched the word of life (1 John 1:1-2). And so Jesus, the
Christ, was really crucified and really died bodily – it was a
real, tangible, material human body that died. And then, on the third day, “he
was raised from the dead”
(John 21:14). And what they meant was that his body – yes, the
very same, numerically identical, material human body that had been
pierced and scarred during the crucifixion – was restored to life –
a new kind of life, but life all the same for that very same body of
Jesus, so that Jesus was not playing pretend when he showed the
disciples his mortal wounds, was not playing pretend when he ate
supper with them, was not playing pretend when he let them touch him
– it was the very same body.
Not
everyone gets that. If Jehovah's Witnesses knock on your door, and
you press them on the question, you'll find out they don't believe in
the bodily resurrection of Jesus. They don't believe in immaterial
souls, so they think people are totally annihilated when they die.
So when they talk about the 'resurrection' of Jesus, they think he
was somehow re-created by God as an angel, and that what the
disciples saw was not a real tangible human body at all, but a
'spirit being' in temporary human likeness. They say they believe in
the 'resurrection,' but they don't believe in what the word actually
means. They don't believe the body that was in the tomb was raised.
But that's exactly what real Christians believe, because it's exactly
what really happened that Sunday.
Celsus
would scoff. He thought the report of Jesus alive again could be
traced back to “a hysterical female” who shouldn't be believed
and a bunch of liars who thought they'd impress their friends with
the story (C. Cels.
2.55). But that doesn't hold water. Jesus is risen, Jesus is alive!
And when we say that he's risen, what we mean is that he – body
and spirit, the whole soul, the whole embodied human self – is alive in a
real human body, numerically the same body that was born to Mary in
Bethlehem, numerically the same body that touched the skin of lepers
and the eyes of the blind and the tongues of the speechless,
numerically the same body that broke the bread and passed the cup,
numerically the same body that was pinned to the cross with Roman
nails – yes, the same material human body is alive.
What
happened? We read: “God raised him from the dead”
(Acts 13:30). And that
changes everything.
God cannot be known the same way before and after he does something
like that. For the people of Israel, when the God they knew did
something so radical, it changed the way they talked about him.
After the exodus, they had to talk about him in new ways: “Yahweh,
your God, [who] brought you out of [Egypt] with a mighty hand and an
outstretched arm”
(Deuteronomy 5:15). And the same way, when we've looked at the cross
and then looked to Jesus risen from the dead, we can't be content
with the same way of understanding God. He's redefined himself by
what he's done for and through and in Jesus. And now we understand
him as a God of Resurrection. Now we know him as “the
One who raised Jesus from the dead”
– Paul repeats that title twice (Romans 8:11). Now, the first
thing that should come to our mind when we pick out the real God from
all the fakes and frauds is this: the real God is the one we can
fairly call 'Jesus-Raiser.' That is the defining act of God in the
world. That is who our God is: Jesus-Raiser, Christ-Raiser, God of
Resurrection, “the
One who raised Jesus from the dead.”
How?
We hear a few things. “God raised the Lord … by his
power” (1 Corinthians 6:14).
“Christ was raised from the dead by the glory
of the Father”
(Romans 6:5). And now we hear that the resurrection had a lot to do
with the Holy Spirit: the Spirit is described in today's passage as
the agency through which the Father raised the Son from the dead
(Romans 8:9-11). And this same Spirit is active in believers. Paul
does not say that the Spirit is active in believers who get it all
right. Paul does not say that the Spirit is active in believers who
do X and Y and Z. Paul does not say the Spirit is active in special
elite 'super-Christians.' Paul says that the Spirit is for all
Christians, all
believers.
“Anyone
who does not have the Spirit of Christ”
– that is, God's Spirit, which is the same as Christ's Spirit,
because the Son is one with the Father – “does
not belong to him”
(Romans 8:9). You cannot be in Christ without receiving the Spirit;
nor can you receive the Spirit if you aren't in Christ. What follows
is that, if you are a believer, the Spirit is in you – you don't
have to doubt it! Paul writes elsewhere that “no
one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except in the Holy Spirit”
(1 Corinthians 12:3). If you can confess and submit to Jesus as
Lord, if you can receive and believe the apostolic faith, it's
because the Spirit of God is in you, making that possible. Without
the Spirit, no one can confess him, belong to him, have their
identity and their self wrapped up with him. No one without the
Spirit can have their life “hidden
with Christ in God”
(Colossians 3:3).
What's
more, it's true that our bodies are dead. Even now, before we die,
there's something already dead about them – they're mortal, they're
sickly, they're always slowly dying off. Why? Paul writes, “The
body is dead because of sin”
(Romans 8:10). That whole process is because of sin's infection,
sin's grip, sin's diseasing and damning presence. That's the reason Paul had to
lament that Israel, like
everybody else in the world, lived in a “body
of death”
(Romans 7:24). “The
wages of sin is death,”
he said (Romans 3:23). Even James tells us, “Sin,
when it is fully grown, brings forth death”
(James 1:15). But there's more to the story.
Paul
goes on to write, “If
Christ is in you..., the Spirit is life because of righteousness”
(Romans 8:10). That is, if you are connected to Jesus, it happened
through the Spirit. If Christ is present in your existence, that
means the Spirit is in you, is in your very body, owing to the
righteousness and faithfulness of Jesus. And the Spirit of God is no
lifeless thing, no tame thing! The Spirit of God is lively! The
Spirit of God is exciting! The Spirit of God is wild! The Spirit of
God fell with tongues of fire (Acts 2:3-4)! The Spirit goes wherever
the Spirit wants – beyond our prediction, beyond our expectation,
beyond our control – “the
Spirit blows where he wishes, and you hear his sound, but you don't
know where he comes from or where he's going”
(John 3:8). Don't be fooled by the Spirit's tendency to whisper,
because the Spirit is alive, the Spirit is lively, the Spirit is life in you.
And
if the Spirit is life in you, if the Spirit is in your body, that changes
everything about what you should expect – not just during the dash
on your tombstone, but whether your tombstone is a permanent record
to begin with. The trouble is, our pop theology falls so short of
the biblical vision. Let's face it, what do we usually expect? How
does that song go? “When we all get to heaven, / what a day of
rejoicing that will be...” Except, the Bible says very little
about Christians 'going to heaven when they die.' Oh, there are
hints here and there about that, but the immediate fate of believers
who are 'absent from the body' just doesn't interest the prophets and
apostles very much. The focus isn't on life after death, but more on
what one theologian nicknamed “life after
life after death.” So why does our pop theology, why does our folk
belief, focus so much on what the Bible is mostly silent on, and
ignore so much of what the Bible screams?
The
focus of the Christian hope is not
about 'going to heaven when we die.' The focus of the Christian hope
is about what happens after
that. Paul didn't entirely look forward to 'going to heaven' –
sure, he looked forward to being in the Lord's presence, but being
“away from the
body”
would be like being “unclothed,”
like being “found
naked,”
he lamented (2 Corinthians 5:3-8). The real good stuff, the best
stuff, happens when we don't have to choose between being “at
home in the body” and
“at home with
the Lord”
– the day will come, Paul tells us, when we get both. To be at
home in
the body and
with
the Lord – that's the goal of resurrection. That's what we're
ready for, what we're waiting for.
If
God were to snatch our souls to heaven, and let that be the end of
the story, it would mean that death has won. It would mean that
either God switched to Plan B and settled for that, or that this
whole good creation was just a weird tangent in the first place. And
God refuses to endorse that kind of nonsense. God's aim has always
been, and still is, embodied humans living in his presence in a good
creation. God has not changed his mind. And the resurrection of
Jesus is a promise that he never will.
And
so Paul can write about how important our bodies are. It matters
what we do with them. Some people in first-century Corinth thought
it didn't matter what we did with our bodies, that everything was
okay, that they didn't much count. Paul shoots back, “The
body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the
Lord for the body”
(1 Corinthians 6:13). Our bodies were meant to be devoted to Jesus,
to be in his power, under his Lordship. But more startling is Paul's
message that the Lord is 'for the body' – he came exactly to redeem
our bodies, not just our inner selves or 'souls.' The Lord became
human for our bodies. Paul goes on to say, “God raised the Lord”
– bodily – “and
will also raise us up”
– again, bodily – “by
his power. Do you not know that your bodies
are members,”
body parts, “of
Christ?”
(1 Corinthians 6:14-15). “So,”
Paul concludes, “glorify
God in your body”
(1 Corinthians 6:20) – because our bodies matter to God, and even
when the body dies because of sin, God isn't finished with it. Not a
chance.
That's
why Paul talks about the hope we actually have – not the hope of
escaping the body, which Celsus could have swallowed, but the hope of
the body being redeemed and restored in resurrection. At some point
in the future, at the return of Christ, the cemetery outside this
church building will become a very exciting place. I'd buy tickets
to see that! It will be an exciting place, because when “the
Lord himself will descend from heaven,”
then “the dead
in Christ will rise”
to meet him and welcome him in (1 Thessalonians 4:16). The dead in Christ in this cemetery will get up alive out of the ground, out of their graves, better than ever!
That's
what we're looking for. “We
await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly
body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even
to subject all things to himself”
(Philippians 3:20-21). The same 'lowly body' that we walk around in
now, will be transformed; it will be changed. It will be numerically
identical – the same body – but in the same way that a seed is
numerically identical with the tree that grows from it. The tree and
the seed it sprouted from are two stages of the same thing, but very
different in character. Just so, “what
you sow is not the body that is to be,”
not in quality, but “a
bare kernel”
compared to what the body will be like in resurrection glory (1
Corinthians 15:37). Living here and now, our bodies are lowly –
they're perishable, dishonorable, weak, and powered by the human soul
– but when raised, they'll be imperishable, glorious, powerful, and
powered by God's Spirit (1 Corinthians 15:42-44). We'll have the
best of both worlds – at home in an imperishable body and with an
undying Lord, whom we can see and know face-to-face – the very face you
have, and the very face he has.
And
the reason you can have that hope is because “the
Spirit is life because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who
raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from
the dead will also
give life to your
mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you”
(Romans 8:10-11). That's such an exciting thought! God, the same
God of Resurrection who raised Jesus Christ to a new kind of bodily
life, will do the exact same thing for you – because what God does
for Christ is what God has in store for all whom Christ stands for,
all who are tied to him by the Spirit.
And
so God will “give
life to your mortal bodies”
(Romans 8:11). Did you get that? The very same body, the very same
material, human body that walked in here this morning, the very same
mortal body whose mortal hand shook the mortal hand of a friend you
saw here last Sunday with your mortal eyes – that's the very same
mortal body, with mortal hand and mortal eyes, to which God will give
resurrection life as an immortal
body with immortal
hands and immortal
eyes! There's no getting around it, there's no fair way to twist and
contort this scripture to say anything less.
Maybe,
during the last year, last few years, last decade or so, you had to
lay a spouse or a parent or a child or a friend to rest. They
believed, they trusted in Jesus, they had the Spirit of God at work
in their life, but then their body died. You comfort yourself that
they're with the Lord in heaven. That's true – Jesus said we could
be with him where he's going, because his Father's house there has
many hotel rooms to spend the night (John 14:2-3). But it gets so
much better. It gets better because God has promised to give life to
their mortal body! Heaven isn't where they get glorified; body and
spirit will be glorified together, right back here, at the return of
Christ!
Those
hands you held – you'll hold them again! Those eyes you gazed into
– you'll gaze into them again! Those vocal cords that made the
voice you loved to hear – they'll vibrate again, you'll hear it
again! That brain's synapses will fire again, those lungs will
breathe again, that skin will be warm to the touch again. And there
will then be no more Alzheimer's, no more Parkinson's, no more
cardiac disease, no more cerebral palsy. That's a big promise! But
it's God's promise, to “give life to [their] mortal bodies.” God
is not done with them.
Nor
is God done with you. Unless Jesus comes back first, each one of us
will one day take a leave of absence from these bodies. And these
bodies will either, like the early Jews and Christians did, be buried
in the earth, or, like their pagan neighbors did, be cremated. In
either case, if the Spirit of God dwelled in your body, the Spirit of
God is not done with your body. And no matter what sicknesses your
body suffered from, no matter what aches and pains your body had, no
matter how you die or how your body is handled once you've set it
aside, God is not done with it, and neither are you. He will give life to your mortal body.
Your
tombstone will not be your permanent record. Your body will be alive
a lot longer than it'll be dead. Your tombstone will mark a
temporary blip, a brief hiatus or pause in your life. If I get
struck by lightning this afternoon, the dates on my tombstone should
not just read “1988 – 2018,” as if that's the whole story.
There should be a comma, followed by “Christ's Return –
Infinity.” That
would be the whole story for this body of mine. And the same will be
true for you. That's what you can count on. And whatever aches,
whatever hurts, whatever doesn't work right now, whatever's subject
to death and weakness now, will be life and health and glory and
power in the resurrection! You can bank on that!
It
may sound crazy, but the best days for your body are the ones ahead
of you, not the ones behind you. Even on the day they lower your
casket in the ground, even a century later, the best days for that
body and for you as an embodied human person are the ones ahead, not
the ones behind. Celsus would call that crazy, insane, stupid –
and Celsus would be wrong! Because Celsus didn't account for God's
Spirit. Celsus thought things could be boxed up in nature as he knew
it. But God's Spirit blows wherever it wishes (John 3:8). Celsus
thought our bodies were worthless. But God not only made them for a
reason, he put his Spirit in them for a reason. Celsus thought our
bodies would be too impure and weak to make a permanent home. He
didn't count on, he forgot to read about, how they'll be raised
incorruptible, immortal, imperishable, raised in glory and power,
governed by the Spirit in place of the old rulebook. And what's
beyond the power of nature to achieve is hardly out of the reach of
God's “mighty
hand and outstretched arm”
(Deuteronomy 21:5) – because this God is the God of Exodus, this
God is the God of Redemption, this God is the God of Resurrection, this God has a Spirit of Life to give!
This
really is our hope in Jesus Christ. Our hope is not to fly away to
the sweet by-and-by, way beyond the blue. That's cheap. Our hope is
so much better, so much brighter, so much fuller. Our hope is for
the Spirit to give life to these very same now-mortal bodies and, in
raising them up, to make them as new and powerful and glorious as the
one Jesus will have forever. And then, being at home both in the
restored body and with our embodied Lord Jesus, we'll really have a
home for good – all of us, body and spirit. It isn't a prison;
it's home.
So
however much the specifics weren't clear to him, Origen couldn't,
wouldn't be cowed by Celsus' invective and sneering mockery. Origen
refused to give up this hope for his martyred dad, or himself, or any
other Spirit-indwelt believer. And neither should we. When Origen
answered Celsus, he stuck by the same thing he wrote when he
commented on today's passage: that real believers, Christ's people,
“know that they are going to be made alive and resurrected from the
dead in the likeness of Christ through the Spirit of him who raised
Jesus from the dead in a similar manner … For if the Spirit of
Christ dwells in you, it seems necessary that to the Spirit his own
dwelling-place should be given back and the temple restored”
(Commentary on
Romans
6.13.6).
Like
Paul said, “Your
body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from
God”
(1 Corinthians 6:19). And that Spirit is wild, that Spirit is
burning, that Spirit is life – life now and life for his temple
forever! So the Christ-raising God will indeed “give
life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you,”
in the temple he's building from you (Romans 8:11). That's when
we'll “sing and shout the victory!” Yield today to the wild
Spirit of God, yield today to the life-giving Spirit of Christ, yield
today to the unpredictable and untameable Holy Spirit, and remember
that, because he claimed you (body and spirit), no funeral can ever
say he's done with you (body and spirit)! Remember
your hope of resurrection, look to the risen “man
Christ Jesus”
in his glorified body (1 Timothy 2:5), and look forward to being like
him (1 John 3:2) – at home!