On 30 January 2007 I managed to sunder part of my finger from the rest of me. A brief, freakish, unfortunate interaction with a folding bed resulted in several courses of antibiotics, finger exercises, physical therapy, and one finger that is slightly shorter than it should be. If you look carefully, the scaring is still visible. It is sometimes hard to point with that finger. Sometimes, inexplicably, it just feels weird. (Even now as I sit here typing I can't really use that finger to type because of the entanglement of nerve endings in my index finger).
It wasn't as though I had lost a leg or an arm. I hadn't lost the sight in my eyes or had my spleen removed. It was only the very tip of my finger - probably the best part of your body to lost if you had to lose one part. But losing the end of my finger provoked much melancholy for me. That something so small could be the source of so much pain was beyond belief. Without the medical marvel of antibiotics, I would have lost more of my finger. It took weeks of rehabilitation to be able to regain functionality in my finger. Frankly it was embarrassing to explain over and over again at wedding receptions and job interviews exactly how I had ended up with my arm in a sling and my finger all bandaged. But I also had a lot to be thankful for from that time: a new fiance whose care and attention epitomised her love; her family who took me in and cared for me in their own home; a soon to be father-in-law who drove me around Sydney to find a hospital that could save part of my finger; friends who would sit with me in hospital waiting rooms whilst I waited for my rehab sessions, or freely volunteered to clean up the leftover blood.
Most of all I came to appreciate anew the power and the hope of the resurrection. That Jesus had been raised from the dead had often been taught to be as the cherry on top of Christ's atoning working; the denouement to crucifixion. It was treated as nothing more than God's grand apologetic sign 'He really did die for your sins'. In such a moment of agony and desolation, it was an incredible consolation to know that my sins had been cleansed and that one day I too would be raised with an incorruptible body, over which death would hold no dominion. I too would be raised like him.
The Christian gospel has always proclaimed the distinctly Christian hope of bodily resurrection. As one of our theologians has said: "The bodies of the saints, then, shall rise again free from blemish and deformity, just as they will be also free from corruption, encumbrance, or handicap. Their facility will be as complete as their felicity".
The resurrection is God's 'No!' to a world polluted by selfishness and pride, malice and murder, envy, slander, alternative truth, and falsehood. The resurrection is God's 'No!' to a world marred by cancer and tooth decay, marred by famine, greed, and sexual exploitation. It is God's 'No!' to a world shrouded by death; a world which would dare condemn God's own Son – the source of all life.
Whilst the resurrection condemns our own efforts to decide what is right and wrong, and to love everything except the person we should love the most, the resurrection is simultaneously God''s 'YES!' to his created order. It is his 'YES!' to the way things are meant to be. Creation matters. Our bodies matter. Matter matters. The risen Christ is God's affirmation that his world will not forever remain enthralled in the darkness of decay and oblivion. Magnificently, God doesn't consign creation to the scrap bin of history and start again. The new creation is creatio ex vetere, creation made new. It is a place liberated from sin, suffering, and all that makes life unlivable; or in the words of one of the Apostles, it is a world made fit for righteousness to inhabit.
The Christian confession is in the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. In former days we constructed our churches in a cruciform shape to remember the centrality of Jesus' death to our faith and worship. We would surround our churches with cemeteries - an ever present reminder that Jesus is Lord over the quick and the dead; that one day he was raise our bodies to be like his body.
I fear however that we have become far less diligent in remembering that we are made of the dust of the earth. As liberalism has gained ground politically, economically, ethically, we have become less confident to speak of the resurrection of the body and the renewal of creation. We speak instead in terms of identity and character - malleable categories we can confirm to our own will and desire. 'Our bodies, indeed this world will be abolished, but our identity will continue.' To suggest this is to drink from the same well which sprouted identity politics. Those who propose such views have wandered from exegesis and theological reasoning into the realm of conjecture and speculation. Can you really have virtue or identity or even a soul apart from the body? If the body is entirely new, is it really the same identity? What walked out of the tomb on the first Easter Day was not a litany of characteristics, nor an excarnated identity, but a body. It had been altered, yes. It had been changed. But it was the same body which had been carried into the tomb three days prior. The resurrected Jesus was the crucified Jesus.
So let us not mock God with metaphor or analogy:
Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.
So what of my finger? Ten years ago I lost not just a fraction of my body. I lost a part of me. Yet even as the flesh and tissue disappeared inside a bio-hazard bin, God's healing work in my body had begun. I lacked, and I have not lacked. And as I look for the resurrection of dead, I look forward to the day when not only my finger, but my whole body and the world it inhabits will be restored and renewed; when God makes all things new.
