St. Luke's Episcopal Church
Cleveland, Tennessee

Third Sunday after Easter
April 26, 2009
The Rev. Deacon Art Bass

Raised Incarnate 

It was Christmas Eve about fifteen years ago. I was driving down East Brainerd Road on my way to the midnight Christmas service at church. Along the way was a church of another denomination. Incorporated into their church sign was a large illuminated message board. On it, they would post service times, and often, some clever saying or proverb. Frankly, in my Anglican arrogance, those clever sayings were usually just a little too cute for my liking.

But on this particular Christmas Eve, as I approached that church sign and read what it said, I think I must have almost run off the road, I was so amazed. To me, it was one of the most profound and insightful statements of incarnational theology I had ever read. It said: “You can't appreciate the miracle of the cradle until you understand the sacrifice on the cross.” Clearly not your usual warm and fuzzy Christmas message.

I was dumbfounded. We make a lot of the incarnation in the Episcopal Church, and well we should. That God became one of us in the person of Christ Jesus was the very basis for God's great master plan of salvation. At Christmas, as we celebrate the nativity of Christ, our focus and attention are ever directed to this great and holy mystery of the incarnation. But unfortunately, months later, when our liturgical calendar takes us to Holy Week and to Easter, we don't hear so much about the incarnation as it relates to those events.

Yet, the importance of the resurrection to us, to humanity, lies in the fact that Christ died as one of us, in the flesh, and he was raised as one of us, in the flesh.

Because God had the power to raise and restore Christ Jesus to the fullness of his being, to raise him incarnate, he has the power to raise and restore us also.

In the church, there has always been an important connection between Easter resurrection and the rebirth of baptism. In the early church, Easter morning was the only time during the whole year when new persons were baptized into the faith.

In the church today, whenever we have a baptism, we all recite in question and answer format the Apostles' Creed, and it is in the Apostle's Creed that we affirm together our belief in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.

God raised Jesus incarnate. The resurrected Jesus had a real flesh and blood body. He was changed; he was transformed. He was no longer bound by space and time. He could appear before two of his disciples in Emmaus, and at about the same time, appear to Peter seven miles away in Jerusalem. He could suddenly appear, even inside a closed room, and he could just as suddenly disappear.

People who had known him well often had trouble at first recognizing Jesus in his resurrection body. But it was usually very simple, very human things, that triggered recognition.

In the garden outside the tomb, it was the way he spoke her name, “Mary”, that brought recognition to Mary Magdalene. In Emmaus he became known to his disciples in the blessing and the breaking of the bread at the table. In last week's gospel and again in today's gospel, the disciples in Jerusalem recognized the risen Lord through his display of very real and tangible wounds in his hands and feet. These were wounds that could be both seen and felt, because they were real wounds to a real human body.

The risen Christ was no ghost, no spirit, and no illusion. Jesus had been raised incarnate.

Yet after seeing, and being invited to touch the wounds of the Passion, some of the disciples, according to today's gospel, even in their joy, found it hard to fully accept that Jesus was really there and that he was indeed alive.

So for their sake, Jesus did something that was so human, it could leave no further doubt. He asked for something to eat. They gave him a piece of broiled fish and in their presence, he ate it.

We cannot see and touch the wounds of Christ as the disciples were able to do in those days between the resurrection and the ascension. We cannot sit down and break bread face to face with the risen Lord as they were able to do.

However, we do have their witness left to us through scripture, and that is a powerful thing, but moreover, we have faith. Faith in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and faith in the experience of Christ working in our lives and in the lives of those around us. By these means we are able to know that Christ is alive, that he is very real, and that he is ever, constantly renewing and transforming all creation.