My Body is a Cage

Culture seems to have a strange conception of the Christian afterlife. You only need to look at films, cartoons, TV programs and books to see that there is a concept of 'going to heaven'- of escaping to an ethereal soul float; a disembodied, spiritual, vague and unscientific existence. I think of His Dark Materials, the Phillip Pullman novels in which millions of souls are released from a torturous existence, to be released into the nirvana of nature. I think of the Simpsons with its comic depictions of God and his long white beard, sitting on a big fluffy cloud, of souls floating out of bodies. You don't need to look far to find a picture of 'heaven'. Ask any person on the street, in gregs, in HMV, in Starbucks- they will tell you about souls and clouds and maybe harps. 

Somehow this notion of 'heaven' has slipped into Christian culture. People seem to be under the impression that the Christian belief is that I will die, my soul will float out and I will live with God in a spiritual heaven. And for years that's what I believed. And it irritated me. Even worse, I didn't really believe it. It sounds like a fairy tale, like a pre-enlightened fantasy. Christian culture seems to be at times vague, and times bordering on confused on what 'heaven' consists of at all.   

But it's pretty clear from what it says in the Bible that the Christian hope is one of resurrection. I was reading only this morning from Job: 

"After my skin has been destroyed,
yet in my flesh I will see God;
I myself will see him
with my own eyes—I, and not another.
How my heart yearns within me!" 

In my flesh I will see God. I really don't know in what other sense I could see God. I don't really know in what other sense I could be anything at all. And it's littered all over the Bible. You only need to read 1 Corinthians 15, Paul goes on a similar rant about resurrection and how important it is. I know it sounds strange, but I get really riled up about this. It influences how we live out faith; it's important that we think through what it is we have hope in.

 But people don't really get it sometimes. On one side there are the people who think 'surely all Christians believe in the resurrection of the body'- it's obvious. The other side don't really know; and even more dangerously, they don't think it matters very much. Only last week I met up with a friend who would call himself a Christian. He didn't really understand what happens when we die. He wasn't really sure what he believed. But he'd never really heard about physical resurrection. I have spoken to friends of mine who have been Christians for 10 years who don't really know what they think. And it makes me so angry, because it's so vital, so central to what Christianity is about. Even in the most basic doctrine of beliefs we have, the apostles creed claims: 

"I believe in the resurrection of the body"

 I think it's pretty important we know what the hope is that we claim. It impacts how we share faith, it impacts how we live it out, and it matters deeply. I resent the fact that we have embraced a culture of 'death' being a going into the next room, a natural part of life, just a little harmless stage in human existence. No! Christianity believes that death is conquered. But it is conquered because it needs conquering. Death is painful. I think about the loss of my Grandmother on my family and what pain that causes us, what a gap that leaves. Death is awful, it is horrendous, it is totally opposed to life and to hope.

Resurrection is a pretty clear word- it is about rising from the dead. It is about conquering death. Rising from the dead reverses an act of utter evil. If death is only an escaping of this world, of this body, then it is not all that bad and it totally nullifies the cross.

 For me, this realization was enormously significant. As far as I could gather, my identity was so intricately tied into my physicality; my personality was as much about how I looked as how I acted. And what I thought were the beliefs of Christianity seemed so opposed to that. The truth is that we are very physical beings- the Bible is very clear about that. We are dust beings not floaty floaty spirits. We need to cling onto this more than ever in an age of ever increasing scepticism towards Christianity. It might be that the concept of resurrection is just as laughable. But personally, I found the truth of resurrection transformed my faith, my view of hope, my view of death. We need clarity in how we speak, how we communicate, how we preach and in our own minds.

"But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised."