Sunday, May 4, 2014 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.

Saved by Our Senses

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 116:1–4, 12–19
Luke 24:36–49

“Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.”
Luke 24:39b (NRSV)

Most people think of the mind as being located in the head, but the latest findings in physiology suggest that the mind doesn’t really dwell in the brain but travels the whole body on caravans of hormone and enzyme, busily making sense of the compound wonders we catalogue as touch, taste, smell, hearing, vision.

Diane Ackerman

In the Gospel passage you just heard, we find Jesus insisting that his disciples believe in his physical resurrection. He doesn’t rely on reports to convince his disciples that he has risen, and it’s a good thing that he doesn’t, because though the disciples have already received reports from Simon Peter, the women who visited Jesus’ tomb, and the two disciples whom the risen Jesus met on the road to Emmaus, they cannot believe it. Rather than counting on the power of these reports to convince them, Jesus visits the disciples himself. Jesus tries to assure them that it really is he and that he is real. Not wanting to leave a single doubt in their minds, Jesus shows them his hands and his feet, marked by the nails that hung him to the cross. He invites them to touch him and feel the warmth of his flesh. And because they were still disbelieving, he even sat down and ate fish with them, giving them the physical proof they needed in order to know that he was no ghost but was living and real.

The need for physical proof in this story about Jesus’ resurrected appearance reminds me of an article I read years ago. It was written by an anthropologist and recounted the first impressions made by white-skinned Europeans upon the dark-skinned native people whom he had been studying. At first, upon seeing these light-skinned persons, the native people thought they were seeing ghosts. Disbelief and curiosity led them to seek proof that these newcomers were indeed real. For some, it wasn’t until they observed the newcomers eat and realized that what they ate also came out the other end that they became convinced that the white-skinned people were not ghosts but were physically real.

Sometimes I forget, or neglect, how fundamentally physical our existence is. That’s why I am always shocked by such stories. In the story Luke tells, Jesus made every effort to emphasize his bodily resurrection. The same is true in the Gospel of John. For both Luke and John, however, insistence upon a bodily resurrection was not only to prove the reality of Jesus’ resurrection to skeptics, but even more importantly to counter the tendency or temptation to spiritualize Jesus so entirely that they would lose a sense of his palpable presence in the world.

It is understandable that Jesus’ disciples would have wanted to dismiss the reports they received about Jesus’ resurrection; after all, these reports were unsettling to no small degree. Given the physically torturous nature of Jesus’ death, it would have been much easier, much more comforting, to remember their Lord in spirit only. In the Gospel of Luke, it is as though Jesus knew that this would be their tendency, because, as Luke tells us in the very beginning of the book of Acts, Jesus “presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs” and appeared to them multiple times during the fifty days between Easter and Pentecost. It is as though Jesus wanted his physical reality to be so impressed upon them that they would not be in danger of spiritualizing him to the point of disembodying him.

Why would Luke and John insist upon Christ’s embodied resurrection? What was the big deal? To see more clearly what was and is at stake in the issue, it’s helpful to engage the debate that ensued at the time the Gospels were being written. Luke and John were, in all likelihood, writing against a group within the church, a group known as Docetic Christians. Docetic Christians believed that physical matter and the spirit could not coexist. In their view, either Christ’s spirit simply inhabited the physical body of the man Jesus or Christ’s physical body was an optical illusion. In either case, Docetic Christians believed that the true or real nature of Christ was spiritual, and therefore, they could not and would not imagine Christ truly to have been flesh.

Against this view, which disparaged not just the body but all things physical and material, Luke placed his Gospel clearly within the context of Jewish belief in the God of creation. The God whose Son was Jesus Christ, Luke asserted, was the very same God who created the world and called it good. As you can see, at stake in this debate was the value the church would ultimately place on our physical existence, on the physical and material conditions of life.

In her fascinating book A Natural History of the Senses, which I could read over and over again, Diane Ackerman devotes a chapter to each one of the five senses—touch, taste, smell, hearing, and vision. She sensitizes and attunes you to what she calls the “sense-lusciousness” of the world. Ackerman writes,

We like to think that we are finely evolved creatures, in suit-and-tie or pantyhose-and-chemise, who live many millennia and mental detours away from the cave, but that’s not something our bodies are convinced of. We may have the luxury of being at the top of the food chain, but our adrenaline still rushes when we encounter real or imaginary predators. . . . We still create works of art to enhance our senses and add even more sensations to the brimming world, so that we can utterly luxuriate in the spectacles of life. . . . And we still perceive the world, in all its gushing beauty and terror, right on our pulses. (Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses, pp. xviii–xix)

Ackerman thinks that even a full account of our five senses is too limited an account of how we truly experience reality. Even though we say there are five senses, we know there are more. She writes that “people who dowse for water are probably responding to an electromagnetic sense we all share to a greater or lesser degree.” She goes on to say that “we are as phototropic as plants, smitten with the sun’s light in a way different from vision” (pp. 302–303). We have a “vibratory” sense as well as a “muscular sense that guides us when we pick up objects” to “know at once that they are heavy, light, solid, hard, or soft,” and we have a sense of gravity (p. 303). Don’t forget that we also have a “proprioceptive sense, which tells us what position each component of our bodies is in at any moment” (p. 303). Ackerman’s point, of course, is that built into our very nature is a multitude of senses that put us in touch with what is real and without which we cannot make sense of reality.

For Luke, the reality with which Jesus wants us not to lose touch is not just a sense-luscious reality, but also an impoverished, painful, and vulnerable reality. Showing his followers his hands and feet and asking them to touch his injured flesh, Jesus calls them to pay attention to the physical, material, conditions in which people live and because of which, in some cases, they suffer.

In a short novel entitled Seedfolks, Newbery Medal-winning author Paul Fleischman writes about how an urban community garden—not so different from Fourth Church’s community garden, which eventually became an urban farm—got its start. One of the novel’s characters who contribute to the start of the garden is Leona. As a mother of two, Leona is not afraid to get in the face of city administrators and officials to make her needs known. Setting out to get city hall to pick up the trash in the lot where a garden is growing, Leona carries a big bag of trash from the lot to city hall. Fleischman writes,

That morning I took a bus downtown and walked into the Public Health Department. Told about the trash all over again to this receptionist. Let her see me up close and personal and hear me loud and clear. She just told me to sit down with the others waiting. I did. Then I opened the garbage bag I’d picked up in the lot on my way. The smell that came out of it made you think of hog pens and maggots and kitchen scraps from back when Nixon was president. It was amazing how quick people noticed it, including the receptionist. And even more amazing how quick I was called in to have a meeting with someone. I was definitely real to them now. I brought that bag along with me into the meeting, to keep it that way. (Paul Fleischman, Seedfolks, p. 28)

Leona, who had learned the hard way that the distance between city hall and the block where she lived couldn’t be measured in miles, learned also that to be real is to be sensed. Whether pleasant or unpleasant, nothing and no one is real unless our senses tell us they are real.

This is a lesson that the early Docetic Christians, given their disparaging views of all material and physical existence, would not have accepted. In fact, by the second century a man named Marcion, who had become a leading proponent of Docetic views, wanted to purge the Bible of the entire Old Testament as well as any books and passages in the New Testament that either alluded to the Old Testament God of creation or portrayed Jesus as an embodied fleshly person. When it came to passages from the Gospel of Luke, like the one we read today, that insisted upon Jesus’ bodily resurrection, Marcion simply excised them from the Bible. According to Marcion and other Docetists, Christ, after his crucifixion, returned to his heavenly home and, in doing so, most certainly cast off, threw away, the material body in which he had appeared on earth.

How simple—just to separate the body from the spirit, the physical from the spiritual. There would be no serious need to wrestle with the body’s needs, desires, suffering, and vulnerabilities; no serious need to examine and try to reform the conditions of life here on earth. Why bother talking about redemption if you don’t even value creation?

In the end, Marcion and the Docetism he promoted did not prevail in the church. In its wisdom, the church held onto those passages in the Gospels that speak of the physically risen Christ. In its wisdom, the church held onto an appreciation of creation and a commitment to work for the world’s redemption. That doesn’t mean, however, that the tendency to separate the physical from the spiritual has been put to rest. There is still a very long distance between city hall and the neighborhoods where some people live. There is still a big gap between the different physical and material conditions into which people are born and grow up. As much as we, like the disciples, need the help of the Spirit to do the work of the church, we also need to see, hear, taste, touch, and smell all the conditions of life. As Luke tells us, to those whom Jesus called to do the work of the church, Jesus didn’t send them the Holy Spirit right away. He made them wait, and during those fifty days between Easter and Pentecost, he appeared to them many times, so that seeing, hearing, touching, and eating with him, they would firmly know what is real and worthy of their work. Amen.