Our Lord's Strange Resurrection Body
One piece of evidence for the resurrection of Jesus that I find compelling, and that I think should be developed further, is the strangeness of our Lord’s resurrection body.
The Gospels go to great lengths to inform us that Jesus’ resurrection was bodily and physical, not merely spiritual. In Matthew 28:9, for example, the apostles were able to “grab hold” of Jesus and worship Him. In Luke 24:15, Jesus was able to walk alongside two of His disciples on the road to Emmaus without suspicion (cf. Mk 16:12). He sat at table with the apostles and broke bread with them (Lk 24:30-31), even eating in front of them (Lk 24:42-43; Jn 21:12-13). He invited the apostles to touch Him and insisted that, “a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Lk 24:39 cf. Jn 20:27). And these things didn’t just happen on a few occasions, rather Jesus physically dwelt among His disciples for about six weeks (Acts 1:3-4).
However, despite being able to walk around, be touched, eat, drink, and do all of the things normal embodied men can do, Jesus’ resurrection body was more than a mere return to what it had been prior to His death. For example, after breaking bread with His disciples for the first time, Jesus “vanished from their sight” (Lk 24:31), only to return a while later by appearing out of thin air (Lk 24:36). Likewise, John’s Gospel goes out of its way to note that “the doors [were] locked” when Jesus suddenly appeared in the room (Jn 20:19), just to highlight how our Lord no longer needed to use doors to enter buildings. Then there’s the obvious fact that, after staying with His disciples for forty days, Ss. Luke and Mark record that Jesus ascended upwards towards the heavens via a “cloud” (Acts 1:9-10 cf. Mk 16:19), something that an ordinary body likely couldn’t withstand.
So what the Gospel accounts leave us with is a picture of Jesus’ resurrection body that is both “physical” and “spiritual.” It was physical in that Jesus could do all of the things embodied man can do, yet it was spiritual in that it could supernaturally surpass man’s bodily capabilities. It’s no wonder, then, why St. Paul could only describe a resurrection body in apparently contradictory terms: “So is it with the resurrection of the dead… [The body] is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body” (1 Cor 15:42, 44 cf. Phil 3:21). A spiritual body? What is that? For a man who drew a sharp contrast between “the flesh” and “the spirit” (cf. Rom 1:3-4), this sure is a strange, borderline incoherent, way of speaking. Yet who can blame him? If the disciples told Paul what we have recorded in the Gospels about Jesus’ resurrection body, how else would we expect it to be described?
To me, this difficulty of being able to linguistically capture what a resurrection body is like strongly suggests that the eyewitnesses of Jesus’ resurrection were not making it up. After all, if Jesus really did rise from the dead, and His was the first resurrection body in the history of creation, then wouldn’t we expect there to be no existing vocabulary with which to fully describe this phenomenon? Wouldn’t we anticipate someone like St. Paul having to come up with (seemingly) contradictory terms such as, “spiritual body,” to do justice to this truly unique event? I tend to think so.
Indeed, if you were inventing (or deluding yourself into believing) a story about someone coming back to life, why wouldn’t you make it similar to all of the other resurrections that occur in Scripture? Why wasn’t Jesus’ resurrection like the raising of Lazarus (Jn 11:43-44), Jarius’ daughter (Lk 8:53-55), or the widow of Zarepath’s son (1 Kg 17:21-22)? Not only did none of these people have strange abilities after coming back to life, but they also behaved in ways that we might expect someone to if they really had been raised from the dead. Lazarus, for instance, stumbled out of the grave and had to be unwrapped from his cloths (Jn 11:44), Jarius’ daughter needed to eat (Lk 8:55), and the widow’s son had to be carried down from his room (1 Kg 17:23). This is in stark contrast to Jesus’ resurrection, wherein He required no assistance in being freed from His burial cloths (Jn 20:6-7), chose to eat in order to prove His physicality, rather than doing so out of necessity (Lk 24:39-43), and had already exited His tomb by the time the angels rolled away the stone (Lk 24:2-3; Matt 28:2-5).
All of this shows that the Gospels themselves present Jesus’ resurrection as categorically distinct from other biblical resurrection stories. And yet, these are the very same Gospel accounts that also go out of their way to highlight the true physicality of our Lord’s resurrection, as explained above. So what are we to make of this? Why did Ss. Luke and John tell fairly “normal” stories about Jarius’ daughter and Lazarus being raised from the dead, while at the same time both distinguishing these from and analogizing them to Jesus’ resurrection? In other words, why did Jesus receive a “spiritual body” while the others didn’t? In my mind, the best explanation is that the disciples were not making this story up. They reported Jesus’ resurrection in a unique way because it actually occurred in a unique way. Simple as that.