“I can understand why people would have doubts about the Bible. It’s a weird, strange, goofy book.”[i]
For a manuscript to claim it is written by divine inspiration, and to contain the very words of the creator God, the Bible contains some wacky tales. There is a talking donkey, King David scalping 200 foreskins (ouch), Moses gazing on the back-end of God[ii], King Eglon’s disgusting death[iii] and so many others. However, my favorite is the lesser known bed-time story of Elisha and the two she-bears. I can identify on so many levels:
He (Elisha) went up from there to Bethel, and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, “Go up, you baldhead!” And he turned around, and when he saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. And two she-bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys. From there he went on to Mount Carmel…[iv]
The moral of the story: this is what happens when Elisha forgets to take his happy pills. So, how did these stories make it through the winnowing process? Surely someone between 400 B.C. and the Council of Jamnia wondered aloud about the inclusion of such bizarre passages. Vetting scripture was never easy. One thousand years of oral history, textual criticism, historiography and primary source analysis went into selecting the canon. From the early culmination of the Hebrew texts, the translation of the Septuagint, the arrangement of the Apocrypha, Jerome’s Vulgate and finally the approval of Athanasius’ canon, each verse has been hand-picked for inclusion. And yet, after so many years of painstaking examination, oddities remain.
I thought I had found another such story in Luke’s gospel. Jesus is appearing to his disciples after the kairos moment of resurrection. The remaining eleven are huddled together when suddenly he is among them.
“He showed them his hands and his feet. And while they still disbelieved for joy and were marveling, he said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it before them.” (Luke 24: 40-43)
The greatest event of world history has just taken place and Luke wastes his words on Jesus’ eating a piece of fish. Or, did he? I believe Luke is up to something. “Every line, almost every word, in this scene demonstrates the point. For Luke, the risen Jesus is firmly and solidly embodied, able to be touched, able to eat.”[v] A mere spirit or ghost cannot eat fish, nor can they be touched. The physical, risen body of Jesus is the thrust of Luke chapter 24. There are several reasons why Luke makes such a big deal about this, but time allows for but a glance into his motivation.
Along with the other Gospel writers, Luke is placing the bodily resurrection of Jesus in the space-time universe as a factual historical event, bursting the very boundaries of our post-enlightened worldview, a worldview that rationally explains how and why dead people don’t wake up. The problem with this arrogant, modern worldview is its limited explanation of reality. Rationality alone can only summon the closed system of cause and effect to explain the past. This paradigm seemingly delivers the coup de grace to the resurrection story through the insurmountable evidence of the dead remaining dead. Everyone knows that when people die, they remain thoroughly and completely dead. It’s always happened this way and evidence suggests the alternative is systematically impossible. And, in some ways the rationalists are correct, the old world isn’t big enough to include such an anomaly.
For Luke and for us, this is exactly the point. Jesus of Nazareth’s bodily resurrection is not a bizarre outlier within the world as it is, but the distinctive starting point of a new creation and a new cosmological order. Jesus’ resurrection is the prime reality of new creation. It is the thing from which everything new comes. John the Seer brings Luke’s new ontology to her climax,
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth…And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.’ And he who was seated on the throne shouted, ‘Behold, I am making all things new!’”[vi]
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