Dry Bones, Dead Faith

It is easy to get the sillies over the recent "revelation" that Jesus' bones have been collecting dust for 2,000 years in an ossuary while Christians the world over have been celebrating his resurrection and his ascension into heaven. Shame on you, James Cameron, for raining on our Easter parades. From the standpoint of building an audience for your documentary on all this, your sense of timing is impeccable. But from the standpoint of faith, it is just plain tacky.

Some people, of course, are going to work up a big case of the worries over this archeological "discovery," from the misguided belief that it somehow calls Jesus' resurrection into question. I can't wait to see how they will go about (and forgive the pun) covering all of this up again. The next breaking news story might even be about the sudden vanishing of the Shroud of Turin. If it happens, then mark my words: it will have been stolen to prevent a DNA match to the skeletal remains attributed to the Nazarene.

Other people will merely call upon their orthodoxy to protect them from sweating the possibility that Jesus was not raised bodily from the dead. Their argument will go something like this: the church teaches that Jesus took his body with him to heaven; therefore, we can be sure that the bones in that ossuary belong to somebody other than him. Hopefully, the Cameron documentary will be long forgotten --- it already has been by reputable archeologists --- before some of our fellow Christians embarrass us yet again with this screwy logic of determining facts on the basis of dogma.

The idea that there has been a lost tomb of Jesus somewhere in Jerusalem fits nicely with other commercially viable ideas now floating around. It is on a par with the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalen deftly combined co-habitation with saving the world from sin, and the idea that the pitter patter of their childrens' little feet were wonderful to come home to after a long day of miracle-working and fending off insults.

To get a little more serious, but not a whole lot: I have long wondered whether the earliest Christians helped their cause much by relying on the tradition of an empty tomb to support their proclamation about God's raising Jesus from the dead. Certainly they had to confront head-on an ugly rumor that the disciples stole Jesus' body, and they did it well by explaining that the real reason why it was in fact missing was that God took it back. Frankly, though, I wish they had soft-pedaled this whole issue. Saying a lot about it stirred up even more speculation about the body, and new searches for its tomb by folks who never trusted that Jesus' women-friends knew perfectly well where the original one was.

But enough already. Here we are in Lent, and the last thing we need is more kidding around on my part, and more pretentious posturing on The Discovery Channel's. The real question here is not whether Easter faith could be undermined by the discovery of earthly remains that are unquestionably those of Jesus and like the remains of every other dead person on the earth. The real question is what it has always been for faith: with what kind of body was Jesus raised? (And with which we will be raised as well.) If you believe that Jesus got out of this world with his this-worldly body intact, then your faith may indeed be in trouble. Not, of course, because of the recent vapid documentary, but because you have unwisely chosen to anchor it by the wrong apostolic tradition.

The more helpful one is the tradition of Jesus' post-resurrection appearances. According to St. Paul, after Jesus entombment over 500 people claimed to have seen him, and not just an empty tomb. What I especially like about this tradition is that it deliberately pushes our images of the body with which Jesus was raised into the realm of the uncanny, the hallucinogenic, and the downright spooky. He takes nourishment, lets wounds be touched, and yet goes through walls and vanishes before peoples' very eyes in a heartbeat. That's some kind of body. It was the kind of body that forced the early church to acknowledge that whatever body we will someday have in the Kingdom of God, it will not be a "flesh and blood" body at all. In truth, leaving his earthly body behind was the only thing Jesus could have done under the circumstances. I doubt that re-entering the Godhead as its second member could have been accomplished at all if he had had to take it with him.