Episode 118: Year C – 7th Sunday of Ordinary Time
In today’s episode, we focus primarily on two details, both of which are found in the second reading for this upcoming 7th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C, which is taken from 1 Corinthians 15:45-49. The relevant topic that the first detail relates to is the unique qualities of our resurrected body at the end of time. This isn’t necessarily apologetical in nature but nevertheless interesting. The second detail relates to the nature of Jesus’ resurrection, whether it was actually bodily or merely spiritual.
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Hey everyone,
Welcome to The Sunday Catholic Word, a podcast where we reflect on the upcoming Sunday Mass readings and pick out the details that are relevant for explaining and defending our Catholic faith.
I’m Dr. Karlo Broussard, staff apologist and speaker for Catholic Answers, and the host for this podcast.
In today’s episode, we’re going to focus primarily on two details, both of which are found in the second reading for this upcoming 7th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C, which is taken from 1 Corinthians 15:45-49. The relevant topic that the first detail relates to is the unique qualities of our resurrected body at the end of time. This isn’t necessarily apologetical in nature but nevertheless interesting. The second detail relates to the nature of Jesus’ resurrection, whether it was actually bodily or merely spiritual.
Here’s the second reading, again, taken from 1 Corinthians 15:45-49. Paul writes,
It is written, The first man, Adam, became a living being,
the last Adam a life-giving spirit.
But the spiritual was not first;
rather the natural and then the spiritual.
The first man was from the earth, earthly;
the second man, from heaven.
As was the earthly one, so also are the earthly,
and as is the heavenly one, so also are the heavenly.
Just as we have borne the image of the earthly one,
we shall also bear the image of the heavenly one.
The detail that I want to highlight is Paul’s teaching, “Just as we have born the image of the earthly one [Adam], we shall also bear the image of the heavenly one [the resurrected Jesus].”
What Paul is getting at here is that we will image the resurrected Christ in our resurrected bodies. Consequently, by looking at the qualities of Christ’s resurrected body we get a picture of what our resurrected bodies will be like as well.
So, what is that picture?
First, it will be a real bodily resurrection—that’s to say, it will be a physical body. The Gospel writers present Jesus’ resurrection as a bodily event. Take, for example, Luke’s account of Jesus’ appearance to the apostles. He records in Luke 24:36-39:
36 As they were saying this, Jesus himself stood among them, and said to them, “Peace to you.” 37 But they were startled and frightened, and supposed that they saw a spirit. 38 And he said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do questionings rise in your hearts? 39 See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have.” 40 And when he had said this he showed them his hands and his feet.
Matthew, in 28:9, records the women taking hold of Jesus when he first appeared to them: “Jesus met [the women] and they said, “Hail!” And they came up and took hold of his feet and worshiped him.”
John 21:1-14 records how Jesus was eating fish with the apostles on the seashore.
Since Jesus’s resurrection was bodily, as evident in Matt. 28, Luke 24, and John 21, so to our resurrection will be bodily.
The Catechism of the Catholic affirms this truth in paragraph 990:
“The “resurrection of the flesh” (the literal formulation of the Apostles’ Creed) means not only that the immortal soul will live on after death, but that even our “mortal body” will come to life again.”
Another characteristic of Jesus’ resurrected body is incorruptibility. Now, there’s no explicit bible passage in the Gospels that reveals Jesus’ resurrected body is incorruptible. However, we are told by both Peter and Paul that it is incorruptible.
For example, in his sermon on the Day of Pentecost, Peter says, “[David] foresaw and spoke of the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption” (Acts 2:38).
In 1 Corinthians 15:42, St. Paul teaches the imperishability of our resurrected bodies, from which we can infer that Jesus’ body was imperishable. He writes, “What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.” Given that Paul says our resurrected bodies will be imperishable, and he teaches that our resurrected bodies are modeled after Jesus’, it follows that he believed Jesus’ resurrected body was incorruptible.
We could also infer the incorruptibility of Jesus’ body from his ascension into heaven, as recorded by Luke in Acts 1. In verse 9, we’re told that “[Jesus] was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.” Then, in verse 11, Luke records the angels saying to the apostles, “[Jesus] will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” If Jesus will come back in the same way as he ascended, in his body, then his body is incorruptible.
The next characteristic is glory. St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:43: “[The body] is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory.” The prior line of reasoning applies here as well. Since Paul says our bodies will be raised in glory, and our resurrected bodies will image the resurrected body of Jesus, then it follows Paul believed Jesus’ body was raised in glory.
We get a hint of this from Jesus himself in Matthew 13:43, when Jesus says, “, “Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.”
Yet another characteristic of the resurrected body is that it will be wholly subject to the soul not only in its being, which makes it incorruptible, but also in its actions and movements. In other words, the body will move in obedience to the soul’s desire. By an overflow of power from the soul united to God, the body will be where the soul desires to act. This is called the gift of agility.
Jesus exercises this gift in a few places. For example, in Luke 24 after Jesus breaks bread with the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, he “vanished out of their sight” (v.31).
We also see his glorified body in action in Acts 1:9 when Luke describes how Jesus ascends into Heaven and disappears before their eyes.
In 1 Corinthians 15:43-44, Paul teaches this complete subjection of the body to the soul, from which the gift of agility flows. He writes, “It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.”
One thing to note about this gift of agility is that it does not entail movement from place to place in a timeless moment without passing through intervening space. Rather, as Aquinas teaches, the glorified body “moves in time, but imperceptibly because of its quickness” (ST Suppl. 84:1).
Finally, the glorified body, by divine power, will not be confined by material boundaries but will be able to pass through them. This is a gift that Aquinas articulates in the supplement of his Summa Theologiae (Suppl. 83:3) within the context of asking the question whether two bodies, by a miracle, can be in the same place at the same time without losing their own identity.
Aquinas appeals to Jesus passing through the shut doors of the upper room in John 20:19. Since our resurrected bodies will be like Jesus’s, we can conclude that our bodies will be endowed with the same kind of power.
Okay, that completes our reflection on the resurrected body. The next detail that I want to draw your attention to is Paul’s reference to Jesus as “a life-giving spirit.” He writes, “It is written, ‘The first man, Adam, became a living being, the last Adam a life-giving spirit.”
Some Christians assert that Jesus’ resurrection wasn’t bodily in nature. Rather, his resurrection was his spirit living on in the afterlife: a spiritual resurrection. And the idea that Jesus did rise bodily was a later accretion, or development.
The late John Shelby Spong, who was an American bishop of the Episcopal Church, was one proponent of this view. In his Jesus for the Non-Religious, he identifies the physicality of the resurrection of Jesus as “quite obviously [a] late-developing tradition,” that “would literally overwhelm the early nonphysical tradition and begin to form the now common understanding of Easter” (pg. 119). He concludes later, “It is a mistake to ‘literalize Easter.’” (pg. 127).
Now, a common passage that’s appealed to in support of this view is Paul’s statement that Jesus is a “life-giving spirit.”
What can we say in response?
First, this objection begs the question against the Christian who argues the Gospel reports are written too early for the bodily resurrection of Jesus to be a legendary development or accretion. The spiritual resurrection thesis can’t even get off the ground if the Gospels were written at the times traditionally ascribed to them: the Synoptics anywhere from A.D. 55 to 62, and John around A.D. 90. Such temporal proximity to events that they record exclude legendary developments because eyewitnesses would still have been around to ensure faithful transmission of the resurrection story.
Second, to speak of Jesus as a “life-giving spirit” doesn’t necessarily mean that he is ontologically a spirit without a body. As G.T. Montague points out in his commentary on this, the identification of the risen Christ with the Spirit can also mean, and we say it does mean, that such identification is “dynamic,” meaning “Christ is the source of the Spirit.” Montague further explains:
It does not mean that Christ ceased to be body and became pure spirit. That would go completely against Paul’s entire thesis in this chapter. It rather means that by the glorification of his body on Easter morning, Jesus possessed the Holy Spirit as the Spirit’s supreme and unique source, to be conveyed to all those who join themselves to him in faith. As Luke puts it, the risen Jesus received the Spirit in order to give it to us (Acts 2:33; Eph 4:8–10). In the new creation, Christ, the one who breathes forth the Spirit (see John 20:22), assumes the role of God in the first creation (First Corinthians, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture [p. 281]).
So, there’s no need to deny the bodily nature of Jesus’ resurrection on account of Paul saying Jesus is a “life-giving spirit.” Rather, as Curtis Mitch and Scott Hahn put it in their Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, Jesus’ resurrected body is the “sacrament” that channels to the world the life-giving Spirit of God. And it’s this Spirit that will raise our bodies as well. As Paul writes in Romans 8:11, “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit who dwells in you.”
Okay, as a side note, there’s a detail in the Gospel reading that’s worthy of highlight. But there’s no need to comment on it because I’ve already covered it in a prior episode. In the Gospel, which is taken from Luke 6:27-38, Jesus speaks of “turning the other cheek.”
This is often misinterpreted by some that Jesus is saying we must be passivists, avoiding conflict and fighting at all costs, including self-defense. For my response to this sort of interpretation, check out episode 13 of the Sunday Catholic Word, which deals with Matthew’s version of this teaching given to us for 7th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A. In sum, I give reasons why the passivists interpretation is wrong and explain what Jesus means by the statement. The bottom line is that Jesus employs hyperbole to convey the idea that we as Christians need to be peace makers with a disposition of patient endurance.
Conclusion
Well, my friends, that brings us to the end of this episode of the Sunday Catholic Word. The readings for this upcoming 7th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C, provide us with some good material for apologetical and theological discussions:
- We have material that prompts us to reflect on the great mystery of the bodily resurrection, and
- We have material that prompts us to defend the bodily nature of Jesus’ resurrection.
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I hope you have a blessed 7th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C. Until next time, God Bless.