Resurrection?

Resurrection ≠ Resuscitation &. Resurrection ≠ Apparition

Then what is it??

By request, I’m reposting two earlier reflections on the Resurrection. Too often we collapse its meaning into a false choice: either a ghost or a body. But the risen Jesus refuses both reductions. As he tells his disciples in the Gospel of Luke, “a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (24:39). Many people, then, jump straight to the binary opposite that it must be his body. But the Resurrection is not a Resuscitation because, unlike Lazarus who had to back to work on Monday, Jesus body is radically different. This is not resuscitation. Lazarus comes back to the same world, the same conditions, the same mortality. Jesus does not.

The Gospels strain to describe something that exceeds their categories. He bears wounds and invites touch—think of Thomas the Apostle placing his hand in Christ’s side—yet he also appears and vanishes, passes through locked doors, is mistaken for a gardener by Mary Magdalene, and eats broiled fish as if to anchor this strangeness in reality. Continuity and discontinuity, material and transfigured, recognizable and elusive—all at once.

So what do we call a life that is neither ghost nor mere body? What kind of existence still bears scars, yet is no longer bound by death? These reflections are an attempt to take the texts seriously on their own terms—and to ask what kind of God is revealed in a resurrection like this.