PREACHED AT Good Shepherd, Berkeley

SEVENTH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY, FEBRUARY 20, 2022

Year C: Genesis 45:3-11, 15; Psalm 37:1-12, 41-42; 1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50; Luke 6:27-38

THE IMPORTANCE OF BODIES

So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body..

Why is Paul so insistent that the resurrection means having a body? It was clearly an important issue for him, even if he wasn’t really sure how to talk about it. And it’s something the Christian community in Corinth was having trouble with. They agreed that they would have a life after death along with Jesus. But they must have thought of it as a purely spiritual existence, freed from the body. Paul was emphatic that there would have to be a body of some kind. Why? I’ll come back to that question in a bit, but first I want to look at our other readings because I think they hold the key here.

Joseph and his brothers—you probably remember the earlier part of the story. Joseph was an annoying kid, not an easy person for his older brothers to live with. He was his father’s favorite—and he liked flaunting it in front of them. They got revenge by selling him off into slavery in Egypt. But there he showed so much managerial talent that the Pharaoh made him his prime minister and put him in charge of the whole country. Among other things, he was presiding over the biggest feeding program in the world all through a seven-year famine. it was the famine that forced his brothers to trek down to Egypt to buy food for their families. And they didn’t know him in his fancy Egyptian duds. But he knew them. And he decided to see just who they had become in the intervening years. So he gave them a test: he would see whether whether they would repeat what they had done to him by abandoning their youngest brother Benjamin (now their father’s favorite in Joseph’s place). He engineered a false accusation against Benjamin and demanded that he be left behind in an Egyptian jail. It turned out that they had indeed learned something from what they’d done to Joseph. They stood by Benjamin and passed the test. 

Only then did Joseph make himself known to them And it wasn’t just a cheerful, gather-the-old-crowd-around family reunion. Our reading this morning didn’t tell quite all of the story. Let’s step back a few verses to the opening of the scene to get the full emotional impact of it: “Then Joseph could no longer control himself before all those who stood by him, [remember that he’s a very powerful man and surrounded by other officials] and he cried out, ‘Send everyone away from me.’ So no one stayed with him when Joseph made himself known to his brothers. And he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it, and the household of Pharaoh heard it. Joseph said to his brothers, ‘I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?’ But his brothers could not answer him, so dismayed were they at his presence.” All the pain and suffering of the story is there in these few verses. Joseph is in tears. His brothers are in terror. 

And that sets the stage for the great thing that Joseph does next. He restores their broken family by forgiving them. It was wrenching, it was risky, it was scary; but it worked. Meeting him brought his brothers face to face with their wrongful deed from years past. Joseph, back then, was all wrapped up in being his father’s favorite. But now Joseph realizes that he needs his whole family. His brothers are entirely at his mercy now. He could exact vengeance. Instead he chooses to forgive them. 

What Joseph chose to do is right in line with what Jesus was saying in this morning’s reading from Luke’s Gospel: “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” It’s counterintuitive stuff, isn’t it? This isn’t the first thing I want to do with someone who’s done me harm. And I’ll bet Joseph, during his earlier years as a slave, must have hated them roundly. But he caught hold of the big picture when they stood helpless before him and understood that only forgiveness could save them all—save them from a cycle of endlessly compounding and reinforcing the evil. Forgiveness is the only thing that can actually bring good out of evil. 

Jesus’ words are terribly challenging. They’re not something we can just make up our minds to do. They’re not just chores to be done. You can’t make a to-do list out of them and check them off as you complete them. What they are is a way of building a new reality. “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. . . ” These are things we have to grow into, just as Joseph had to. But they will produce a new world.

Now, that would be matter enough for a whole sermon, by itself, but I want to go back to Paul and the body. To start with, notice that the whole Joseph story is very much about bodies—both what his brothers did to him and what he does with his brothers. They threw him in a pit and then sold him into slavery. He threatens them with detention in Egypt. And they are reunited only when a famine forces them all back together—because they had bodies to be fed. If they’d all been spirits, none of this could have happened!

Bur we human beings are weird, hybrid creatures, really—a bit like the mythological sphinx: body of a lion, wings of an eagle, human head. On the one hand, we are spirits that can range across the universe—from the furthest galaxies to the infinitesimally small word of quarks and quantum mechanics, through all the vast stretches of human experience, and emotion. We can howl with laughter over the absurdity of our existence and also weep over its sorrows. There is nowhere our spirits can’t go. 

And we are also creatures of the body, creatures of time and place, bound to other human beings from the moment of birth onward. How many years did Joseph have to turn his brothers’ treatment of him over and over in his mind, trying to resolve it all by himself? He may have been as surprised as they to hear himself forgiving them. But forgive them he did, and that opened the way for a new beginning among them all. It was the reality of their bodies that demanded it.

In Paul’s day, almost everybody believed that there was a life after death. They believed that the spirits of the unburied dead could turn up as ghosts to haunt the living. And once their bodies had been buried, they went to Hades, the land of the dead. People who’d been really bad got punished there. People who’d been really good got to hang out in the Elysian Fields. The rest of us, I guess hung out on the streets. But it was a thin, shadowy existence—not something to look forward to. There was really nothing to do—only an eternity of memories. The author of Ecclesiastes (9:4) summed up the prevailing sentiment when he wrote, “Better a living dog than a dead lion.” 

And Paul was saying, “It isn’t like that! It’s a real life because it’s like Jesus’ resurrection.” In other words, we continue to be embodied human beings, with human relationships. These relationships in which we have sometimes harmed one another can also be the relationships in which we can move, together, toward forgiveness and love and new life. 

Jesus’ words this morning told us the dynamics of this life, here and in the age to come. We know what to expect of that world: a realm of healed and restored relationships. We can even begin to live in it here and now. We can begin to discover it in our lives and help one another to discover it. Stepping back from judgement and condemnation doesn’t come easy. Forgiving and sharing don’t, either. But the promise Jesus concludes with is not an idle one: “A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your laps; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.” Now and in the age to come!