What I Write About

I write about the infinite number of intersections between every day life and the good news of the God who has come to get us.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Easter Bodies Meet Wireless Internet

So if you look at the various post-resurrection stories in the gospels, they're kind of all over the place. They tell different interactions with Jesus, scattered across different circumstances and contexts over the span of a couple of weeks.

But they all insist on a couple of things: first, that the disciples actually saw Jesus and secondly, that it actually was Jesus. Not a ghost. Really him.

Only he passes through walls and appears in rooms. What's up with that? How can the gospel stories insist upon a physical resurrection while at the same time granting these funky, ghost-like qualities?

The issue here is one of reality and solid-ness. I sit here on my couch. My couch and I are similarly real and similarly solid.

But I walk through the newly installed wireless internet signal that's being beamed around my house courtesy of my brother-in-law because the wireless signal, while real, is less real than me or my couch. It is permeable, easily disrupted.

So it is with the risen Christ. He is able to pass through walls not because he is less real and more ghost-like, but because he is so very real that everything that we experience as "solid," even the most solid things that we can imagine, are barely real.

Jesus moving through walls is like an airplane flying through a cloud. It is no big deal. His resurrection body is so incredibly real that everything here on this earth is vapor-thin in comparison.

In C.S. Lewis' "The Great Divorce," the grass is so real that it hurts the feet of the visitors to heaven.

As it was with Jesus, so it will be with us. What we know and experience as reality here is only a shadow of what reality is, reality as we'll finally experience it when all things are made new. What seems real now will be shown for what it really is--passing, fragile, momentary. We will be as He is. Solid. Real. Eternal. I can't wait.

But for now, I'm pretty pumped about my wireless internet. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition with my wife while blogging? Not sure it gets any better than that: "Hey Ty! Move that bus!"

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