Stanley Spencer’s painting The Resurrection: Cookham is one of the great works of twentieth century Christian art. Painted in the 1920s and first exhibited in 1927 it was immediately recognised by one critic as “the most important picture painted by any English artist in the present century”.
The painting itself is enormous, a little under three metres high by five metres wide and depicts the dead rising from their graves in the pastoral beauty of the church and churchyard at Cookham in Berkshire where Spencer lived for most of his life. It is an image which speaks very much of its time and so has become, for some contemporary critics, a problematic work of art. That understood it is an immensely moving image of that great promise of the general resurrection, that moment at the end of time when, as St Paul describes in one of the earliest written understandings of the resurrection:
the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible
In Spencer’s vision this future promise is depicted as an outworking of the beauty and peace of his home in Cookham, a place he called “a suburb of heaven”. So, in his painting those he knew and loved are seen climbing out of their graves dressed in contemporary clothes as they make their way down the path to a waiting river boat to carry them to the paradise of God’s new creation. This is not the vision of the resurrection of the great and the holy, but of the mundane and ordinary.
For us, today, this image is a helpful one as it helps us makes sense of one the most challenging aspects of the Easter promise. That in Jesus we find not the resurrection of an idea, nor the possibility of some sort of life on some kind of spiritual plain, but the resurrection of a man in flesh and blood which itself points us to that promise of the bodily resurrection of all the faithful. That moment when, in words from the book of Job used at the funeral of Pope Francis yesterday:
…after my skin has been thus destroyed,then in my flesh I shall see God,[…]and my eyes shall behold, and not another.
At the heart of the Easter story is the promise of the bodily resurrection. Through all of the resurrection appearances in the Gospels there is the confident assurance that the Jesus who appeared to the Apostles on that first Easter Day and beyond was not some sort of spectral apparition or ghostly figure, but a real person in flesh and blood. In the Gospel story we heard last Sunday morning Jesus tells Mary Magdalene “do not hold on to me” as she sought to hug and touch Jesus in her shock and joy. Later, on the first Easter Day Jesus meets disciples on the road to Emmaus and reveals himself to them only when he has sat and eaten with them. And then today in our Gospel reading we hear Thomas’ doubt turned around as he is invited by Jesus to:
Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.
We are told again and again about the bodily reality of Jesus’ resurrected self for two reasons. The first is that it provides veracity to these resurrection accounts. These were not hallucinations or visions, but the appearance of a real person, present to them in flesh and blood. The second is that in asserting not only the promise of the resurrection, but the bodily reality of that resurrection, the Christian Gospel is presenting something radically and transformatively new.
The idea of resurrection is not one which is unique to Christianity. Through the Hebrew Scriptures we hear echoes of this idea. Initially it appears as a metaphor alluding to the renewal of the people of Israel after a time of exile. These then develop into the assertions of something beyond death as the dead are carried down to a shadowy existence in Sheol. These ideas were not limited to Judaism with, for instance, Greek philosophy drawn from the ideas of Plato asserting life beyond our material bodies in the theory of the immortality of the soul.
However, in the Christian story – told both in the Gospels and in the writings of St Paul – the promise of life beyond death is held together with the promise of a full and corporeal and bodily resurrection for those who come to God through Jesus; the resurrection and the life.
So, what can we draw from this great mystery?
The first is that it reminds us that the resurrection is not a rupture in God’s promise with his creation. Rather it teaches us that the resurrection is the consummation of that promise. That in his bodily resurrection Jesus does not leave behind the physical body which walked and ate and, with a healing touch, transformed those he came to save. Rather in his risen body he carries with him the marks of that ministry – in the holes in his hands and side he shows to Thomas and the other Apostles – that all that Jesus showed in his earthly life echoes across all time and space in the resurrection.
The second is that it points towards that same promise for each one of us. Through the Gospels we are given for-echoes of that future resurrection. In stories where Jesus raises people from the dead, like the stories of Lazarus and Jairus' daughter, we are told that the new life Jesus promises us is not just the reviving of our old selves, but a reorientation of everything that we have been – warts and all – to what we will be in Christ.
If these first two understandings point us to a future hope, within these is a third understanding which draws us back to our present reality. And here we might return to Spencer’s image of that resurrection at Cookham. What is so powerful and moving in that image is the ordinariness of it. It is full of simple, ordinary acts and actions. People dusting off their clothes as mother might tidy her scruffy son before leaving the house. Some reclining and reading, others resting before the journey to come. All being made new, all being transformed in and through their ordinariness.
These details are a reminder of the deep hope we find in the promise of bodily resurrection. Not only that God will use – on the other side of time – that which he has given us on this, but also that we can use those ordinary things to bring into our own reality the promise of the new creation we seek in this Easter season.
In this week when we have given thanks to God for the life and witness of Pope Francis so often it has been the extraordinary power of his ordinary actions which have shone through. His desire to live in relative humility amid the opulence of the Vatican, his breaking of tradition and washing the feet of female prisoners as part of his Holy Week observance, his calling for peace in South Sudan not only by his words, but by kneeling and kissing the feet of the leaders of that war torn place.
These vivid examples are a reminder that it is through ordinary things – through bread and wine, through water, through our own bodies – that God can reveal the new life of the resurrection. A promise we can know not only on that great day when the trumpet will sound and the dead shall be raised, but here and now in our own lives and in the little suburbs of heaven which we call home.
