If You Believe He's Risen, Indeed You Better Be Celebrating Constant Communion

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Third Sunday of Easter — Acts 9:1-6, (7-20)

According to my friend Ryan Burge, three-quarters of mainline clergy report belief in the bodily resurrection of the crucified Jesus (better than I would’ve guessed); meanwhile, nearly all of Roman Catholic priests and Evangelical pastors profess the dogma. The historic black church likewise affirms the Easter alleluia.

However, it is far from clear that preachers know what we’re talking about when we talk about the body of the risen Christ.

The body birthed by the empty tomb is not the same body delivered by the Mother of God.

The news of Easter is not that the crucified corpse of Jesus came back alive. The resurrection is not simply Jesus’ life starting up again. After Jesus offers the disciples the wounds in his hands and his feet, the disciples reciprocate by offering him hospitality. They give him some broiled fish to eat, which he does. Nevertheless, though the Risen Jesus is not a ghost neither is as he was before he died, for when he leaves them Jesus does not walk off into the distance. Presumably, he leaves in the manner in which he came— he vanishes. An odd body indeed.

As Peter Brunner writes:

“The risen Jesus’ life does not continue on from his death…that he is not merely returned to life is shown by the discontinuity of his risen existence with his incarnate existence.”

Bible editors typically label Acts 9.1-20, “Paul's conversion, baptism, and preaching.” Preachers focus upon Saul in this scripture at the expense of an extraordinary revelation the risen Christ unveils to him— a claim critical to the logic of the future apostle’s epistles. Armed with arrest warrants, the Pharisee among Pharisees prowls the diaspora for followers of the risen Jesus. Saul aims to rendition members of the Way to a black site in Jerusalem.

Nearing Damascus, the risen Jesus assaults Saul and speaks a strange word, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me ?”

The locution is theologically decisive.

The bodies Saul has bound and beaten on account of blasphemy constitute the body of Jesus.

This no mere metaphor nor is it a figure of speech. In this utterance, the crucified-and-risen Jesus identifies the community of disciples—those men and women whom Saul pursues—not merely with himself, but as himself.

The church is not merely the people about whom Jesus cares.

The church is the people in whom he is present.

The church is not the Jesus Memorial Society!

We are his risen body?!

You are the me of whom Jesus speaks when he says to Saul, “Why do you persecute me?”

Perhaps this is an immodest claim that stretches all credulity, but it is nevertheless not a pious exaggeration. And again, the point is religiously decisive. If we take the Word at his word, then we must say that to strike the church is to strike Jesus Christ. And this is not because the church reminds Jesus of himself. It is not because Jesus is sentimentally bound to his Bride. It is because she is, in time and space, the embodiment of his risen person.

That Jesus of Nazareth ate and drank with sinners scandalized the begrudgers in Galilee. That the crucified Jesus chooses sinners as his risen body only exacerbates the opprobrium. This is the ecclesial scandal of the Damascus encounter and it is the oft-neglected content of the Easter gospel. The crucified is risen from death and is bodily present in the community he has called forth.

Christ is risen.

Indeed he is risen in this mundane manner.

Critics often charge that Mary’s boy came announcing the Kingdom of God but instead the church is what arrived. But according to Jesus in the Book of Acts, the church is rather the prolongation of the incarnation in history—not as a replacement for Jesus, but as the very form in which his risen life is available.

“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”Nowhere is Christ’s posit more unavoidably clear than in the eucharist.

After all, the reason the apostle Paul can warn the church at Corinth that they eat and drink judgment upon themselves at the eucharistic table is because the risen Jesus— the Judge— IS PRESENT THERE!

As Robert Jenson elaborates:

“Although Paul clearly thinks of the LORD as in some sense visibly located in a heaven spatially related to the rest of creation, the only body of Christ to which Paul ever actually refers is not an entity in heaven but the eucharist’s loaf and cup and the church assembled around them…

The teaching itself is a proposition and not a trope…We are the body of Christ, according to Paul, in that we have been “baptized into” it. And what we have been baptized into is simply “Christ.” Again we are one body in that we do something that can equivalently be described as “sharing in the body of Christ” and partaking “of the one bread.” In the complex of these passages, there is no way to construe “body” as a simile or other trope that does not make a mush of Paul’s arguments…

The church, according to Paul, is the risen body of Christ. She is this because the bread and cup in the congregation’s midst is the very same body of Christ. Paul’s first statement on the matter does not extend quite to this equation. “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” But Paul then applies this doctrine to the behavior of the Corinthian congregation: because the Corinthians eat and drink disrespectfully of one another, they fail to “discern” the body of Christ.

We want to ask which body Paul has in mind, the bread about which he has just reported the dominical words or the congregation that is in fact the offended entity and which he has just earlier called Christ’s body.

Paul’s text makes sense only when we grasp that he means both. At once. And he would reject our question as meaningless.”

He means both.

“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute the loaf and the cup?”

Just so—

It is precisely at the table, in the broken bread and poured-out cup, that the church is most truly herself, because it is there that the risen Christ is most truly himself for her.

The eucharist does not symbolize Christ.

The eucharist— bread and wine and gathered believers— is Christ.

Christ given.

Christ speaking.

Christ binding his people into the unity that is his risen body.

Thus—

To persecute the church is to persecute Jesus because the church, gathered in Word and Sacrament, is not only the witness to the resurrection but she is its medium. Saul’s violence against the disciples is violence against Christ because the church is the site in which Christ’s presence persists. This is not because Christ is absent and remembered, but because he is risen and active, shaping a people who speak his words, enact his sacraments, and await his return.

The church is not only called to be like Christ; she is where Christ happens.

The surveys report nearly all preachers affirm Christ’s bodily resurrection, yet the scriptures suggest their Easter alleluia is not persuasive if it is not occasioned by the edible promise, “This is my body, given for you.”

Biblically speaking, Christians cannot profess “Christ is risen indeed!” if they do not simultaneously gather around their resurrected LORD as bread and wine.

If the Word’s word to Saul on the road to Damascus is reliable, then every resurrection utterance is invalidated by a table devoid of loaf and cup.

Or as John Wesley might put it, no confession of Christ’s bodily resurrection is credible apart from constant communion.

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