Easter Collection for 2025
Laura Laurie: Once incarnate, always incarnate In this piece, I have chosen to emphasize just one aspect of Jesus’ physical resurrected existence. Of course, Jesus is not a detached brain floating around in the heavens directing his body the Church to accomplish his will. But it is also true that Jesus does in fact have a brain that is both like and unlike yours and mine. It is shaped and deeply affected by the euchatastrophy of the crucifixion and his resurrection. Today, he reigns on the right hand of God and yet he does so within a human body with a human brain and human hands and feet and a heart that pumps blood and a digestive system and taste buds in his mouth and scars on his skin and no doubt, facial hair! Far from diminishing him, emphasizing Jesus’ humanity after his resurrection glorifies, magnifies, raises our own humanity so that it is no longer a source of shame but an extravagant display of the surpassing power of God (2 Cor 4: 7). His resurrection easters us too.
“Many Christians, perhaps without thinking too much about it, assume that when Jesus ascended into heaven, he entered into a kind of spiritual existence with no more need for his physical body. Even those of us, like me, who were raised in orthodox Christian churches probably harbor some notion of eternal life as the immortality of our invisible souls. While our bodies may decay in their caskets or urns, the immaterial part of us lives on. But the story of Jesus’ ascension insists otherwise: if Jesus will return to earth in the same way in which he departed (Acts 1:11), then he is and will remain an embodied human person. Once incarnate, always incarnate, we might say, which is why John’s Gospel makes that scene with Thomas so prominent: the body that was crucified, the body with scars from the nails, is the body Jesus has now - though it is, as Wright reminds us, transphysical.” - Wesley Hill, Easter, p. 85.
“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ” - Paul (Phil 2:5)
“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing - Jesus (John 15:5)
“And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent” - Paul (Colossians 1:18)
LORD Jesus Christ, our living Head,
How bright Thy glories shine!
Unique in Thy humanity:
Eternally divine - C.C. Eliott, Hymn Lord Jesus Christ, our Living Head