The Resurrection of Jesus: Physical/Bodily or Spiritual/Mystical?

April 18, 2011 by Marcus Borg

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A Mystical/Spiritual Resurrection?
I also decline this option because of the widespread associations of these words in modern English. To call something "mystical" or to say "sounds like mysticism" commonly means that you don't need to take it seriously.

And given the modern world-view in which the physical and material are assigned a greater reality than "the spiritual," to speak of the resurrection of Jesus as "spiritual" assigns it a lesser and commonly unimportant significance. It's "just spiritual," not really real.

This is unfortunate, for the ancient meanings of "mystical" and "spiritual" suggest a reality that is more important, more significant, than the space-time world of our ordinary everyday experience. In the pre-modern meanings of "spiritual" and "mystical," the resurrection of Jesus was both: the spiritual is about "the really real" and the mystical is about knowing, experiencing, "the really real."

The central meaning of Easter is not about whether something happened to the corpse of Jesus. Its central meanings are that Jesus continues to be known and that he is Lord. The tomb couldn't hold him. He's loose in the world. He's still here. He's still recruiting for the kingdom of God.

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4/18/2011 4:00:00 AM

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