From Empty Tomb Toward Transfigured Bodies: Pondering Resurrection with Wit

Abstract

����� ��� Resurrection, 1 in Hans Urs von Balthasar’s poignant words, establishes “the all-controlling turning point” 2 in divine and human history. In other words, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the sacramental hinge in the historico-cosmic drama of salvation. Its utmost soteriological and spiritual relevance resides precisely in its provocative yet irreducibly embodied nature. Hence, a mere mention of Jesus’ empty tomb in scholarly discourse rarely fails to raise historical-critical eyebrows. It is no secret that Christian theological inquiry, especially in its modern Western manifestations, has habitually struggled with the intricacies and angsts of human embodiment. Yet it has wrestled even more profoundly with the absence of one critically important—yet missing—body: the body of Jesus Christ, “the firstborn of all creation,” in whom “all things hold together” (Col 1:15–17). Regardless of the intellectual scandals and cultural shockwaves that bodily resurrection engenders, nothing less than the overarching sacramental integrity of salvation hinges on the possibility of redemptive transfiguration of all matter starting with the exquisite yet vulnerable human body. But if, as Tertullian claimed long ago, caro salutis est cardo—if our flesh indeed is the hinge of salvation, the empty tomb is much more than just the most embarrassing episode within an already eccentric narrative of Jesus’ death and resurrection. For the resurrection to be what the Christian tradition continues to claim it is—the ultimate liberative and healing transfiguration of our earthly personal, social, and planetary corporeality towards its true actualization and fulfillment in spiritual, affective, sensual, intellectual, and material wholeness—the tomb of Jesus had to be, as it were, empty. Despite persistent temptations to “spiritualize,” rationalize, and demythologize, the scriptural narratives suggest that the resurrection events were multisensory events that stretched human senses, sensibilities, affects, and intellects to the breaking point. The reflective trajectory of this essay starts with a multimedia event that engages senses and sensibilities—HBO award-winning film Wit. Wit foregrounds my theological reflection on the corporeal exigencies of Christ’s—and, proleptically, our own—resurrection. But why choose a movie as a theological interlocutor?