And God saw all that he had made and it was very good…

An often overlooked but absolutely crucial detail of the Easter story is that Jesus rose from the grave bodily. The gospel writers take great care to communicate that the ultimate and glorious status of the resurrected Christ was not as an ephemeral spirit, free from the constraints of embodied existence, but as a walking, talking, eating, hugging, fleshly being. He lets Thomas touch his wounds. He eats breakfast on the shores of Galilee. To be sure, Jesus had a “new creation” body, but it was a body nonetheless.

While it is tempting to dismiss the bodily resurrection of Christ as the sort of parochial and doctrinal nonSTOCKsense that only clerics busy themselves with, to do so is to dismiss one of the most powerful and positive concepts in the Judeo-Christian worldview: the goodness of creation. The dualism that dominated the philosophies of Jesus’ day viewed the physical as evil and the spiritual as good. Physical, created matter was doomed to destruction and the sooner it was abandoned the better. Therefore, the body was the source of all of humanity’s ills; the life of the mind and the spirit was the only path of salvation.

But from the very first chapter of the Bible (Gen 1:31) to the very last chapter of the Bible (Rev 22:1-3), God declares that what he has made is good. He loves the world (John 3:16) and his ultimate purpose for creation and its inhabitants is to be fully and eternally alive.

Human beings are purposed, therefore, to love and care for God’s good creation as much as he does. The story of the Resurrection is that, even when it looks like humans have ruined everything God made, there is always hope for new life, new beginnings and new creation. We, as his children, should be about the business of joining God in that work.

The flourishing of creation and the flourishing of human beings, rather than being thought of as antithetical, should be understood as the whole point of the Easter story. The current debate about the fate of the Earth too often views people and their progress as the primary problem rather than the primary promise of the planet. But Easter reminds us that people can begin again and their world along with them. We celebrate the One who says, “Behold, I make all things new!” (Rev 21:5).

Eric Hankins, Ph.D., is pastor at First Baptist Church of Fairhope, 300 S. Section St., Fairhope, AL. For more information call 251-928-8685 or visit FirstFairhope.org.