Several years ago, a peculiar series of television ads appeared on behalf of a life insurance company. Life insurance is a hard sell for many of us, because it forces us to think about something we would just as soon forget. So the challenge for an ad agency would be to come up with a way to promote their products in a striking yet non-offensive way. What better way than to choose humor?

As I remember them, these ads depicted unlucky holders of life insurance policies finding themselves run over, or dropping dead from heart attacks. You can be forgiven if you don’t yet see the light-hearted fun in them. But of course, the ads didn’t show people as tires thumped over them or as they were suffering a coronary. No, as in the movie Ghosts, each of these people think they have narrowly escaped death, until a heavenly messenger comes along to let them know that their time has come. In one, a young man stands by the office water cooler, listening to others talk about him as if he weren’t there. They don’t see him. He is puzzled, until two heavenly messengers – one equipped with angelic clipboard – approach to tell him to come along with them. They take him for a ride up the heavenly escalator (always a heavenly escalator, by the way, I never did see an ad where the angels led someone to a freight elevator and punched the “down” button!). Along the way, as they glide up toward heaven, the young man exclaims that he is glad he took the time to buy such-and-such a life insurance policy.

The ads are forgettable, as is most advertising, but the item that has stayed in my memory is that death seems to have been such an effortless experience in every case that the one who died hardly seems to have noticed the change. The heart attack victim appears for work, unaware that he has died; the one run over by an automobile jogs, panting, to the opposite sidewalk, apparently misunderstanding what has happened, believing himself still to be alive, when in reality he has been crushed to death.

Such a smooth transition from life to death in the popular mind amounts to a denial of death and its terrible reality. Even Jesus, whom we might believe to have had more of an inkling about the life to come than most of us, even Jesus called out to God in the anguish of his approaching death, saying, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me…” When we think about it, our amused smiles at cartoons with angels on clouds holding harps and wearing bed sheets amounts to laughing into the abyss, a bit of mental gymnastics to help us avoid thinking about the unthinkable, the grim reaper who can cancel out our lives and all we have done at any time.

Scripture says Jesus came to the disciples and stood among them. They thought they were seeing a ghost. The word Luke used is the same as the word for wind or air in motion. Who can see the wind? They thought they had caught a glimpse of the unreal, the half-visible, half-hidden world of the beyond, the twilight zone. The ghost that they thought they saw was not unlike the apparition that Scrooge saw when his old partner, Marley, came to pay him a visit in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Scrooge, too, thought he saw a ghost, and momentarily dismissed it by saying, “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blob of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than grave about you!”

Seeing a ghost, if not an everyday occurrence, is still one that we can write off as the not-quite real, something that occurs midway between sleep and wakefulness which we cannot be altogether sure is really there.

We are caught here in the dilemma of the Greek way of thinking that tells us that we have bodies, not that we are bodies, that our souls are not really connected to our bodies but are awaiting our death to be freed for eternal living beyond death. Apparently the biblical record does not mesh with this Greek view. The disciples assumed they saw a disembodied spirit, apparently a cause for alarm, an assumption that what they saw was less than fully alive, was a ghoulie or a ghosty, or a thing that goes “bump” in the night.

They “thought that they were seeing a ghost,” Luke tells us, but apparently they were mistaken. What, then, was Jesus after his resurrection if not a ghost?

Luke went to great pains to describe the scene for us, to show that in no way could the disciples say they had just eaten over-rich food and had a community nightmare. Jesus invited them to look at his hands and feet, to handle him, saying to them, “for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” He even asked them for a fish fillet, and what person has ever seen a ghost eat? No question about it, Luke gives us a picture of Jesus that leaves very little room for those who would pass off the resurrection as a mass hallucination or a wistful dream. They discovered, from touching, watching, and probably pinching themselves once or twice, that he was real – not some abstract, immortal soul that drifts in and out of haunted castles, that merely awaited release from the flesh and bones body, but a real person, the person they had seen and known and loved, and missed when he was gone.

When the Apostles’ Creed says – or, rather, has us say – “I believe in the resurrection of the body…” the phrase is put there for a reason: The reason is that there is no other way to understand the biblical witness about the matter. There are those who consider such a doctrine an embarrassment to the modern mind, who prefer to think about disembodied souls somehow magically released into the Ozone layer upon death, but if we are going to be faithful to the biblical witness, and I think we should be, we simply cannot avoid coming to terms with this witness that Luke makes to the very real presence of Jesus among his followers after his very real, very convincing death.

But please note this: all, every one, of the resurrection appearances of Jesus in Paul and the Gospels are different. They disagree in almost every detail: who was at the tomb, who witnessed the resurrection, the character and quality of Jesus’ resurrected body. That should tell us that we do not have reports of historical fact but of real and faithful experience. But all the accounts make one thing clear: those who witnessed the resurrection believed they saw Jesus as a resurrected body.

When the Apostles’ Creed says, “I believe in the resurrection of the body,” there is no harm, in our less-convinced moments, in finding out that the reaction of the disciples is the very same reaction as our own. Luke says, “While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering…” like getting a telephone call saying we’ve won the Publishers’ Clearing House giveaway. The Good News Bible puts it “They still could not believe, they were so full of joy and wonder.” The New English Bible is more up front still: “They were still unconvinced, still wondering, for it seemed too good to be true.”

There is no question that this is my favorite line in our passage, for it is so like me, like so many of us. Disbelief and joy, walking hand in non-reconciled hand. The witness to the bodily resurrection would be so much less convincing if Luke had said that once they had seen him they were convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt, that never again did a suspicion of doubt enter their minds. But he doesn’t say that. Standing there, looking into the resurrected eyes of Jesus himself, they still were bothered by the fact that they could not quite accept it all, knowing as they did that there was nothing else on earth to compare with what they were seeing, witnessing and yet not having the foggiest shred of understanding about what was happening to them.

Frederick Beuchner says that those who believe in the immortality of the soul believe that life after death is as natural a function as digestion after a meal. But the Bible doesn’t speak in that sense. The Bible speaks instead of resurrection. We do not go on living beyond the grave because that is how we are made. We go to our graves just as Jesus did, just as all those who have died have always done, dead as a doornail… Then we are given our lives back again, not because that is how we are made, but because that is how God has decided to act in our behalf.

A whole person is not just a spirit traveling around in a body, waiting to be let out. This idea, popular as it is, seems more fantastic to me than the resurrection of the body. If it were true, where is this immortal essence located? In the appendix? The medulla? The elbow? Body and soul together make up a whole person, are fused together in a perfect unity so that neither is complete without the other. So the resurrection, however much we, like the disciples, may need to blink our eyes to make sure we are seeing what is there, is a gift of divine reality.

And, like the unity of body and soul in the resurrection, Jesus appeared to his disciples for two reasons:

First, to inspire belief. This is the heart of the Christian movement; it is the spirit of belief. The very word “inspiration” means a breathing in, a being filled with creative thought or action, the way lungs are filled with air. It is a filling of Spirit. It is the rock upon which we base our hope. For this reason, Jesus appeared in his resurrected body to the disciples. But it was not for this reason only. The resurrection does not inspire a detached belief any more than the soul exists independently of the body.

Jesus appeared to his followers in order to commission them. He didn’t tell them to return to their homes and be warmed by their newfound faith. Rather, he commissioned them for action on behalf of the whole world. This commissioning creates the body of the Church, the body of Christ.

If the inspiration of belief brought on by the resurrection is the spirit of the Christian movement, the commission to go into the world and be about the business of redemption is the body. When Paul calls the church the “body of Christ,” he is not speaking abstractly, but in flesh-and-bones reality. Jesus, in resurrection, is not a disembodied “soul,” but an empowering presence, a presence in you and in me.

Only such an empowering presence in each of us could cause us to fulfill in any way the commission of Jesus, who said that we would be “clothed with power from on high.” The miracle of Jesus’ resurrection is alive in each of us, even when we are covered over with the feeling that it is too good to be true. It is true. It is the promise by which we can find life, real life, and pass it on to others.