Christianity is a materialistic religion
Our faith isn’t ethereal, the physical resurrection of Lord makes it quite concrete
When Jesus met Mary after he resurrected, he told her not to hold on to him—not to hold on to the evidence, so to speak—but go to spread the Good News. So much ink and paper has been spent trying to use old-fashioned apologetics to prove the resurrection of Jesus. But rather than try to prove what is impossible to prove, Jesus charged Mary with a mission to spread the Good News of Jesus’ material resurrection.
It's not our job then to try to prove the unprovable, but to live and act in a way that demonstrates the material resurrection of Jesus. After he resurrected, Jesus appeared in a locked room that his disciples were in. He seemingly appeared out of thin air. But it wasn’t his immateriality, his ethereality, that allowed him to pass through these walls, but rather his materiality, his physically. Things of more substance pass through things of less substance, not the other way around. You can, for example, pierce steam or fog with your hand or your car, because your hands and car are more material than the steam or fog that they are entering through. Similarly, a more material Jesus could pass through these less material walls.
This isn’t an object lesson in metaphysical beings and how they work, but an invitation to pause for a moment. Perhaps we will become more solid in the age to come than we are in the present age. Perhaps we live in a ghostly world, and the one we are moving toward is physically more material. Christianity is then a religion that is deeply materialistic and moves us to care about material matters, like injustice, poverty, and oppression.
We see this image in C.S. Lewis’s famous work, The Great Divorce. When the protagonist enters heaven, the flower petals are too hard to be plucked, the leaves can’t be picked up, the grass is sharp and hurts his feet. Heaven is more material than he is.
When Jesus calls us to enact God’s will on earth as it is in heaven, he is calling us to work to make this world more substantive. It is the materiality of the wounds in his hands and the piercing in his side that evidence his resurrection to Thomas. It isn’t some apologetic argument or some philosophy that runs counter to the laws of physics. Jesus shows Thomas himself, in all of his materiality, and Thomas believes.
Christianity then, and proximity to God, makes us more material, more real, if you will. It doesn’t turn us into spiritual beings and allow us to spiritually bypass our pain and oppression. But rather, the material resurrection of Jesus which confronted death itself, gives us the courage and the power to confront the forces of death today. In doing so, we actually demonstrate the materiality of the resurrection of Christ. Put another way, political action and social action is among the simplest things we can do to account for the resurrection of Jesus.
In the face of fascism and oppression, Christians who confront this plain evil and rush to the aid of the oppressed are manifestly being the hands and feet of Christ. When we act for material change and provide for material needs, we are demonstrating the materiality of Christianity.
Christianity, then, is a religion that actually makes us more materialists. Jesus didn’t just resurrect as an ephemeral, spiritual being, but rather, he resurrected as someone who was more material than he was before, with the ability to pass through walls. Nevermind the absurdity of that; let go of the body, if you will. And embrace the call to make material change now.
This is the most basic level of Christian faith: to pronounce good news for the poor and liberation for the oppressed and act for it. Political action against injustice isn’t a complicated subject, nor should it a polarizing prospect. It’s the simplest expression of our faith. And to those who need see to believe—and that’s most of us—political action is a crucial work of discipleship and evangelism.
For those who need sight to believe, like Mary, Peter, and Thomas, we must act for material consequence in the world. When our love expresses itself politically, we are declaring that Christ is Risen indeed.
In face of the horrors of fascism, we need to see, Lord. We want to believe, help our unbelief. The ability to see God in the face of fascism without explicit progress or action is a discipline that’s cultivated over the life of faithfulness. In order to see the ephemerality of this world and the eternity of one to come, one must dwell with the Human One, the material one. To lift the veil and rip the curtain that separates this ghostly world from the material one, we need to contemplate and meditate as we adopt the mind of Christ. I hope for all of us we have pastors, directors, and mystics around us that help us in that harrowing journey.
For those new to the journey or struggling in this present moment, we also need those deep followers of God to show us how to act for change now. We need them to prophetically speak against injustice and lead us to do the same. Christianity can be a material solution to the world’s oppression if Christians act for justice. In our actions, we declare that Christ has materially risen.