It's Always Been Scattered: A Theology of the Church

On the Rags of Christ's Body

The distinction between Christ and the body of Christ begins in the resurrection tomb. Reminder: there’s currently a discount going for supporting subscriptions, in advance of our upcoming book club.

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There is a detail in John’s account of the resurrection’s aftermath that has always puzzled me. From John 20: 6-7:

Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, ⁷ as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen.

The most routine explanation is something proasaic like “This is clearly evidence that Jesus was raised from the dead and not stolen”. For directly after this, we read that the other disciple with Peter “saw and believed”.

The line of thinking is that there’s something in the way the cloths were folded (or not) that translates into evidence for the resurrection. But this interpretation just feels like a suicide squeeze in the bottom of the 9th, a hail Mary, a full court launch at the buzzer kind of interpretation: the cloths must mean something, and so, sure: it’s an apologetic sign.

Photo by James Wood on Unsplash

But John’s Gospel doesn’t have time for that. In fact, after John 11, with the raising of Lazarus from the dead, John is decidedly anti-evidence:

³⁷ Even after Jesus had performed so many signs in their presence, they still would not believe in him. ³⁸ This was to fulfill the word of Isaiah the prophet:

“Lord, who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”^[h]

³⁹ For this reason they could not believe, because, as Isaiah says elsewhere:

⁴⁰ “He has blinded their eyes
and hardened their hearts,
so they can neither see with their eyes,
nor understand with their hearts,
nor turn—and I would heal them.”^[i]

What John is, however, fully committed to is the notion that Jesus is brimming with signs, and the cloths of the tomb are of this kind, I think. From beginning to end, Jesus is constantly signing his way through his ministry, demonstrating with deed and word who he is: weddings, feedings, resuscitations, his own death.

It’s much more plausible, in other words, that the orderliness of the head cloth and the rags in this passage function as one last sign, but a sign of the new world of the resurrection.

My hunch is this:

The distinction of the two cloths—having been shed by the resurrected Jesus—are a sign of things to come:

The head—orderly and in its right place—and the body—scattered on the floor smelling like death.

The Orderly Head, The Unruly Body

Before moving further, let us go beyond John’s Gospel and suppose that the John of the Gospel is the same John who gives us Revelation¹. For in the Revelation, this motif of order and chaos carries out repeatedly: things are orderly above even while chaos reigns below.

The heavenly court carries out its praise and prayer, even while the people of God are scattered, vexed, and hiding from the four horsemen. The “upstairs is fine/downstairs is nuts” back-and-forth of Revelation helps to orient the reader to how to name a point of orientation and hope amidst the chaos of beasts and prophets of the beast.

The head in order. The body in chaos.

The head cloth folded, the body wrappings on the floor.

But it’s not just John who follows this through. Paul, in multiple letters, refers to this dynamic, of the church as paradoxically smelling like a grave and new life at the same time², or of the church as a living sacrifice, undergoing disolution while at the same time bearing the marks of the Spirit³.

All of this paradox begins, of course, as soon as there is such a thing as a church: the disciples—who scattered in fear while Christ remains steadfast toward death—will scatter faithfully now in Acts. The church, spread out across the world like rags on the grave floor, is of one piece with the head, but only by not being the orderly head. This union of head and body, however, does not prevent the body from remaining always at the edge of disolution and disagreement, even among their representative figures⁴.

The church stretches out, tries to hold itself together in administrative form and through common confession. And at every turn, is vexed by infidelity and the ordinary wobbles of being a body in motion. Such is, I think, the sign of a church which is living as the church: it smells like death but is animated always in that scattering through the Spirit which has raised its head from death.

And so, the rags on the grave floor are scattered precisely as witnesses. If the rags were still on the body of Christ, there would be no resurrection. But the rags—scattered as they are—are scattered precisely because Christ is risen. These rags, smelling of death and witnesses to the resurrection, lie scattered as they are as a testimony that they can do no other than be scattered and trust that they do not collapse into chaos precisely because the Lord has risen.

This sign in the tomb—the head cloth and the body rags—signify the history ahead for the body of Christ and Christ the head. The head will remain always in place, singular, at rest; the body rags remain scattered in time, but scattered as the kind of witnesses which are fitting for time’s movement. The rags are scattered, nearly dissolute, always on the knife edge of teetering over into disarray.

But this is the form given them: to attest in their having been scattered to the person of Jesus, whose form is absent from them and whose aroma lingers over them. The rags have been shaped by Christ’s own body, and now, bear that shape out on the floor of the world, awaiting the time when they too will be scooped up, folded, and glorified.

When I wrote my forthcoming book, I did not have this passage in mind, but I could hardly imagine a better image. This notion—that the scattered, and indeed, contestation that goes with this scattering—is not something to be feared: this is the only notion, I think, which makes sense of that history that is the church. Rather than seeking a movement back into singularity and order, the church is always that body which cannot escape having been marked by both death and the resurrection, scattered on the floor of the world. Its frail order and contentions go with being a creature in time which has a history, movement, and growth.

The global divergences and historical distensions of the church are not, on this reading, always divisions. They are, rather, intrinsic to the scattering of the cloths which have been wrapped around the incarnate Lord in death and resurrection.

These rags—these bones—will live.

But they will live precisely by their connection to the head, not by being the head. The unruliness of the rags is tied into their witness, their way into the world. They exist as the form of the Lord who is not among the dead but the living, thrown into the world because of the resurrection.

1. Scholarly opinion is pretty decidedly against these being the same person, but one doesn’t need to exclude the possibility that something is written in John’s name. It has authority nonetheless.

2. 2 Corinthians 2:15-17

3. Romans 12:1

4. Galatians 2