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Easter
First Friends
1 Corinthians 15:35-49
‘What Kind of Body?’
Doug Gwyn
Jan just read for us
Paul’s great passage about the resurrection. During this
Lenten season, we’ve listened to Paul reflecting on the cross of
Jesus and what it meant to him. What it reveals about our lives
and the world we live in. There’s so much suffering in this
world, and each of us comes in for a share of it. Paul reflects
on the suffering of Jesus and what sense it makes of our
suffering. That can be very helpful to us. We know
suffering exists. But here in this passage, Paul speaks of a life
we don’t really know. A life many people doubt really
happens after we die. Is the resurrection of the dead just
wishful thinking?
Of course, in the centuries since Paul lived, the scientific revolution
has profoundly altered our world. Modern scientific inquiry and
technological application have changed the way we live. They have
also changed the way we look at our world. Great things have been
achieved by the scientific method of investigating our world. The
scientific method brackets out our religious beliefs and philosophical
outlooks. The scientific method doesn’t say religion and
philosophy are not true. It simply insists that we stick to what
we can observe in nature, the results we can achieve through controlled
laboratory experiments, etc. The universe may be God’s
creation in some sense, or the product of some intelligent
design. But in science, we stick to what we can actually
observe. Scientific method has produced many important insights
and helped us improve the human condition in many ways.
Scientific method really has no conflict with religious faith.
The true scientist could hear the passage Jan just read and simply say,
well, we can’t verify it scientifically. Conflict between
science and faith only happens when science becomes a faith of its
own. Or when faith thinks it can become science.
Unfortunately, both science and religion today often seem to step
outside their true understandings, and trespass in each other’s
rightful territory. When we listen to these words from Paul, we
need to remember that these are the words of faith. They cannot
be verified by science. But as I thought about it this week, I
realized that there are some things we know from science that make
Paul’s words sound pretty reasonable, outrageous as they
are. Actually, Paul trying to relate what he believes about the
resurrection of Jesus to the world of nature – at least what the
ancient world understood of nature. The point he’s making
is that we can’t really conceive of the destiny contained in our
bodies, or this universe. As he writes earlier in 1 Corinthians,
“No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived,
what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor :9).
A lot of modern science would support Paul’s thinking here.
We are involved in a vast, cosmic evolutionary process that has already
developed in ways unimaginable from earlier stages. For example,
our solar system revolves around a second-generation star. Our
sun and planets were formed out of the wreckage of an earlier
star. At the beginning of the universe, there were only hydrogen
atoms. The first generation of stars slowly fused those hydrogen
atoms into larger, more complex elements. All the elements that
our planet earth is made of – that we are made of.—were
produced by a star that no longer exists. We have arisen out of
the collapse of that star. We are stardust. Not so
differently from what Paul says here. We are created in the image
of Adam, literally, the man of dust. Our material bodies are made
up of the dust of the earth. And the dust of the earth came from
a star that eventually collapsed, exploded, and gave rise to this solar
system. Or something like that. I’m not a
scientist. And scientists can only conjecture.
But I was thinking this week, if we could have been there to see that
first generation of stars, when there was nothing but hydrogen atoms,
how could we have imagined even our solar system, let alone the life
that developed on this particular planet, let alone our amazing human
species that developed from that? We can look back and make some
sense of it. But who can look forward and see these things?
Paul is trying to do just that. But he’s being pretty
careful. He’s not spinning out an imaginary world like we
read in science fiction books. He’s simply saying this: if
Christ was raised from the dead, in something like a body, what does
that say about the destiny of our human species, and the rest of the
world around us? It says that we come from the dust.
We’re formed in the image of Adam, good old Dusty. But
we’re being pulled into a radically different future.
We’re being reformed into the image of a new human of
heaven. We live between two images, one that formed us from a
past we understand to some extent, and another that calls us into a
future we cannot imagine. Paul is careful not to say much more
than that.
It might be helpful to think of another example from nature. An
image we hear sometimes at Easter – the caterpillar and the
butterfly. We could speak of maggots and fruit-flies, but
it’s nicer to think of caterpillars and butterflies. The
adult stage of an insect is called the imago. It’s the
image of what the insect larva eventually becomes – even though
the larva looks nothing like the imago, the final stage. The
caterpillar looks nothing like the butterfly. We could look at a
caterpillar and never guess what it will become, if we didn’t
already know. If a caterpillar could think, it could ever imagine
what it will become. It might look at a butterfly and think, oh,
how beautiful! – I could never be like that. The
caterpillar just goes about eating one leaf after another, because
somehow, it seems right. And then at some point, it stops eating,
spins a cocoon around itself, and more-less dies. The caterpillar
has to die to everything it has known as life. Only then can it
be transformed, metamorphosed into the butterfly.
Lord knows, we get a taste of that experience in this life. When
I was in junior high, I was miserable. I was really starting to
grow and becoming so awkward. I lost all my
self-confidence. Sure, I had vague ideas what adolescence is
about. But from inside my body and inside my mind, I could only
wonder, what’s happening to me? I was just getting good at
being a kid – and now this! It was awful! Adolescence
one major metamorphosis we get to enjoy. And then there’s
mid-life. We’ve been out there questing for some
years. Learning and becoming competent in some kind of work,
maybe marrying and starting a family. And then at some point,
just as we’re getting good at being grown up, something
changes. It all seems strangely hollow. And the quest
changes direction. The answers are less out there, and more in
here. Our focus changes from objects we can clearly set our
sights on and go for, to a mysterious reality within we can only grope
toward.
Well those are two profound changes we experience in this life.
So why shouldn’t death be one more transformation into yet
another thing we cannot imagine from here? And because death is
the hardest of all, it leads to the most glorious transformation of
all. Of course, what remains so challenging about the
resurrection is that it’s more than immortality of the
soul. It’s a new existence in something like a body.
The gospel stories of the first Easter insist that Jesus became present
to his disciples in bodily form. They didn’t always
recognize him at first. But there was something about him they
recognized – including the wounds he had suffered in his
death. Now, I’m willing to imagine that some details in
these stories are poetic. But there’s something here we
shouldn’t just shrug off.
What does the metamorphosis from a physical body to a spiritual body
mean? Well, I don’t claim to know. But one thing it
means that what we do in this material body matters. It’s
not like we live for a while in this kind of body and then we get
another one. This body and this universe is not just a big
mistake. And it’s not just incidental to what we will be in
the next life. Mary Magdelene at the tomb didn’t recognize
Jesus at first. She recognized him when she heard his loving
voice call her by name. Later, the disciples recognized Jesus
partly by the wounds he showed them – wounds he had suffered by
standing faithfully for God, what he suffered for befriending the poor,
the disabled, the outcast and unwashed. What he suffered for the
good news he had preached. What he suffered for his
friends. The spiritual body we will become is some kind of
distillation of the goodness, the faithfulness, the love and friendship
we have lived out in these physical bodies. I believe this is
true – somehow.
So, we’re stardust. We’re the residue of a past
world. And we’re caterpillars, crawling today, that someday
we may fly. We’re men and women struggling to be faithful
in these frail and imperfect bodies, in the rough and tumble
circumstances of our lives. And to our eyes and our minds in this
life, much of what we are and what we do seems futile and doomed to
failure. Just as the whole ministry of Jesus came to naught on
that Good Friday. But no act of faith is futile. We will
live again to see its real meaning. And “when we’ve
been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve
no less days to sing God’s praise than when we’d first
begun.”
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