Preacher - David H. C. Read

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about conditions “over there,” and asked the questions to which there seem to be no satisfactory answers. Gradually I have learned that we cannot possibly expect to understand much about life in a dimension beyond this mortal life of space and time. Even if someone were to return and attempt to describe it to us, we would be incapable of understanding. It would be like trying to describe the glorious fall colors to someone totally color blind. I realize now that this is why the Bible has so little to say about the nature of eternal life. The Old Testament has almost nothing on the subject. Jesus was very reticent. For instance, when confronted with the trick question about the woman who married seven brothers, one after the other, and was asked whose wife she would be in the resurrection, he replied that the question made no sense since conditions are so different in a dimension where mortal institutions like marriage no longer exist, and we shall be “like angels.” That’s as far as he would go in describing heaven; it’s not very far since we have no idea of what angels are like. All Jesus would do is to give the absolute assurance that there is a resurrection, there is a heaven where God’s will is done. “He is not a God of the dead;” he said, “for all live unto him.” That’s a startling thought: for God there are no dead, those we call dead are alive in him.

      We can be agnostic about the details of eternal life and refrain from taking literally the spectacular imagery of the Book of Revelation, and yet hang on to the ringing assurance of the Gospel that to know God now is to know him forever, and that Christ has conquered death. I would trade all the speculations of know-it-all preachers, or the evidences of psychic research, for these simple words of Christ: “In my father’s house there are many rooms; if it were not so would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you . . . I will come again and take you to myself that where I am you may be also.” That’s all I need to know about heaven—“where I am you may be also.” Expand that thought, and do you need to know any more here and now?

      But who is this “you”? We may be allowed that question. Is it the “you” that now exists, that strange combination of body, soul, and spirit? Or are we dissolved into something ethereal, invisible, and unrecognizable? The ancient Greeks held a doctrine of “the immortality of the soul.” On the whole they held the body in contempt. It was something to be sloughed off at death to release the immortal soul. Eternal life was thus not a “communion of the saints,” a fellowship of real people, but a community of souls in which individual personality is presumably lost.

      Throughout the Bible we are seen as real people, each one of us known and loved by God. And since the body is the outward, visible means by which we can know and love one another it is treated with reverence and respect. “The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” The Bible portrays you and me as this mysterious body-soul creature, created and loved by God, and never speaks of the body, as the Greeks did, as a mere temporary prison for the soul from which we eventually escape. Therefore the eternal life we are promised is the recreation, the transformation, of the real you and me. Just as our souls are to be purified, so there will be new bodies through which they shine. For this Paul coined the paradoxical term a “spiritual body.” It was, then, to proclaim the truth that in the life eternal we are not lost in some impersonal community of souls but raised up as real people, living persons, individual and recognizable, that the Church set in the Apostles’ Creed these words: “I believe . . . in the resurrection of the body.”

      And gave a lot of Christian people trouble. In all my ministry I have had more questions about this than any other statement in the creed. Some bluntly say they can’t accept it. Others confess that at this point in the creed they are tempted to cross their fingers. Well, it could have been omitted from the Apostles’ Creed. The Nicene Creed simply has: “I look for the resurrection of the dead; and the life of the world to come.” I usually find myself responding: “Well, you don’t have to say it. You won’t be thrown out of the Presbyterian Church for refusing to say it. But first let me ask if you’re sure you know what it means.”

      It does not mean that these same bodies we have now are going to be put together again. Unfortunately, it was often interpreted in this way so that Christian people thought it all-important to have their bodies preserved and protected so that they could emerge at the right time and place and walk into heaven by the front door. When I was once in Jerusalem I was shown a graveyard reserved for those who could afford to be buried at the very spot where they expected Christ to come and revive them. This kind of thinking still infects the minds of those who attach enormous importance to the preservation of our mortal bodies, but can anyone who trusts in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ really believe that he would differentiate in the life eternal between one who dies peacefully in bed and the other whose body is blown to pieces by a bomb? When I say “I believe in the resurrection of the body,” I am not thinking of the literal reconstruction of the flesh and bones I now inhabit.

      This is not just my private opinion. It is the point of this portion of Scripture we are listening to this morning. The Corinthians to whom Paul was writing were naturally trained to think like the Greek philosophers about the separation of the soul from this body. Therefore some of them when they heard about the resurrection assumed that the Church was saying that this old body would be put together again, and they were scandalized, just as many are today. Paul heard of these objections and didn’t mince his words in replying. “You may ask, how are the dead raised? In what kind of body? How foolish!” (The King James’ Version is nearer to the Greek: “Thou fool!”)

      He then concentrates on a simple illustration of the relationship of the body we have now to the body we shall have in the life eternal. He points out how, when we sow a seed in the ground it rots and dies: yet later it springs to life as a new and beautiful plant. “The seed you sow does not come to life unless it has first died; and what you sow is not the body that shall be . . . God clothes it with the body of his choice.” Then he goes on to speak of the vast variety of these heavenly bodies corresponding to the variety we know here on earth. They are related to the earthly bodies but, he says, “The splendour of the heavenly bodies is one thing, the splendour of the earthly another.” “What is sown in the earth as a perishable thing is raise imperishable. Sown in humiliation, it is raised in glory; sown in weakness, it is raised in power, sown as an animal body, it is raised as a spiritual body.”

      “A spiritual body.” It is strange how this word of Scripture has been neglected by so many in the Church ever since. If we protest that we can’t conceive what a spiritual body would be like, Paul’s answer would be that of course we can’t while we are still bound in this mortal life. What we can say about those who are in the new dimension of eternity is that, like the seed that has died, “God clothes it with the body of his choice.” The plant is the same being (if I could put it this way) as the seed that has died, but it has now its unique and glorified body, just as the caterpillar is the same being as that magnificent butterfly that he will become.

      “God clothes it with the body of his choice.” This wonderful passage illumines for us the Christian view of life eternal. When we hear about this spiritual body that awaits us, this new clothing for the soul, we begin to realize how the doctrine of the resurrection of the body is richer and fuller than the affirmation of the immortality of the soul. It silences such questions as: “What age will we be in the resurrection life? Will babies be forever babies? Will the hundred year-old stay that way to all eternity? Will the handsome be frozen in their beauty and the deformed in their deformity?” God clothes us in the body of his choice—and I know that choice will be the best.

      For me “the resurrection of the body” is an expression of my belief that in the new life beyond the grave we shall be the real people we are now, not phantom spirits identical in our invisibility: we shall be transformed but recognizably the same. Since it is with these bodies we have that we recognize one another it is my belief that we shall know others and be known by them in the life to come. It is this kind of life that awaits those who trust in the living God, and this kind of a life, far beyond our imaginings, that is now enjoyed by those whom we have loved here on earth and are now with Christ. As we worship this morning we are in communion, not only with our Lord, not only with one another here present, but with all the company of heaven who are gloriously and totally alive. “For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this

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