Affirming the Apostles ’ Creed (16 page)
What did Luther mean by saying, “You became what you were not that I might become what I was not”?
But our citizenship is in heaven,
and from it we await a Savior,
the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform
our lowly body to be like his glorious body,
by the power that enables him even to
subject all things to himself.
PHILIPIANS 3: 20-21
Resurrection of the Body
S
cripture sees death—life’s one certainty—not as a friend but as a destroyer. When my body and soul separate, I shall only be a shadow of what I was. My body is part of me, the apparatus of my self-expression; without it, all my power to make things, do things, and relate to my fellows is gone. Think of someone with full use of his faculties, and compare him with a paralytic; now compare the paralytic with someone totally disembodied, and you will see what I mean. Paralytics can do little enough; disembodied persons, less still. Thus death, while not ending our existence, nullifies and in a real sense destroys it.
C
OPING
W
ITH
D
EATH
Death is the fundamental human problem, for if death is really final, then nothing is worthwhile save self-indulgence. “If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (1 Corinthians 15:32). And no philosophy or religion that cannot come to terms with death is any real use to us.
Here, however, Christianity stands out. Alone among the world’s faiths and “isms” it views death as conquered. For Christian faith is hope resting on fact—namely, the fact that Jesus rose bodily from the grave and now lives eternally in heaven. The hope is that when Jesus comes back—the day when history stops and this world ends—he will “transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (Philippians 3:21; cf. 1 John 3:2). This hope embraces all who have died in Christ as well as Christians alive at his appearing: “for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear [Jesus’] voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life” (John 5:28ff.). And the raising of the
body
means the restoring of the
person
—not just part of me, but all of me—to active, creative, undying life, for God and with God.
N
EW
B
ODY
In raising believers, God completes their redemption by the gift not of their old bodies somehow patched up, but of new bodies fit for new men. Through regeneration and sanctifica-tion God has already renewed us inwardly; now we receive bodies to match. The new body is linked with the old, yet is different from it, just as plants are linked with, yet different from, the seeds from which they grew (see 1 Corinthians 15:35-;44). My present body—“brother ass,” as Francis of Assisi would have me call it—is like a student’s old jalopy; care for it as I will, it goes precariously and never very well and often lets me and my Master down (very frustrating!). But my new body will feel and behave like a Rolls-Royce, and then my service will no longer be spoiled.
In raising believers, God completes their redemption
by the gift not of their old bodies somehow patched
up, but of new bodies fit for new men.
No doubt, like me, you both love your body because it is part of you and get mad at the way it limits you. So we should. And it is good to know that God’s aim in giving us second-rate physical frames here is to prepare us for managing better bodies hereafter. As C. S. Lewis says somewhere, they give you unimpressive horses to learn to ride on, and only when you are ready for it are you allowed an animal that will gallop and jump.
A dwarf I knew would weep for joy at the thought of the body God has in store for him on resurrection day, and when I think of other Christians known to me who in one way or another are physical wrecks—deformed, decaying, crippled, hormonally unbalanced, or otherwise handicapped—I can weep too for this particular element of joy that will be theirs—and yours and mine—when that day dawns.
S
OUL AND
B
ODY
This bit of the Creed was probably put in to ward off the idea (very common for three centuries after Christ, and not unknown today) that man’s hope is immortality for his soul, which (so it was thought) would be much better off disembodied. There was a tag, “the body is a tomb,” that summed up this view. But it shows a wrong view both of matter (which God made and likes and declares good) and of man (who is not a noble soul able to excuse the shameful things he does by blaming them on his uncouth material shell, but a psycho-physical unit whose moral state is directly expressed by his physical behavior). The disordering effect of sin is very clear in the way my physical appetites function (not to look further); but for all that these appetites are part of me and I must acknowledge moral responsibility for whatever active expression they find. The Bible doctrine of judgment is that each of us will “receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” (2 Corinthians 5:10).
L
IKE
C
HRIST
The promise that one day we will have bodies “like his glorious body” (Philippians 3:20ff.) challenges us—do we really, from our hearts, welcome and embrace our promised destiny of being like Christ? (Cf. 1 John 3:2ff.) Facing this question could be a moment of truth for us. Some find their whole identity in gratifying physical itches (for sexual excitement, sleep, food, exercise, violence, alcoholic or drug-induced “highs,” or whatever) and feel—alas, with too much truth—that were they deprived of these, nothing would be left of them but an ache. And they see Jesus, who was not led by physical itches, as the “pale Galilean” through whose breath, according to Swinburne, the world grew cold, and whom D. H. Lawrence wanted to humanize (I have to use that verb in fairness to Lawrence, though it is the wackiest nonsense I have ever written) by imagining for him a sex life with a pagan priestess. Such a vision makes the idea of being like Jesus—that and no more—sound like being sentenced to a living death. Now is that how, deep down, it sounds to you?
If so, only one thing can be said. Ask God to show you how Jesus’ life, body and soul, was the only fully human life that has ever been lived, and keep looking at Jesus as you meet him in the Gospels until you can see it. Then the prospect of being like him—that and no less—will seem to you the noblest and most magnificent destiny possible, and by embracing it you will become a true disciple. But until you see it—please believe me: I kid you not—there is no hope for you at all.
F
URTHER
B
IBLE
S
TUDY
The resurrection hope:
Q
UESTIONS FOR
T
HOUGHT AND
D
ISCUSSION