Friday 5th May
Read 1 Corinthians 15:35-41
“But someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?’ 36 How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. 37 When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. 38 But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body. 39 Not all flesh is the same: people have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and fish another. 40 There are also heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies; but the splendour of the heavenly bodies is one kind, and the splendour of the earthly bodies is another. 41 The sun has one kind of splendour, the moon another and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendour.” (NIVUK)
Having established that after death there will be bodily resurrection the next question, and admittedly the one of more interest to us, is what kind of body will it involve and how will it happen? How in both the sense of ‘How is it even possible?’ and ‘How will it occur?’.
In answering those questions we need to grasp two key things. First, Paul is speaking by analogy here. He wants us to understand the concepts but not take them to their extreme conclusions (i.e our resurrection bodies will not ‘sprout’ from a random cell from our scattered and decayed physical bodies like an apple thrown out the car window may eventually result in an apple tree by the roadside…). Second, he is building a picture of the new creation using images from the original creation story. Reading Genesis 1 and 2 one will find, plants and seeds and birds and fish and heavenly bodies and life granted by the spirit, and reproduction after its kind, and Adam, etc. All images that he uses in answering this question. There is not enough space in a short devotion to go through all the amazing ways in which Paul compares, contrasts and then creates a picture of resurrection from the original narrative of creation. But it rewards meditation.
Paul describes both continuity between our old body and resurrection body, but also discontinuity. As a seed does not look like the plant it will become when clothed by God, so too we may not look exactly as we do now when clothed with our resurrection selves. (Which may partly explain why Mary did not recognise Jesus…). Just as there was splendour matching the original location and purpose of each part of creation, so too our resurrection bodies will be ‘fit for purpose’ and match the setting of the new creation perfectly.
Paul will further explain the ‘How will it happen?’ in the next paragraph, still working from analogy and from Genesis 1 and 2. But I hope that as we read, and re-read, this amazing passage we will be comforted that God knows what he is doing. That the seed of life has already been planted by the word of the gospel in our lives and will bear fruit both now and at death. And that we will be clothed with splendour at the end.
