The Body That Will Be Raised

Today's Reading

Read 1 Corinthians 15:42-58 — Paul's resurrection chapter. The contrast is fourfold: perishable/imperishable, dishonor/glory, weakness/power, natural/spiritual. Notice that the resurrection body is the same body — sown and raised, the same seed — and yet transformed into something it was not. Read all the way to verse 58: "Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain."

Read Romans 8:18-25 — the whole creation groaning in labor pains, awaiting the redemption of our bodies. Paul says we ourselves "groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies."

Read Revelation 21:1-7 — the new heaven and the new earth. The dwelling place of God is with man. Death and mourning and crying and pain are no more. He makes all things new.

Read Philippians 3:20-21 — Christ "will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body."

Reflection

The plan ends here, on day ten, with the strangest and most stubborn of Christian doctrines: the resurrection of the body.

Most Christians, even most churchgoing Christians, do not actually believe what the New Testament teaches about the resurrection. We have absorbed instead a vaguely Greek hope: that when we die, our souls go to a disembodied heaven, and the body — this troublesome, sick, aging container — is finally left behind. This is not the Christian hope. It is gnosticism, and the early church spent its first two centuries fighting it. The Christian hope, hammered out in the creeds and rooted in 1 Corinthians 15, is that the body — this body, the one that hurts — will be raised. Not replaced with a different body. Raised. Transformed, glorified, made imperishable, but in continuity with the body that was sown.

This matters more than almost any single doctrine for the Christian in chronic pain.

If the body is finally an irrelevance, then chronic suffering is essentially meaningless. The body's pain is a distraction from the soul's true life, and the sooner we are rid of it, the better. Many Christians have lived inside this assumption without realizing it. Their hope has been escape: from the body, from the world, from the material. But the New Testament hope is different. It is not escape. It is redemption — the buying back, the making right, the remaking of the body and the world into what they were always meant to be.

Paul makes this argument in 1 Corinthians 15 with characteristic force. He says the resurrection body is sown in weakness and raised in power. Sown in dishonor and raised in glory. Sown perishable and raised imperishable. The verbs are passive: God does the raising. The same body is in continuity through the change, the way a seed and a wheat plant are in continuity, even though they look nothing alike. Whatever you have suffered in this body — the surgeries, the chemo, the disability, the depression that ate years of your life — that body, that you, will be raised. Not abandoned. Raised.

N. T. Wright has spent decades arguing that the church needs to recover this. In Surprised by Hope he puts it bluntly: heaven is not the final Christian destination. The new heavens and new earth — the resurrected creation, with the resurrected saints living embodied lives in it — is the final destination. The temporary state between death and resurrection (what older theology called the "intermediate state") is real but it is not the goal. The goal is the resurrection. The Apostles' Creed got this right: "I believe in... the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting." The body is not subordinated. It is named. It is the location of everlasting life.

This means that what is happening to your body now is not finally without meaning. The chronic illness is not the last word about you. The disability is not your permanent identity. The depression is not the shape of your eternal mind. The body that hurts will be raised. The pain that has worn down your faithfulness for years will be wiped away — and notice how Revelation 21 puts this — by Christ himself, with his own hand. The promise is not that there will be no tears. The promise is that the One who has counted every tear will, personally, wipe them away. The intimacy of the gesture is striking. He does not delegate it. He does it.

Romans 8 sits at the center of this hope and gives it its strange, painful texture. Paul says the whole creation is groaning. Not just us. The trees, the rivers, the animals, the matter of the universe itself, are in labor pains. Something is being born. The redemption of our bodies is part of the larger redemption of the cosmos. We are not waiting for evacuation. We are waiting for delivery. The labor is real. The labor is long. The labor is sometimes unbearable. But labor is not pointless. Something comes out of it.

This is the hope that has sustained suffering Christians for two thousand years. It is not optimism. Tim Keller, drawing on the Czech writer Vaclav Havel, distinguished hope from optimism: optimism is the conviction that things will turn out well; hope is the certainty that things make sense, regardless of how they turn out. Christian hope is the second kind. The Christian who is dying of cancer at thirty-eight is not optimistic. There are no plausible optimistic readings of her situation. She can still be hopeful. Her body, sown in weakness, will be raised in power. Her suffering, which has felt unbearable for years, will not be the last word. The labor pains will deliver something.

What do we do with this hope today? How does it touch the pain that is in your body, in your house, in your hospital room, this hour?

It does not erase the pain. The Bible never asks it to. Revelation 21 explicitly says he will wipe away every tear, which assumes the tears were real, the suffering was real, the pain was real. The hope is not a denial of present suffering. It is a confidence about what present suffering is becoming.

It changes the time horizon. Most of us live as though this life were the whole stage. The Bible says it is the prologue. Paul says, in 2 Corinthians 4, that "this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison." Read it carefully. He calls it light. He calls it momentary. The man who said this had been beaten, shipwrecked, imprisoned, stoned, and was probably writing this from inside an active suffering. He is not minimizing the pain. He is locating it on a different scale. Set against the glory that is coming, his decades of suffering are a moment. They are still a real moment. They are also no longer the whole picture.

It dignifies the body. The Christian hope says the body is not a problem to be escaped but a creation to be remade. Your body, with its limitations, its illnesses, its aging, its scars, is not finally despicable. It is a creation God called good, a creation Christ took on in the incarnation, a creation he plans to remake. To care for the body — to take the medication, to do the physical therapy, to rest when rest is needed, to pray for healing — is not unspiritual. It is consistent with what God thinks of the body. The body matters. He is going to raise it.

It reframes faithfulness. The charge at the end of 1 Corinthians 15 — "be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain" — is the Christian's marching order in chronic suffering. The labor includes getting out of bed when getting out of bed is hard. It includes praying when prayer feels stale. It includes loving your family when illness has worn down your patience. It includes the small daily faithfulnesses that no one sees and that may, in this life, never be rewarded. Paul says they are not in vain. The resurrection makes them not in vain. Every act of faithfulness in this body is being kept, by God, for the body that will be raised.

This is the end of the plan, but it is not the end of the suffering. Many of you who walked through these ten days will close this last entry and still be in pain tomorrow. The chemo will not have worked yet. The depression will not have lifted. The marriage will still be hard. The chronic illness will still be chronic. We are not promising you a closing miracle. We are pointing you toward the closing reality.

You are walking, with the saints, toward a city. The city has gates. The river of the water of life runs through its center. The tree of life bears fruit twelve times a year. The Lamb is its lamp. There is no temple, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. There is no night, no death, no mourning, no crying, no pain. The body that has carried you through this hard road will be there, raised, glorified, finally well. Christ himself will wipe every tear from your eyes.

Until then, the charge is the charge of every Christian who has gone before you in this strange company: walk faithfully. Pray honestly. Lament when lament is needed and praise when praise is possible. Stay in the body of Christ. Bear other people's burdens and let them bear yours. Do not let the prosperity gospel's lie or the world's despair set the terms of your hope. You belong to a Lord who has been crucified and risen, whose body bore the same wounds yours bears, and whose body — glorified, ascended, reigning — is the firstfruits of what yours will be.

The healing did not come, perhaps. Or it came in part, or it has not come yet. The plan does not end with healing. It ends with hope. The Redeemer lives. He stands upon the earth. After your skin has been thus destroyed, yet in your flesh you shall see God.

The long faithfulness is the road. The raised body is the destination. Walk on.

Going Deeper

Read 1 Corinthians 15:54-58 aloud. Read it as the closing word over your last ten days, and over the suffering you carry into tomorrow. "Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?... Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain." Then sit in silence. The plan ends here. The road continues. The Christ who has walked it with you will continue to walk it with you, all the way to the city he is building, where the body that hurts will be raised in glory.