If it doesn’t it is not faith, and grace is not there. Listen again to the words of the epistle. “By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God; not of works lest any man should boast.” Our Christian activities in this devil-filled world are not the cause, or the price, of our salvation. They must follow genuine faith as the thankful answer of the forgiven sinner. “For we are his workmanship,” the passage goes on, “created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.” In a new translation: “We are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to devote ourselves to the good deeds for which God has designed us.”
So we come down from forty thousand to six feet above the ground. We go out again to face a world with devils filled. There is work to do. And we are called to do it with the joy of those who are being saved by grace through faith. In our anthem this morning you will hear the sounds of the devils: but through it you will hear the clear notes of the grace and the love that casts out fear. “Be of good cheer,” said Jesus, “I have overcome the world.”
The Resurrection of the Body
Editor’s Introduction
“We see through a glass darkly,” said St. Paul. And that glass is so dark that even Jesus could not describe the conditions of life on the far side of death. All the Lord was prepared to do, Read reminds us in this Commemoration Day sermon, “is to give the absolute assurance that there is a resurrection, there is a heaven where God’s will is done.”
Still, most of us would like to know something about the nature of life in that heavenly sphere. Read for his part encourages us to follow the lead of the Bible in speaking at least about the resurrection of the body rather than the immortality of the soul. “Body” is the biblical word for the whole person. That whole person, the Gospel assures us, “is sown in humiliation but raised in glory . . . sown in the earth as an animal body but raised as a spiritual body.”
But what does that mean? It certainly doesn’t mean, Read hastens to say, “that these same bodies we have now are going to be put together again.” It would, however, seem to mean 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.” This in turn would seem to imply that “we shall know others and be known by them in the life to come.”
The Resurrection Of The Body
A Sermon preached by David H. C. Read at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church on All Saints Commemoration Day, November 3, 1985
Text: “What is sown in the earth as a perishable thing is raised imperishable. Sown in humiliation, it is raised in glory; sown as an animal body, it is raised as a spiritual body.” 1 Corinthians 15:42–44 (NEB)
Readings: 1 Corinthians 15:35–49 (NEB); Luke 20:27–38
When approaching a topic like the resurrection of the body or any other that has to do with the nature of life after death, I try to keep in mind the admonition of the great sixteenth-century Anglican Richard Hooker: “Dangerous were it for the feeble brain of man to wade far into the doings of the Most High . . . our safest eloquence concerning him is our silence . . . He is above and we upon earth; therefore it behooveth our words to be wary and few.” Therefore in speaking about the resurrection of the body, my words will indeed be wary—and, within Presbyterian limits, I’ll try to make them few.
Like all who have a bump of curiosity, I have from time to time wondered 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
