The Resurrection of the Body

But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwelleth in you, he that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall quicken also your mortal bodies through his Spirit that dwelleth in you.—Romans 8:11.

1. “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” In spite of that merciless saying of Strauss, “The last enemy which shall be destroyed is the belief of man in his own immortality,” there is no hope which nestles deeper in the human heart, and none which in our day has had more wistful expression. Among a thousand people there will not be one who does not wish to cast himself with all his heart and mind into this inspiring belief, and declare his conviction, if he can, that death is not the end of all his labours, his sorrows, his endeavours, his victories, his love, but that he, a complete human being—not soul only, but body and soul—will enter into fulness of life when he passes from this world into that which encompasses us on every side.

2. Now this hope is fulfilled in Christianity. For Christianity is a revelation of energy. That is its heart of hearts. It declares the direction in which God has put out force. It professes to bring into play the full powers of the Divine will. Everything else is subordinate to that. Knowledge, for instance, is not given by it for its own sake. Nothing is told us which does not belong to and issue from the action taken on our behalf. We know God through what He does. We know Him, we see Him, in Jesus Christ whom He has sent. In that sending we learn what God is, and the sending determines and limits all our knowledge. When we go beyond what He has shown us in that mission of His Christ, we find ourselves, as much as any others, lost in an abyss. We slip off into the inane; our faculties fail us. Only in the face of Jesus Christ, only by the rigid adherence to the actual manifestation of God’s will in act through Him, only in what is there expressed through the face of Him who lived and died and rose, only so does our knowledge come.

Even such is Time who takes in trust

Our youth, our joys, and all we have,

And pays us but with earth and dust;

Who, in the dark and silent grave,

When we have wandered all our ways,

Shuts up the story of our days.

But from that earth, that grass, that dust,

The Lord shall raise me up, I trust!1 [Note: Sir Walter Raleigh.]

I

Resurrection

1. The word most commonly used in the New Testament for rising from the dead is the verb egeiro, “to awaken.” The angel awakened Peter, and the disciples awakened Jesus (Acts 12:7; Mark 4:38). Joseph awakened from his dream, and took Jesus to Egypt, and back to the land of Israel (Matthew 2:13-14; Matthew 2:20-21). Here and often elsewhere the English versions have the verb “arise,” but the arising is only a suggested meaning. Probably the word could be uniformly translated “awaked,” and in many instances with the effect of rendering the sense more vivid. Read through the fifteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians, substituting “awaken” for “be raised.” Note especially the places where it comes into antithesis with “asleep” (e.g. Romans 8:15; Romans 8:20). You will perhaps not wish to change the familiar old rendering, but you will find it imbued with new significance. The noun of this stem is used but once in the New Testament (Matthew 27:53).

2. Nearly as frequent as egeiro, and on the whole more conspicuous, are the verb anistemi and its noun anastasis. The noun is translated “resurrection.” The verb denotes to rise up or raise one up from the supineness of death to the vigour of life. Peter turned to the body of Tabitha and said, “Rise up.” She opened her eyes, saw Peter, sat up, “and he gave her his hand, and raised her up.” Jesus commanded the ruler’s daughter to awaken, “and straightway the damsel rose up” (Acts 9:40-41; Mark 5:41-42).

3. The words of these two stems are sometimes used interchangeably, and in variant readings one is often displaced by the other. Resurrection of the dead is frequently mentioned, but resurrection from the dead still more frequently. In the first of these expressions dead persons are represented as rising to life, in the second, one is represented as passing out of the class of dead persons into another class. Perhaps we have here nothing more than two differing aspects of the same fact.

4. Whatever exceptional or unusual forms of expression there may be in the recorded teachings of Jesus and His immediate followers, the ordinary presentation is not that of buried bodies rising up from their graves, or from Hades, but that of a person awakening from unconsciousness, rising up from the powerlessness of death to the activity of life.

Twilight and sunrise,

Burden and heat of day,

Sunset and twilight—

So passeth life away.

Back in my Mother’s arms

Lay this tired clod,

Till a fresh sunrise

Wake me—with God.

II

The Resurrection of Jesus

1. The Resurrection of Jesus is, above all else, a display of power. He who is our strength moves out of the bonds wherewith the grave had bound Him; He shatters the gates of brass, and bursts the bars of iron in sunder. God, by raising Jesus Christ from the dead, has overcome death, and opened the door of everlasting life—opened the door. There is an uprush of pent energy; there is an eruption of might. And barriers yield and break, and doors are flung open, and a passage has been forced, and human life is carried forward as by an irresistible flood past its ancient limits. It moves out into new fields, on untravelled levels; through the doors that had so long forbidden its entry it presses onwards, driven by the power of its indwelling might.

2. That is the Resurrection as St. Paul conceives it. A tremendous action must have taken place, and all the world is convulsed with the tumult and the shock. God has come upon the scene in the greatness of His name, “according to the working of the mighty power which he wrought in Christ when he raised him from the dead and set him on his own right hand in heavenly places, far above all principalities, and powers, and might, and dominion; and he hath put all things under his feet, and given him to be head over all things.” The words tumble over one another in their anxiety to portray this immense and overwhelming effort to which the Eternal has committed Himself.

3. This insistence on the energy put in action concentrates itself for St. Paul on the reality of the risen body of the Lord. There are critics who succeed in persuading themselves that St. Paul by his teaching of the spiritual resurrection of our own bodies in the famous chapter of the Corinthians, consciously avoids any reference to the Lord’s actual body which is obviously at variance with the usual belief. And yet he is most certainly and emphatically rehearsing as his own the universal tradition of the Church. He is deliberately appealing at the very time to the fact that he is but saying for himself, what he received as the authorized account which every Christian held, by sheer necessity through being a Christian.

4. And so, again, the vividness of the Apostle’s recognition of the humanity of the risen Christ alone explains the intensity and the immediacy of the activities which it sets in motion here on earth. The entire sum, he tells us, of our bodily conditions here in the flesh, experiences at once the result of our life hidden with Christ in God. For that which is hid there with God is one with our human realities here; it tells upon them inevitably. It is in our bodies that we become so forcibly aware of the change that has been at work. “Mortify, therefore, your members which are upon the earth, fornication, uncleanness, evil desires, and passions; put also away all anger, wrath, malice, railing, shameful speaking; lie not one to another.” Why? Why is all this bound to happen? Because you are putting on the new man, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of Him that created him, and this through identification with that body of Christ alive from the dead, in which there can be neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free. So we are alive by the Spirit working with His splendid energy in our flesh; the Spirit that is groaning and travailing, struggling and striving, helping our infirmity with His irresistible force, working for the adoption—i.e. the redemption—of our body!

III

The Resurrection of our Body

1. Jesus rose in the body. His was no mere immortality of the soul; He claimed the body as part of Himself. In the body He ascended; in the body, now glorified, He lives and rules; in the body He will appear again, the second time, unto salvation. Not only, however, has He Himself risen in the body, but His resurrection is set forth as the pledge of ours. The hope of the believer is not simply that his soul shall live hereafter, but he looks for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of the body. The body of his humiliation shall yet be changed into the image of Christ’s glorious body.

It may be difficult for us to reconcile St. Paul’s description of the spiritual body, but it is plain that he himself did not recognize any difficulty. He universally takes the actual body of the Lord as the very ground of his Resurrection doctrine. It is out of its reality and identity that he draws all his moral and practical teaching. He can never speak or think of the Resurrection without showing that he has the actual body before his eyes. So, in the text the Resurrection of Jesus is the proof and the pledge that what happened to the Lord will happen to us. And what is that? The raising of the body. If the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus Christ from the dead dwell in us, then He that raised up Jesus Christ from the dead is bound to quicken, too, our mortal bodies.1 [Note: H. Scott-Holland.]

2. In the bodily resurrection of our Lord—an organic part of the reconciling work of Christ—we have the earnest of the bodily as well as the spiritual redemption of all that are in Him. For it must not be forgotten that the work of Christ is a work of reconciliation in more than one sense. Of course, primarily, it is the reconciliation between the individual sinner and the holy God against whom he has offended; then it is also the potential harmonization of the schism which sin has wrought in man’s nature, so that man comes into unison with himself; and to crown all, the cross is also the potential reconciliation of the entire cosmos, including, of course, man’s physical being, which has been disordered by sin. It is the plan of God to sum up all things in Christ, and through His cross.

Souls may fly off, perhaps, as the hymns tell us, to distant worlds, to unknown spheres. We may think anything we like about such winged creatures; they have nothing to do with us. But the spirits of those we have loved and cared for, the spirits who have held converse with ours, cannot be changed into birds or butterflies. They must be still human, the more they have entered into converse with the Divine. And why must we force ourselves into the conception of them as without bodies? Is it because they have dropped that which was corrupt and dead, because this has been given “earth to earth, dust to dust”? Was it this dead thing which we saw and heard and handled? Was it this from which sweet words came forth? That which is mortal is gone; is any life gone? Is not mortality opposed to life?1 [Note: F. D. Maurice, Life, ii. 623.]

i. The Body

1. It is a correct instinct which leads men to speak of the salvation of “the soul.” The same instinct asserts itself when we speak of the immortality of the soul, but of the resurrection of the body. What is the human body? Differentially, it is the complement of organs through which an individual human spirit works. Whether it is necessarily made of matter is another question. In certain conditions, we would speak of the body of a shadow or of a reflection. The Bible says little of disembodied spirits as such. It represents the human person in the life after death as a soul, a self, a spirit with whatever organism is requisite for maintaining personal identity. It never speaks of the resurrection of “the flesh” or of the materials of which our present bodies are composed, but it emphasizes the resurrection of the body. “If the Spirit of him that awakened Jesus from the dead dwelleth in you, he that awakened Christ Jesus from the dead shall quicken also your mortal bodies through his Spirit that dwelleth in you” (Romans 8:11).

2. The body is as really a part of man’s personality as the soul is. It is not, as philosophy is apt to teach us, a mere vesture or accident, or, still worse, temporary prison-house, of the soul; it is part of ourselves. Not, indeed, in the sense that the soul cannot survive the body, or subsist in some fashion without it, but in the sense that man was not created incorporeal spirit. His soul was made and meant to inhabit the body, and was never intended to subsist apart from it. Hence death, in the true Biblical point of view, is not something natural to man, but can only be regarded as something violent, unnatural, the rupture or separation of parts of man’s being that were never meant to be disjoined. The soul, in virtue of its spiritual, personal nature, survives the body; but, in separation from the body, it is, as many things in Scripture (e.g. its doctrine of Sheol) show, in a mutilated, imperfect, weakened condition. This view is not only important in itself as giving its due share of honour to the body, and harmonizing with the close relations between soul and body on which modern psychology lays increasing stress; but it will be found to shed much light on other doctrines of Scripture—for instance, on death, on immortality, on resurrection, on the full scope of Christ’s redemption.

A human body is the necessary—is the only—method and condition on earth of spiritual personality. It is capable, indeed, of expressing spirit very badly; it is capable of belying it; indeed, it is hardly capable of expressing it quite perfectly; it is, in fact, almost always falling short of at least the ideal expression of it. And yet body is the only method of spiritual life; even as things are, spirit is the true meaning of bodily life; and bodies are really vehicles and expressions of spirit; whilst the perfect ideal would certainly be, not spirit without body, but body which was the ideally perfect utterance of spirit.1 [Note: Moberly, Problems and Principles, 358.]

It was with keen feeling that St. Paul, with his thorn in the flesh and his many infirmities, referred to the body of humiliation, and it was with gladness that he looked forward to the body of glory, which would accomplish whatsoever his soul desired, so that he could imagine no high endeavour but this perfect servant would carry it into action.2 [Note: J. Watson.]

ii. The Resurrection Body

1. Our resurrection bodies are to be our mortal bodies made alive. That this making alive implies transformation is much insisted upon. We wait for the Lord Jesus Christ from heaven, “Who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory” (Php 3:21).

Matthew Arnold has told us that St. Paul, without being aware of it, substituted an ethical for a physical resurrection, and an eternal life in the spirit here for an everlasting life hereafter. Now a German theologian (Kabisch) tells us that St. Paul knows nothing of a figurative “life” ethical in quality, but only of a physical life; that Prolongation of physical life after death is the object of his hope; that even the Spirit, in his system of thought, is physical and finely material, and communicates itself by physical means, by baptism, and even by generation through a Christian parent; that the germ of the resurrection body is a spiritual, yet physical body, existing now within the dead carcase of the old body of sin; and that the essence of the resurrection will consist in the manifestation of this spiritual body by the sloughing off of its gross carnal envelope. Such are the two extremes. Surely the truth lies somewhere between.1 [Note: A. B. Bruce, St. Paul’s Conception of Christianity, 391.]

I dreamed that I was growing old

(It may be it was not a dream),

I shivered in the frosty cold

And trembled in the summer beam;

It cost me many a bitter sigh,

Until I knew it was not I.

The house my Maker for me made

Received His likeness in its form;

His wisdom all its parts displayed,

His beauty clothed its Chambers warm;

If not so fair as years go by,

What matter—for it is not I.

The lamps that light its rooms burn low,

Its music sounds more dull of late,

And one—it may be friend or foe,

Knocks loudly often at its gate;

I tremble then—I scarce know why,

My house he Claims, it is not I.

I am indeed a dweller there,

A winter and a summer guest,

Its rust and its decay I share,

But cannot look therein to rest;

I’m sure to leave it by and by,

’Tis but my house—it is not I.

I sometimes think, when lying down,

For the last time I lock the door,

And leave the home so long my own,

That I may find it yet once more

So changed and fair I scarce shall know

The home I lived in long ago.1 [Note: J. E. A. Brown.]

2. Of what nature, then, is the resurrection body?

(1) First, it is identical with the mortal body of the same person, in the sense of its being body to the same spirit, and constituting with that spirit the same soul, the same self. Jesus, speaking on another subject, stated an implication which Paul recognized and expanded. When a grain of wheat dies in the earth, it has a resurrection in the “much fruit” which springs from it (John 12:24). Paul calls attention (1 Corinthians 15:36-41) to the identity of the blade with the kernel that was sown: “to each seed a body of its own.” The kernel and the blade are alike the body to the differential principle of the kernel. The product is still wheat, not something else; still that individual type of wheat, not some other.

(2) Second, various terms are used to indicate the differences between the present body of a person and his resurrection body. One is earthy and the other heavenly, one psychical and the other spiritual, one corruptible and the other incorruptible (1 Corinthians 15:42-54). Jesus had taught that in the resurrection men die no more, but are like the angels (Luke 20:36 and parallels), and Paul expands this doctrine of a heavenly, spiritual, incorruptible body. This might be illustrated by all the numerous passages which speak of the changing of our mortal bodies (e.g. 1 Corinthians 15:51-52; 2 Corinthians 5:2; 2 Corinthians 5:4; Php 3:21; Romans 8:11).

Should it be the case that the soul had become so perfectly embodied that its covering is now its character, then the moment of death would be the moment of judgment, for the soul would carry with it, as it were, its whole history, and show the deeds done in the body. We have, indeed, I think, a hint and prophecy of this correspondence between body and soul when before our eyes a face of perfect shape grows unsightly through pride and lust, and a countenance that once was repulsive becomes attractive through the beauty of the soul. If the soul in her sin or in her loveliness can so far mould to her will this stubborn matter, what may she not do with a finer material? And so we may be writing our own books of judgment, recording every high endeavour and every base passion upon the sensitive and eternal body of the soul.1 [Note: J. Watson.]

(3) Third, emphasis is particularly placed on the idea that the resurrection body is not subject to the perpetual flux which we think of as characterizing matter. That it is incorruptible is many times reiterated. Christian teaching, except in figure of speech, does not mention the nourishing of the resurrection bodies of the redeemed by eating and drinking. Jesus expressly says that there is no marrying in the resurrection. Note the contrast with the teachings of Muhammad and others. And as if other expressions were not explicit enough, Paul expressly tells us that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 15:50), that is, that the resurrection body is not a body of flesh and blood.

Science suggests that as the seen universe is composed of matter, the unseen is composed of ether, and at every point of investigation we “are led from the visible and tangible to the invisible and intangible”; and science also concludes that the visible universe will in the end be swallowed up by the invisible, and this world disappear as a “species of matter out of date.” The body of the future cannot therefore be material, but is likely to be ethereal, a body to which matter could offer no obstacle, and whose mobility would be incalculable. It is evident that a body of this substance would be much more akin to the soul, a more flexible instrument and a more transparent veil, so that while the body of matter hides the inner self, the body of ether would be its Revelation 1 [Note: J. Watson.]

As life wears on, and the physical freshness and beauty of the body fade, a new expression often comes out which reveals the body of the soul. In disease I have often seen faces transfigured, as though the husk of earthy matter became for a moment transparent, and an inner body, wearing the soul’s likeness, shone through. Death often completes this purging away of the mere fleshly carcase, and gives a truer picture than the living face of the body of the spiritual world. I have seen faces of noble Christian combatants, which wore but a common expression in this life, look grand and heroic in death.

As sometimes in a dead man’s face,

To those that watch it more and more,

A likeness, hardly seen before,

Comes out—to some one of his race:

So, dearest, now thy brows are cold,

I see thee what thou art, and know

Thy likeness to the wise below,

Thy kindred with the great of old.

But there is more than I can see,

And what I see I leave unsaid,

Nor speak it, knowing Death has made

His darkness beautiful with thee.

Yes, and death to those who have lived Christianly is a kind of transfiguration. “He who raised up Christ from the dead, doth quicken the mortal body”—and in death we see how perfectly—“by his spirit who dwelleth within.”1 [Note: J. Baldwin Brown.]

3. The subject of the resurrection of the body is not devoid of practical interest. It really lies at the bottom of the ideal of a Christian State. Throughout the Epistles of the New Testament the duties of the Christian life are based upon the fact of our Lord’s Resurrection. Before that event polygamy, concubinage, private divorce, and even slavery, had the sanction of religion. But the Christian was required to “put off” all these practices; and the “newness of life” which distinguished him from the rest of mankind was conceived as resulting directly from the fact that “Christ was raised from the dead.”

Other religions may teach that there is a magical charm in asceticism; but none of them condemns as sinful the free indulgence of any natural appetite, provided it be not coupled with imprudence, or with disregard of the acknowledged rights of others. And St. Paul was apparently of the same opinion—if so be that Christ is not risen. In a world where the guiding principle is common sense, he could conceive of only one alternative to life in union with a risen Lord: “If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.”2 [Note: E. H. Archer-Shepherd.]

And, therefore, let no difficult speculations, no haunting doubts, no attempts to be wise above that which is written, move you from this solid certainty, that, when your time comes to die, and that tired body which, perhaps, now contains in it the seed of the disease which shall one day lay it low, lies still in death, then the Holy Spirit who has disciplined you and taught you and confirmed you and led you all your life long unto that day, has yet one more loving office to discharge for that body which has been His temple for so long—He will raise it from the dead. It was an old prophecy which expressed well the undying instinct of immortality: “Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thy Holy One to see corruption”; and if that was proved true in the case of Christ, it will also be proved true in the case of a Christian.1 [Note: A. F. Winnington Ingram.]

Never weather-beaten sail more willing bent to shore,

Never tired pilgrim’s limbs affected slumber more,

Than my wearied sprite now longs to fly out of my troubled breast.

O come quickly, sweetest Lord, and take my soul to rest!

Ever blooming are the joys of heaven’s high Paradise,

Cold age deafs not there our ears nor vapour dims our eyes:

Glory there the sun outshines; whose beams the Blessed only see.

O come quickly, glorious Lord, and raise my sprite to Thee!2 [Note: Thomas Campion.]

And if the dying are to lift up their heads, then lift up your heads, ye mourners. What has happened to your dead? you ask this morning; they were here with you last Easter, you say, joining in the Easter hymns and looking with you at the Easter flowers. What has happened to them? A beautiful thing: “The loving Spirit has led them forth into the land of righteousness.” It was just what they had prayed for in the Psalms time after time: “May thy loving Spirit lead me forth into the land of righteousness”; and He took them at their word, and escorted them forth to be with Christ for ever—

Children, in My gracious keeping

Leave ye now your dear ones sleeping.

I’d a dream to-night

As I fell asleep,

Oh! the touching sight

Makes me still to weep:

Of my little lad,

Gone to leave me sad,

Aye, the child I had,

But was not to keep.

As in heaven high,

I my child did seek,

There, in train, came by

Children fair and meek,

Each in lily-white,

With a lamp alight;

Each was clear to sight,

But they did not speak.

Then, a little sad,

Came my child in turn,

But the lamp he had,

Oh! it did not burn;

He, to clear my doubt,

Said, half turn’d about,

“Your tears put it out:

Mother, never mourn.”1 [Note: W. Barnes.]

The Resurrection of the Body

Literature

Beecher (W. J.), The Teaching of Jesus concerning the Future Life, 145.

Brown (J. Baldwin), The Divine Life in Man, 223.

Ingram (A. F. W.), A Mission of the Spirit, 217.

Jeffrey (G.), The Believer’s Privilege, 286.

Mabie (H. C.), The Meaning and Message of the Cross, 171.

Christian World Pulpit, xxxviii. 392 (White); lxvii. 289 (Scott-Holland).

Contemporary Pulpit, 2nd Ser., vi. 39 (Brown).