February 20, 2022 “Heavenly Bodies” – I Corinthians 15:35-50

I Corinthians 15:35-50 “Heavenly Bodies”
February 20, 2022 – Seventh Sunday after Epiphany

“Beam me up, Scotty,” may be the most famous Star Trek line that never quite actually got said, at least in the original series. Captain Kirk does say, “Scotty, beam us up,” in one show and simply “Beam me up” in another show. But the phrase has become part of popular culture. It’s based on the fictional device known as a “transporter.” Supposedly the molecular, atomic structure of the characters is disassembled and beamed electronically to another location, where the person is reassembled.

Whatever the scientific possibility of “beaming” a human body from one place to another, philosophers debate another issue about it all, which they call the question of “personal identity.” Presumably, Captain Kirk’s actual atoms are not being moved from one place to another, but only the information to reassemble him from atoms there at the new location. So is the Kirk at the other end the same as the one who got “beamed” in the first place? Without physical continuity, why believe it’s still the same person?

I’m talking about Star Trek to help us realize one could raise similar questions about the resurrection of our bodies. If Irene has been dead long enough, all the atoms of which she consisted have been scattered in many directions. Some of those same atoms may even now be part of someone else. So why think the person being raised is still Irene, even if she looks and talks and acts just like Irene used to?

Now, if you’re gritting your teeth and getting impatient with me, maybe because you’ve never watched or don’t like Star Trek, I don’t really blame you. Paul got a bit impatient with those who wanted to pose such philosophical questions to him about the resurrection. He quotes a couple possible questions in verse 35, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” and then in verse 36 exclaims “How foolish!”

My guess is that “How foolish!” is a response to the insincerity Paul perceived in such questions. They were not serious inquiries for the sake of understanding. They were devices to simply write off belief in a bodily resurrection. In that way they were similar to the question posed in Mark 12 by the Sadducees when they asked who, in the resurrection, would be married to a woman who had multiple husbands in this life. It says that Jesus saw their hypocrisy. There’s something similar about these questions.

Last week talking about verses 12-20 in this chapter, I broached and set aside other questions like these. If the dead are raised, if our bodies are going to rise again, what will they be like? Will I look like I did when 20 or like I do now at 66 or even older? Will I have all my hair back on my head and maybe a bit less in other places? Will I need to sleep? Will I be able to play the violin or ice skate even though I never could before? My mother always believed she would be able to sing beautifully then, in a way she never had in this life. But now you see that it’s all getting a bit silly, foolish, as Paul says.

Yet, like Jesus did for the Sadducees, Paul offers an answer, though it probably wasn’t the sort of answer those scoffers thought they wanted. Instead of going into physical detail about resurrected bodies, Paul develops an analogy for resurrection using the image of a seed that is sown and then grows into something different from and greater than the seed.

Paul starts with a statement similar to what Jesus said in John 12:24, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Verse 35 echoes that with “What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.”

Now, as we also need to say about Jesus’ words, this is not exact horticultural science. Seeds do not actually die when they go into the ground. As anyone knows who has tried to plant seeds from an old packet you found in your garage or shed, they “die” when you leave them out of the ground too long. But Paul and Jesus were thinking about the fact that when a seed is planted it is soon no longer a seed. The seed, as a seed, disappears, “dies,” as a plant begins to arise from it.

So Paul goes on in verses 36 and 37, “When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined.” He then notes that God gives various kinds of bodies to things. He’s been talking about bodies of plants, but there are also animal bodies. Mammals, birds, and fish all have different sorts of bodies as biology and zoology continue to affirm and explore.

Paul also looks around the cosmos and surmises that heavenly bodies are something different from earthly bodies. One of the discoveries of modern science was that both earth and the objects we see in the heavens consist of the same sort of matter, but science has also shown that the makeup of stars is radically different from the makeup of earth or the moon, just as Paul says in verse 41.

His discourse about different kinds of bodies is to set the stage for Paul’s argument beginning in verse 42. Just as there are different kinds of bodies, just as a seed grows into something that is not a seed, so the resurrection takes the “seed” of our current bodies and raises them into something different. “So will it be with the resurrection of the dead.”

Thus Paul turns from the difference between bodies on earth and what we often call the “heavenly bodies” in space to the differences between human “earthly bodies” before the resurrection, when they also will become “heavenly bodies.” Verses 42 and 43 spell out that difference in several dichotomies, “The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.” Paul did not try to explain the biology, chemistry, or physics of a resurrection body. He did not answer questions about its appearance or specific abilities. Instead, he simply highlighted ways in which that new body will be superior to the body you or I have now.

Some of those differences do show that something will have changed in the biology of resurrection bodies, even if we don’t know how. Every living body we know, whether animal or vegetable, dies one day. But those new bodies will not die. “The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable.” Likewise, somehow those bodies will be stronger. Every human body has its limits. We get tired and sick and injured. We need sleep and medical care. That new body will be “sown in weakness,” but “raised in power.”

Yet the other two dichotomies show something more than physical transformation is going on here. This is not merely a science fiction story about transplanting human minds or souls into superior biological mechanisms that somehow will not wear out. Paul said, “it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory.” That is more about the moral nature of our resurrection rather than the mere physical fact of a resuscitated body.

Paul is reminding us that even the best of human beings is tainted with “dishonor.” You can say you have “no regrets,” but you know it’s not true. As each of us comes to the end of life and is “sown” into the ground, we regret and perhaps are ashamed of many things we have done and many which we failed to do. Our sins are forgiven in Jesus, but the memory and often the consequences of them still follow and haunt us. Yet, in the resurrection, even that will be addressed. By the grace and power of God, even shame and dishonor will be exchanged for glory.

That understanding of the moral component of the resurrection body also gives us a handle on that last dichotomy, the natural versus spiritual body. The problem is partly translation. I chose to read the NIV version this morning because “natural” is somewhat better than the NRSV which says “physical.” “Physical” there would give you the idea that a resurrection body is somehow not physical, not material. But you heard Paul and me both rail against that mistake last week. He’s not going to contradict himself here.

In I Corinthians 2:14, the same word translated “natural” here, gets translated “unspiritual,” or “without the Spirit.” It’s not a dichotomy between the physical and the non-physical, material and immaterial. Just as it is in the second chapter of the letter, the contrast is about one’s relationship with the Spirit of God, about the moral quality of one’s mind and heart. When Paul goes on, “If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body,” he is talking about a change from bodies which the Holy Spirit only partly fills to bodies which the Holy Spirit completely fills. He’s talking about bodies like the body Jesus had in which the Holy Spirit was totally and fully present.

That’s why in the next few verses, 45 to 49, he contrasts Adam with Jesus, whom he calls “the last Adam.” It’s a contrast he also used when writing to the Romans, in chapter 5 of that letter. Adam came first and was natural, of the earth. Adam was of the dust of the earth and eventually went, like all of us, back to the dust of the earth. But Jesus was from heaven. He is the spiritual Adam, the first of a whole new sort of human being. And our hope is just what I John 3:2 says, “we shall be like him,” like Jesus. Verse 49 says “just as we have born the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man.”

Being like the “heavenly man,” like Jesus, and having a “heavenly body,” cannot possibly mean being non-physical, like a ghost. When Jesus rose, there were several occasions when He made sure no one would think He was just some immaterial wraith or illusion. He had His disciples touch Him. He ate and drank with them. No, that natural versus spiritual contrast is not physical versus non-physical. It’s about being like Jesus in the way we heard from Luke 6 today, filled with the Spirit and filled with love, even love for those who might hate or attack us.

Thus when we come to Paul’s conclusion (for this part of the chapter) in verse 50, “I declare to you, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” we ought to beware of taking that as a contradiction to the resurrection of the physical body. “Flesh and blood” here means the realm of human sin and failure rather than a physical body and fluid. Paul often uses the term “flesh” in the same way to point to human moral failure, not to the human body. Other Jewish rabbis of the same period also used the term “flesh and blood” this way. A fallen, corrupted human life is what cannot inherit the kingdom of God until it is redeemed and raised into a new kind of life.

So to answer questions about what “heavenly” bodies will be like, Paul is telling us they will be free from the taint of sin and death, not that they will be immaterial and less substantial than our present bodies. Those promises of bodies that are imperishable and stronger than our natural bodies actually mean that, if anything, heavenly bodies will be more substantial, more solid than what we have now.

No theological work has helped me more than C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce in the work of imagining (picturing in my mind) what Paul is talking about here. In that book, Lewis depicts the state of the blessed in heaven as more substantial, not less, than those who dwell in hell. They are more solid even than the narrator, who, we understand, is an ordinary human transported to heavenly scenes by a bus ride.

Lewis’s narrator experiences even heavenly grass beneath him as having more substance than himself. He can see the grass through his translucent feet. And he describes the inhabitants of heaven first as “solid people,” in contrast to his experience of himself and his companions from hell as mere phantoms.

I’d quibble with Lewis’s setting of resurrection bodies in heaven rather than on the new and restored earth promised in Revelation, but his picture of spiritual reality as more, even physically more, instead of less, than our present reality is spot on. Once again, our hope is not to escape from our bodies and be just spirits. Our hope is for our bodies’ to be transformed into something much more splendid and substantial than they are now.

The Great Divorce also offers us multiple pictures of the heart of the transformation between natural and spiritual bodies. It’s not so much about the physical change as about the spiritual and moral change, about a change of heart and character.

One of the first encounters we witness in the book is between a man from hell and a friend of his who lives in heaven. The man from hell keeps insisting that he deserves to be in heaven, that all he wants is his rights. His friend, who is a forgiven murderer, tells him that just like himself, he doesn’t deserve anything, that he has no right to heaven. All he needs to do is admit it and receive heaven as grace, as a gift. But the ghost from hell says, “I only want my rights. I’m not asking for anybody’s bleeding charity.”

His friend’s answer to that British obscenity is to turn it on its head. “Then do. At once. Ask for the Bleeding Charity.” He of course means the Bleeding Love of Jesus on the Cross. It is that love which will turn him from a phantom into a solid person. It is the love of Jesus which gives you and me the hope of sowing these poor, weak, insubstantial bodies in the earth and then rising up whole and strong and glorious by the grace of God.

The Great Divorce ends with the narrator seeing the sun about to come up in heaven. The light is so intense and bright that it drives all the phantoms away, disperses them into nothingness. Realizing his own insubstantial state, the narrator cries, “The morning! The morning! I am caught by the morning and I am a ghost!” But he wakes up from his dream and finds himself in his cold dark study, with an air raid “siren howling overhead.”

Paul’s talk about bodies as seeds that are sown invites us to consider our own situation. One day those bodies will lie down in the ground and wait for a morning to come. And when it does, will what we have sown be raised as something solid enough to withstand the light? What are we sowing with our bodies right now? Are we just insisting on our rights, like Paul wrote about some of the Corinthians. They insisted on their rights to do as they pleased with regard to sex or food. Are we also too concerned about our rights to do what we want, or are we seeking the Bleeding Charity? Are we willing to give up our rights for the sake of bleeding, sacrificial love, just as our Savior did on the cross?

In one Star Trek episode, “The Enemy Within,” there was a transporter error when Captain Kirk beamed back to the Enterprise. He was split into two versions of himself and one was thoroughly evil. While Christians don’t believe what the show taught, that we all need a dark side, we do know that it is there. It’s the constant temptation to refuse gracious charity, to give up on love, to look out only for ourselves. In Jesus Christ, God offers us love and grace to leave behind all that darkness and come solidly out into the light.

So as we walk about this world in our present bodies, interacting with the bodies and souls of those around us, let us sow seeds that will grow and rise gloriously in eternity. That is the hope and the warning of the Resurrection. Our bodies are meant to rise in glory by accepting and living in the love of Jesus now. If we selfishly refuse to receive and share that love, then we will only be ghosts. But if we love as we have been loved, we will rise, solid forever.

Amen.