I will never forget, as a kid, hearing Lewis Grizzard tell his story about Uncle Cleve and the wake. Here is Brenda Miles’ recollection of Grizzard’s story [I will change her “Uncle Clem” to “Uncle Cleve” since that is how Grizzard actually told it in his standup routine]:
[Lewis Grizzard] knew of an Uncle Cleve, a hump-backed man, who lived in his community. When he died and was taken to the local funeral home for embalming, the funeral director could not position him properly in the casket because of the huge hump in his back. If he pushed down his upper parts, the knees came up. He pushed these down, the torso rose. Finally, the director’s son came up with a solution. He went down to the local hardware store and bought a leather strap. This was secured on the left of the casket, run underneath Uncle Cleve’s collar and clip-on tie to the right side of the casket. All was secure. Uncle Cleve was stable.
After the body was returned home, three families came to “sit up” with the corpse—one a young nephew [Weyman C. Wannamaker Jr.] who lived in the house, only thirteen. He was terribly afraid of the dead, but his daddy told him it was time to learn the practice of “sitting up.”
It turned out to be a stormy night. Around nine, one neighbor said his wife was terribly afraid of storms and, since the others were sitting up, he would go on home. At ten, another neighbor said, “The rain is pouring down harder and liable to get worse. I think I will go on home since the rest of you are sitting up.” And he left.
The storm continued to rage and [Weyman C. Wannamaker Jr.’s] mother called for the father to come upstairs during a moment of lightning strikes and horrendous thunder. The father said, “Since you are sitting up, son, I’ll go up and calm down your mother.”
Just before midnight, the storm reached its height. Tree limbs beat on the windows, lightning flashed every moment, thunder shook the house and even the lights went out! This left only the flickering candle at the head of Uncle Cleve’s casket. The young [Weyman C. Wannamaker Jr.] shook with fear as he tried to remain in his chair. Suddenly, however, a thunderclap with power unknown to mankind, shook the house and Uncle Cleve’s strap broke loose! He raised up in the casket just like he had good sense! Trembling in his boots, [Weyman C. Wannamaker Jr.] stood up and muttered, “Well, if you’re going to sit up, Uncle Cleve, I think I’ll go on up too!”
And he hightailed it for the stairs.[1]
I never hear that story without laughing. The point? We do not quite know what to do with the dead sitting up! Yet, this idea—which the Bible calls resurrection—is at the very heart of our faith, and we must reclaim it in our day. In the Apostles’ Creed, we profess belief “in the resurrection of the body.”
The Christian doctrine, in short, is this: When the Lord returns, our bodies will be (a) resurrected and (b) transformed in ways that are largely beyond our understanding. It is astonishing how many Christians seem to forget this and seem to hold, instead, to a disembodied view of the afterlife. Hans Urs von Balthasar has written that “a bodiless soul is not a human being.”[2] Very true. But it is as human beings that we will be resurrected, and this includes our bodies.
Let us consider what the scriptures say about this.
The bodily resurrection of Jesus is a promise and a picture.
Our belief in the resurrection of the body begins with our belief in the resurrection of a very specific body: the body of Jesus Christ. Time and again in the New Testament we find the idea that Christ’s resurrection is a promise and a picture of our own coming resurrections.
Consider what Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15 and specifically his language of “firstfruits.”
20 But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep… 23 But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ.
If the firstfruits of a harvest were healthy and strong, that meant that there would be a great harvest to come! Jesus is the firstfruit of the greater resurrection harvest to come. New Testament scholar James Dunn writes that Paul’s use of the term “firstfruits” is his way of saying that Jesus’ resurrection was “the first sheaf of the ongoing harvest of dead humanity…”[3]
In Romans 6, Paul blatantly ties the future resurrection of the dead to Christ’s resurrection.
5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his…8 Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.
The believer in Christ, then, sees in the resurrection of Christ not only his salvation but also his future state. We will be raised just as Christ was raised!
In Acts 26, Paul asserts the same idea while speaking before Agrippa.
23 that the Christ must suffer and that, by being the first to rise from the dead, he would proclaim light both to our people and to the Gentiles.”
Christ is the first to rise, not the only. We will rise with Him! His resurrection is a picture and a promise of what believers can look forward to!
Our bodies will be resurrected.
In Christ’s rising again, we see two realities: (a) bodily resurrection and (b) bodily transformation. We will rise and we will rise into a new and transformed state. But let us make no mistake: our bodies will be resurrected!
Paul, in 2 Corinthians 4, writes:
14 knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence.
Christ rose bodily. We will rise bodily. We will rise as Jesus rose. And Jesus rose bodily!
Every year in our Holy Week guide we include John Updike’s “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” which begins:
Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.
Yes, “It was as His flesh; ours.”
Christ rose bodily. So will we! And neither decay, decomposition, burning, being eaten and digested by sharks, nor any other disintegration of the body presents a problem at all for an omnipotent God. He will gather your body back together in His might and power.
Robert George and Patrick Lee have helpfully written that:
…belief in the resurrection seems to entail some type of material or bodily continuity. And that would have to be by God’s reassembling something material. How to refer to that something material is problematical: perhaps parcels of matter, or parcels of matter-energy. In any case, we think that belief in some form of material continuity, indeed, a partial identity with respect to the material aspect of the human person, is part of what it means to believe in the resurrection…We will be bodily beings because that’s the kind of thing we are. We shall have glorified bodies, “spiritual bodies,” in St. Paul’s phrase, but they will still be bodies. That means at least this much: We will be able to walk and talk, see with our eyes, gesture with our hands, etc. Glorification (thinking about the passages about Christ after his Resurrection) seems to mean that some of the body’s limitations will be removed.[4]
I agree! That is a good way of phrasing it: there must be some measure of material continuity. He made you with a body. You will rise with your body to be transformed.
May I remind us that it was the early heretical Gnostics that downplayed physical matter, that saw material creation as somehow evil. Not so, the church! Christians celebrate the goodness of creation, the goodness of the physical. We are fallen, yes, and in need of redemption, but God loves creation, the material, the world. The material is good and we will be materially raised.
Our bodies will be transformed.
We believe too in the transformation of our resurrected bodies! We will be raised. We will be transformed in ways beyond our comprehension. Paul, as he reveals in 1 Corinthians 15, was already being asked by early Christians what this transformation will be like. He answers this at length.
35 But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” 36 You foolish person! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. 37 And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. 38 But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body.
Paul begins by acknowledging three realities:
- Our bodies will die.
- Our bodies will be resurrected.
- Our resurrected bodies will be changed into something we have yet to see.
Beginning in verse 42, he gives us some glimpses on what this body will be like:
42 So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. 43 It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. 44 It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.
These movements of transformation are powerful. Consider:
- The perishable will be transformed into the imperishable.
- The dishonored will be transformed into something glorious.
- The weak will be transformed into something powerful.
- The natural will be transformed into something “spiritual.”
On the idea of us having a “spiritual” body, we need to be clear on what Paul is and is not saying. Timothy George writes:
What will our resurrection bodies be like? This question was already asked in 1 Corinthians 15:35. God does not give us a complete answer, but we do know that our new, glorified bodies will be imperishable. No more cancer, no more drownings, no more holocausts.
Our bodies will also be spiritual (Greek, pneumatikos). This word does not mean nonphysical, but rather bodies “transformed by and adopted to the new world of God’s Spirit” (George E. Ladd). They also will be recognizable, but, like Jesus’ risen body, so utterly transformed that we shall be aware of the differences as well as the sameness.[5]
Again, we can look to Jesus’ resurrected state as a helpful clue on what this might look like. Hans Urs von Balthasar observes:
It is enough that we have received the following on testimony: in the Easter stories, the Lord appears bodily, but no longer tied to the laws of our time and space, no longer at the mercy of his material semblance, but free to make himself recognizable or not at will.[6]
The resurrected Jesus, you will recall, could appear in a locked room (John 20:19) but then He also ate broiled fish in front of the disciples (Luke 24:42). There was, then, a kind of new reality between the physical and the spiritual. This helps us get at what our resurrected bodies might be like.
I was pleasantly surprised while reading a poem in First Things to discover that the author, Paul Lake, is an Arkansas guy. The poem that Lake wrote was on the resurrection of the dead and it discusses the burial of a friend of his in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in a cemetery near Oaklawn, the horse racetrack. I would like for you to hear the concluding verse of this poem.
I’m glad our friend now sleeps in oaken shade
Above the rolling thunder at Oaklawn,
Sharing the shocks and tremors of the crowd
Until a trumpet beckons, and he wakes
From oaken slumber to the starting gun
In sweat-sheathed flesh that dazzles like a sun
And hurtles home to glory and high stakes.[7]
In this poem, Lake envisions his friend’s body rising from the dead when Christ comes. The last two lines are fascinating and helpful:
In sweat-sheathed flesh that dazzles like a sun
And hurtles home to glory and high stakes.
What Lake appears to be doing here is stressing two realities about the resurrection of the dead:
- It will be our bodies that are raised (i.e., “in sweat-sheathed flesh”).
- Yet, in the resurrection, our bodies will be changed and transformed (i.e., “that dazzles like a sun and hurtles home to glory…”).
Yes, the Bible adamantly asserts the twin truths of (a) bodily resurrection and (b) resurrection transformation. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul writes:
51 Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, 52 in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. 53 For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. 54 When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.”
We believe in the resurrection of the body!
[1] Miles, Brenda Starks. Miles of Memories. (Pittsburgh, PA: Red Lead Press, 2012), p.25–26.
[2] Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Credo. Ignatius Press. Kindle Edition.
[3] Dunn, James D. G. The Theology of the Apostle Paul. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), p.240.
[4] https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2006/08/material-continuity-in-the-res
[5] https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/february/38.84.html
[6] Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Credo. Ignatius Press. Kindle Edition.
[7] https://www.firstthings.com/article/2008/04/003-the-resurrection-of-the-body