The Mystery of the Human Body, Part 3: Resurrection

"In part 2, I discussed on how the soul communicates through the body and how two bodies interact in more than a simply physical way. Here I reflect on the resurrection of the human body.

Resurrection

Even more than all this, the deepest mystery of the human body, it seems to me, is the resurrection of the body, in which state it will receive the four gifts of impassibility, agility, subtlety, and clarity.¹ St. John Henry Newman pointed out this mystery in a sermon on Luke 20:37–38.² He says that all the saints are alive to God even though they may be dead, and this seems to be a paradox.³ But because God knows everything and understands everything completely, his words to us have many meanings.⁴ We, on the other hand, only know things through our sense perceptions (barring knowledge directly infused by God). Yet:

We are apt to talk about our bodies as if we knew how or what they really were; whereas we only know what our eyes tell us. They seem to grow, to come to maturity, to decay; but after all we know no more about them than meets our senses, and there is, doubtless, much which God sees in our material frames, which we cannot see. We have no direct cognizance of what may be called the substantive existence of the body, only of its accidents. Again, we are apt to speak of soul and body, as if we could distinguish between them, and knew much about them; but for the most part we use words without meaning. It is useful indeed to make the distinction, and Scripture makes it; but after all, the Gospel speaks of our nature, in a religious sense, as one. Soul and body make up one man, which is born once, and never dies. Philosophers of old time thought the soul indeed might live for ever, but that the body perished at death; but Christ tells us otherwise, He tells us the body will live for ever. In the text [Lk 20:37–38] He seems to intimate that it never really dies; that we lose sight indeed of what we are accustomed to see, but that God still sees the elements of it which are not exposed to our senses.⁵

Newman says that Christ “having sanctified our nature in himself, he communicates it to us” in the Eucharist.⁶ The bread and wine become his Body and Blood. We name it transubstantiation and yet do not really know how that happens nor are we told how, but we do know that it happens.⁷ Christ says that we will have eternal life if we eat his Body and drink his Blood (Jn 6: 53–54), and he makes no distinction between body and soul. The whole of us, whatever we are, is (or will be) immortal. “We eat the sacred bread, and our bodies become sacred; they are not ours; they are Christ’s; they are instinct with that flesh which saw not corruption; they are inhabited by his Spirit; they become immortal; they die but to appearance, and for a time; they spring up when their sleep is ended, and reign with Him for ever.”⁸

We show our reverence for the bodies of the dead, Newman continues, by burying them in consecrated ground. “We deposit our departed friends calmly and thoughtfully, in faith; not ceasing to love or remember that which once lived among us, but marking the place where it lies, as believing that God has set his seal upon it, and his angels guard it.”⁹ And the mystery is that

as God’s word is sure, what is sown is raised; the earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, shall become glory to glory, and life to the living God, and a true incorruptible image of the spirit made perfect. Here the saints sleep, here they shall rise. A great sight will a Christian country then be, if earth remains what it is; when holy places pour out the worshippers who have for generations kept vigil therein, waiting through the long night for the bright coming of Christ!¹⁰

Our living bodies, also, are to be honored:

If the dead bodies of Christians are honorable, so doubtless are the living; because they have had their blessedness when living, therefore have they in their sleep. He who does not honor his own body as something holy unto the Lord, may indeed revere the dead, but it is then a mere superstition, not an act of piety. To reverence holy places (right as it is) will not profit a man unless he reverences himself.¹¹

For, as St. Paul says, our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit; and he commands us to “glorify God in your body”(1 Cor 6:19–20).¹² The body is one of the main images in St. Paul: for example, we, the Church, are Christ’s body and he is the Head (Eph 5:23; Col 1:18, 24).¹³ What a mystery that our body, rather than our soul or mind, should be God’s temple. God the Most Holy chose our mortal bodies (which seem the least holy) in which to dwell. The saints display this mystery of the body in many ways: they levitate, they appear in two places at once, they manifest the stigmata; their bodies are incorrupt after death; they glow. The Holy Spirit shines out of the saints with all the beauty of the sun shining on a lead-crystal temple.

The Mystery of the Body

Alongside the mystery of the soul and the mystery of the body/soul union is the mystery of the body itself. If it were not for the resurrection of the body, modern science would probably plumb its depths and disperse the mystery of the unknown with detailed knowledge. But with the coming of Christ and the resurrection of the body also comes the mystery of the body. This material, corruptible, human body made of ashes and dust and clay will rise one day and be transformed into a glorified body of impassibility, agility, subtlety, and clarity, and abide in heaven with God and the angels.

Notes

¹ See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, III, q. 45, a. 1, obj. 3.

² Lk 20:37–8 (RSV): “That the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now He is not God of the dead, but of the living; for all live to Him.” See John Henry Newman, “The Resurrection of the Body,” in Parochial and Plain Sermons (1891; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 174–80.

³ Newman, “The Resurrection of the Body,” 175.

⁴ Ibid., 174.

⁵ Ibid., 175.

⁶ John Henry Newman, “The Mystery of Godliness,” in Parochial and Plain Sermons, 1014.

⁷ Newman, “The Resurrection of the Body,” 175–76.

⁸ Ibid., 176.

⁹ Ibid., 177.

¹⁰ Ibid., 178.

¹¹ Ibid., 179.

¹² See also Rm 8:11; 1 Cor 3:16–17; 2 Cor 6:16; Eph 2:19–22. The note on 1 Cor 6:19–20 in The Catholic Study Bible is very incisive: “Paul’s vision becomes Trinitarian. A temple: sacred by reason of God’s gift, his indwelling Spirit. Not your own: but ‘for the Lord,’ who acquires ownership by the act of redemption. Glorify God in your body: the argument concludes with a positive imperative to supplement the negative ‘avoid immorality’ of v. 18. Far from being a terrain that is morally indifferent, the area of sexuality is one in which our relationship with God (and his Christ and his Spirit) is very intimately expressed; he is either highly glorified or deeply offended.” The Catholic Study Bible: New American Bible, ed. Donald Senior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

¹³ John A.T. Robinson, The Body: A Study in Pauline Theology (London: SCM Press, 1952), 9: “One could say without exaggeration that the concept of the body forms the keystone of Paul’s theology. In its closely interconnected meanings, the word soma [body] knits together all his great themes. It is from the body of sin and death that we are delivered; it is through the body of Christ on the Cross that we are saved; it is into his body the Church that we are incorporated; it is by his body in the Eucharist that this Community is sustained; it is in our body that its new life has to be manifested; it is to a resurrection of this body to the likeness of his glorious body that we are destined. Here, with the exception of the doctrine of God, are represented all the main tenets of the Christian Faith—the doctrines of Man, Sin, the Incarnation and Atonement, the Church, the Sacraments, Sanctification, and Eschatology. To trace the subtle links and interaction between the different senses of this word soma is to grasp the thread that leads through the maze of Pauline thought.”