Death and Resurrection

A week and a day ago one of my uncles died. We saw it comming. In many ways this was one of those wierd deaths that give you more relief than sadness. Don't get me wrong, we were all sad. But his body had been giving him mortal trouble for the past two years, and it had failed him so much that, as my dad mentined to me after he went and visited him two weeks ago, Bill Webster was no longer Bill Webster. I've kind of felt this last week that my emotions against death should be stronger, that I should hate it more and more. One of the emphases here at Covenant is the teaching that God's creation was glorious, but that now its a gloirious ruin needing to be put to rights. This is were the mixed emotions that Christian death brings can maybe make a little sense.

Check this out:

But someone will ask, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?" You foolish person! (yes, that's in the Bible) What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of what or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body... So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable.

-1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42

Unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and dies it bears no fruit. Untill Christ returns, unless our bodies give way we will not experience the imperishable bodies.

Now what kind of body does my uncle have? With what kind of body does he come? He comes with one that can be hugged and one that can go fishing like it used to love to do.

The other night I read an essay by Chesterton in which he says, writing against Marry Baker Eddy and the idea that there can be any purely spiritual religion (a heresy unfortunetly that the Church has found herself a part of at times), "Hope has not been thought of as something light and fanciful, but as something wrought in iron and fixed in rock."

Jesus was the firstborn among the dead. His resurrection is our hope. He rose with a physical body and for that reason Christian death is a bag of emotions. We are going to be raised in glorious bodies to a glorious physical new creation that is as solid and real as iron and rock. But in order to be raised in glory we have to suffer in death.

This helps me understand the strangness of Lenten Lord's Days. They're somber and joyous at the same time as we wait for easter.