What Are You Looking For? Part 1: The Nicene Creed

And I Look Forward To the Resurrection of the Dead

And I Look Forward To the Resurrection of the Dead

            We’re all going to die.  I know that’s hardly a profound statement, but have you ever stopped to think about what happens after you die?  When we die, our soul is separated from our body.  No, we don’t come back as cats or dogs or whatever.  If you happen to believe in reincarnation, sorry, it doesn’t work that way.  What does happen is that our souls go either to Heaven or to Hell.  If we have chosen in this life to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength and our neighbor as ourselves and we have done it perfectly, we’ll go to heaven.  If we’ve done it imperfectly, we’ll go to Purgatory first for final purification before going to heaven.  If we’ve chosen to live without God in this life, God will honor our choice in the next and we will go to hell.  That’s what happens to our souls, but what about our bodies?

            When we die, our bodies return to the dust from which they were created.  God said so in Genesis 4:19 when he tells Adam, “By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread, until you return to the ground, from which you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (NABRE)  And our bodies decay.  But they don’t stay that way, any more than Jesus’ body stayed in the grave.  One day our physical bodies will be resurrected just as his was.

            The belief in the resurrection of the dead is not a new concept.  Even at the time of Christ, it was a commonly held belief that at some point in time all the dead would be resurrected.  In the Israelite community of Jesus’ day, the only group that didn’t believe in the resurrection of the body was the Sadducees. And that is why they were sad, you see.  And St. Paul confirmed both the resurrection of Christ and our own future resurrection in his first letter to the Corinthians, “But if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some among you say there is no resurrection of the dead?  If there is no resurrection of the dead, then neither has Christ been raised.  And if Christ has not been raised, then empty [too] is our preaching; empty, too, is your faith.” (1 Corinthians 15: 12-14 NABRE)

            So what will the resurrected body look like?  We don’t know for certain, but we can use what we know of Jesus’ resurrected body as a guide.  After the resurrection, when Jesus appeared to the disciples, there were a few noticeable differences in his resurrected body.  For one thing, he wasn’t bound by time and space any more.  In John’s gospel, he writes of the disciples being in a locked room and suddenly Jesus was there with them.  John also tells of Thomas’s insistence that he won’t believe unless he touches Jesus himself.  Which he does, proving that Jesus’ glorified, resurrected body had flesh and bones just like his unglorified, mortal body had before the crucifixion.  Jesus ate and drank with his disciples.  His physical body was still his physical body, in the sense that we understand physical bodies, but it was also so much more.

            I think our resurrected bodies will be like that.  Also, since Jesus died in the prime of his life at age 33, I like to think we’ll all be 33 again – no matter what age we are when we die.  Actually, we will probably be ageless.  Which works for me, too.

            When will it happen?  No one knows.  It will happen when “the Lord himself, with a word of command, with the voice of an archangel and with the trumpet of God will come down from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first.  Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.  Thus we shall always be with the Lord.” (1 Thessalonians 4:17 NABRE)