We shall all be changed
O Death, where is thy sting?
Yes, it’s been a while since I issued my last post. I can plead a number of causes, but in the end it all amounts to: I’ve been busy, with lots going on in my life, and, at the root of it all, I’m lazy. Forgive me.
The daily office readings for 25 October 2023 are: Lamentations 2:8-15, 1 Corinthians 15:51-58, and Matthew 12:1-14.
The reading from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is one of my favorites. It is often among the readings selected for funerals, and for good reason. In it are found many of scripture’s most compelling statements of our belief in resurrection and in Christ’s ultimate victory over death. Among these, in the poetic language of the King James Version, are:
Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
And…
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?
I imagine that when John Donne wrote his famous Holy Sonnet, Death be not proud, he had these words of Paul in mind. They speak to me of a hope I can only barely comprehend—a mystery indeed. Although my physical body dies, I do not die. Although my physical body dissolves into dust, it will be resurrected and live again. But how?
“We shall be changed,” Paul tells us. God exists outside of space and time as we perceive it. In this life, I am stuck in this time and this space, and I experience the passage of time and movement through space linearly, a series of here/now. I can’t go back, nor can I see forward, but must plod on in that series until my life is done. But when I die, I will be released from that linear progression, and by reuniting with God I also will exist outside of space and time. I will be changed.
So often, I try to fit the irregular contours of God’s ineffability into the neatly squared-off pigeonholes of scientific rules, the physics of this universe I live in. So, when I am told that my body will be resurrected, I start to ask questions like, “Well, which body will I get? Will it be as I was when I died, or as a mature adult, or as a child, or what? Do I get to choose? If I had my tonsils out, are they part of my resurrected body?” Too many questions.
None of them are relevant. The rules of this physical universe do not apply to God, nor to us in the life that is to come after death. Will I be an old man, a young man, or a child? Yes, I will. All of them. All at once and all together. In the reading from Matthew’s gospel, Jesus reminds his listeners that the law is there to serve God, not the other way around. God’s mercy, God’s love, supersedes all laws, be they the laws of men or the laws of physics. This is literally the definition of supernatural: above nature. All of God’s miracles, great and small, are supernatural. They are things we cannot explain because they do not fit into our neat boundaries of what is and isn’t possible.
All things are possible with God.