I don’t think any theological work has helped me more than C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce in the work of imagining (forming an image of) what Paul is talking about in our text for this week: I Corinthians 15:35-50. I’ll come back to that book in a bit.
The text begins with the sort of question which I raised and left unanswered in last week’s message on verses 12-20 in this chapter. If the dead are raised, if our bodies are going to rise again, what will they be like? Will I look like I did when I was 20 or like I do now at 66 or even older? Will I have all my hair back on my head and maybe a bit less in other places? Will I need to sleep? To get really silly, will I be able to play the violin or ice skate even though I never could before?
Paul’s initial answers to verse 35’s question, “With what kind of body do they come?” seem reasonable and fairly easy to accept. He offers the analogy of sowing a seed which grows, is “raised,” into a rather different form than the seed itself possessed. So in verses 40 and 41 we are told that “heavenly bodies” will be different from earthly bodies. In verses 42 and 43, that difference is spelled out in several dichotomies, “What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.” But the last dichotomy in verse 44 is the most difficult and is unfolded more in the following verses, “It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.”
Part of the problem is in translation. The translation “physical” in verse 44 in the NRSV is highly misleading. The word in Greek is psychikos, literally derived from psyche, often translated with the word “soul” or perhaps “life,” thus something like “soulish” or “living.” The NIV’s “natural body” is better, but still problematic. In I Corinthians 2:14, the same word is translated “unspiritual,” which would at least make it clear that we are not dealing with a dichotomy between the physical and the immaterial. The dichotomy has much more of a moral quality to it, as it does in chapter 2:14 and 15.
Thus when we come to Paul’s conclusion (for this part of the chapter) in verse 50 that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” we ought to beware the danger of taking that as a contradiction to all he has already said (and I preached last week) about the resurrection of the physical body. Instead, “flesh and blood” carry their own moral meaning as the designation of the realm of human sin rather than literal, physical entities. This is quite consistent with Paul’s use of the single term “flesh” throughout his writings and it is also consistent with the use of the phrase “flesh and blood” by other rabbis of the time.
So in his answer to questions about what resurrection, “heavenly” bodies will be like, Paul is saying that they will be free from the taint of sin and death, not that they will be immaterial and less substantial than our present bodies.
Back to C. S. Lewis. In The Great Divorce, Lewis pictures the state of the blessed as more substantial, not less, than those who dwell in hell as well as more solid even than the narrator, who, we understand, is an ordinary human transported to heavenly scenes in a dream. The narrator experiences even heavenly grass beneath his feet as having more substance than himself. The inhabitants of heaven he first describes as “solid people,” in contrast to his experience of himself and his companions from hell as mere phantoms.
I could quibble with Lewis’s setting of fictional resurrection bodies in heaven rather than on the new and restored earth promised in the book of Revelation, but I believe his picture of spiritual reality as more, even physically more, instead of less than our present reality is spot on. Once again, to repeat from last week, our hope is not escape from our bodies. In this text we see that our hope is for our bodies’ transformation into something much more splendid and substantial than they enjoy now.
Thus the “seed” imagery of the text is also important for present life. What we do with our bodies now is being sown toward an imperishable body in the resurrection. Thus as Paul argued earlier in the letters, what we do in our bodies in regard to sexual morality or eating or in other ways, matters a great deal. Bodies are not merely handicaps or impediments in our attempts to be spiritual. They are the means by which we sow spiritual life and by which an eternal spiritual life will be realized. Spiritual life includes the life of the body.
We do well then to reckon what we are sowing as we engage in present embodied life, not only in relation to our own selves but in relation to the embodied persons we meet and interact with each day. Those bodies are all God’s good creation, destined to be recreated into something even greater.