CHILDREN OF THE RESURRECTION
Suffer the Little Children, von Uhde, 1884. Public domain.
There is something odd about the resurrection of the body. It has the power to make even the greatest of minds childlike.
Take, for example, Origen of Alexandria. He is arguably the single greatest mind and soul of the first thousand years of Christianity: a first-rate textual critic who compiled a classic word-for-word comparison of six versions of the Old Testament; a theologian of immense rigor and depth whose ideas dominated church councils and controversies for at least four hundred years after his death; a stunningly talented preacher who could deliver an impromptu sermon full of more grace, insight, and rhetorical flourish than any of his more scripted contemporaries; a martyr who endured persecution and exile with calm patience; and, rarest of all, a man of such moral excellence that even his many enemies could not find a single thing to criticize about his character.
He also believed that, at the resurrection of the dead, our bodies would become giant, floating spheres.
Origen’s exact reasons for this belief are, alas, lost to history. Our best evidence, however, suggests they were disarmingly childish. People find symmetry beautiful, and since spheres are the most symmetrical object, they are clearly the most beautiful. Our resurrected bodies will be as beautiful as possible, so they must be spherical.
Nor is Origen alone in his speculations. Saint Augustine of Hippo, another popular contender for the greatest mind and soul of Christianity’s first millennium, spent far more of his prodigious literary output than necessary answering his own childlike questions about the resurrected body. Augustine is firmly convinced that nothing is lost in the resurrection due to Luke 21:18’s assurance that “not a hair on your head will perish.” Yet questions immediately multiply. If I am to be resurrected with all the hair I have ever grown, will I not resemble an overgrown Furby (1) more than a human being? Or if all the skin cells I ever had are returned to me, won’t I be a giant, not a human being? These are serious and weighty questions, but even larger ones loom on the horizon. St. Paul writes that the blessed are “predestined to be conformed to the image of [God’s] Son” (Romans 8:29). Does this mean that our resurrected bodies will look like Jesus’? And if so, how shall we possibly tell the true Son of God apart from his billions of clones inhabiting the New Jerusalem? Moreover, how will nothing be lost if those of us who are taller than Jesus must be literally cut down to size?
You will no doubt be relieved to learn that Augustine finds his way through these thorny questions to sensible-sounding answers: we will be resurrected with an appropriate amount of hair, at our usual height, more or less recognizable as ourselves and not as a 1st century Jewish preacher, etc. Yet he does so after giving the matters far more thought than most. Augustine, just like Origen, maintains the posture of a child in his inquiry: no question about the resurrection of the body is off-limits, and no possibility is out of the question, no matter how far-fetched.
I do not mean this as a criticism. Quite the opposite, actually; it is only because of their great wisdom that Augustine and Origen can ask their childlike questions about the resurrection. If we have grown too old to take their wonderings seriously, then the foolishness is ours, not theirs.
Death and resurrection make children of us all. No matter how well we think we know how to live, we have no knowledge of dying beyond what those on their deathbeds can describe – and even their knowledge is still that of life approaching death, not of death itself. And we have no knowledge at all of the life beyond death, save for the evocative and highly symbolic promises of the Bible – the very promises that sparked Augustine and Origen’s imaginations. In the resurrection of Jesus, we are faced with the promise of a new world as entirely foreign to us as our current world was when we were children.
And it is no wonder that, in the face of the unknown, we wonder, and that we especially wonder about its promised transformation of our bodies. Our bodies matter to us intensely; they create and carry the better portion of our joys and fears. It would be a far stranger thing for us not to wonder how God would transform the site of our loving and feeling and doing and knowing than to speculate on the good things prepared for it.
I wonder what my chest will look like in the resurrection. I suffer from Long QT Syndrome (LQTS), a rare electrophysiological disorder that predisposes me to dangerous fainting spells that can lead to sudden cardiac arrest and death. I also suffer from an overactive vagus nerve, which is the primary culprit in benign fainting spells. Anyone who has seen a child faint in the middle of a choir concert after locking their legs, felt dizzy at the sight of a needle, or heard of adults collapsing from heat, has observed the vagus nerve’s handiwork. The confluence of these two maladies, one laughably harmless and the other deadly serious, is the defining feature of my medical history. The hospital stays I have experienced, both of them after a faint, have been quests to tell which of these causes was at work – a task that is as difficult and inevitably ambiguous as it is important.
Fortunately, my fainting spells to date have all been benign. Yet the risk of an LQTS episode – or of confusing an LQTS faint with a vasovagal faint – is high enough that surgeons have tucked a defibrillator in my chest, keeping careful watch over my heartbeat, ready to shock it back into rhythm if its hold on life grows weak.
My chest still bears the scars from the defibrillator’s implantation. I wonder if I will see them in the resurrection. Will they remain but, like Christ’s wounds, be made glorious? Will they be a badge of triumph, reminding me of all that God overcame in me: memories of the nauseating moment of fainting, when the world slipped into black; the undulating, agonizing waves of hope and fear as I waited in the hospital, wondering if this faint was nothing to worry about or everything to worry about; the painful awareness of my body’s fragility before I had even turned 30? Or will they disappear as completely as my suffering itself has – a reminder that against God’s infinite love, even my deepest agonies have no more power and substance than a drop of vinegar in the ocean?
I cannot say for sure which possibility is closer to the truth. I cannot even say which I would prefer. Most likely God will find some third way through my dilemma, preserving and combining what is best in both options in ways incomprehensible to me now. All I know is that I am profoundly, deeply invested in the question. To stop asking it would be to stop caring about my body – that is to say, about myself.
To wonder about the fate of the body is as deeply personal as wondering about the fate of the soul. I can, therefore, only speak for myself. Yet I suspect I am not alone in being so deeply invested in my body’s fate. I think of a friend living with Klinefelter’s Syndrome, and the thousand maladies he lives with as a result of his condition. I think of older adults who mourn the loss of their young, agile bodies, and of children who want nothing more than to grow up to match their parents’ strength. And is there anyone alive who has not felt the pain of being told their body was wrong – too big, too little, too light, too dark, a nose too big or wide, a smile too crooked?
Whatever else we make of the Apostles’ Creed’s insistence that it is the body that is resurrected into the life everlasting and not just the soul, it is clear that the Creed takes the body’s suffering seriously – so seriously, in fact, that it prescribes the strongest possible remedy: resurrection into the glory won by Jesus of Nazareth, whose pierced, broken, and maligned flesh was vindicated by God against its tormentors and raised to a glory above even that of the angels.
Of this glory we know precious little. Our final end is, thank God, so far removed from our present struggles with sin and corruption that any pleasure we currently have can only give us the faintest of hints as to what those joys will be like. There is a blessing in this – would anyone want to have less joy at the resurrection of the dead just so they could better understand it now? – but also danger.
The danger is that we might attempt to become all too wise in the face of the unknown, restraining our wonder and limiting our questions to what seems sensible, or practical, or in line with the scientific understanding of our day. We might, in short, refuse to let the resurrection make children of us.
And what a tragedy that would be.
Our bodies are too dear a thing for us to spend our lives passing over their urgent cries for redemption in silence. Our resurrection is too great a gift for us not to speak much of it for fear of losing our intellectual respectability. Our imaginations are too vital to our sanity to starve them of even our weakest, most half-formed visions of how things ought to be, instead of how they are. And we creatures of dust are far too invested in the fate of the earth below us, our hearts within us, and our friends beside us to pretend otherwise.
We are children of the resurrection, waiting to be born into eternal life. And for as long as we wait in limbo, we might as well exercise the privilege of children and wonder what our new lives will be like. We ask not because, God forbid, we think we shall be right. We wonder because imagining the future sharpens our desire for it. We wonder because future glory is a comfort in present suffering. Most of all, though, we wonder because once we have imagined a life so joyful that our hearts burst at the very thought of it, we can take that vision to the Spirit and ask, “Will it be like this?” And the Spirit will smile and reply with the only words that can fully encapsulate the Easter promise: “Not at all, my beloved child. It will be far, far better.”
Augustine, of course, was blessedly ignorant of Furbies, which would not be invented for another 1500 years after his death. However, it is my considered opinion that if he could have used Furbies as an example, he most certainly would have.
