Dare to believe in life after life

Every day we're reading or listening to part of the Bible together and sharing thoughts with you. Today it’s Chris Simmonds:

What did I like about today’s passage?

I love the picture Paul uses in 1Cor 15:36-37 of our resurrected bodies being like a plant that grows from a seed that falls to the ground and dies – this being the picture of our current bodies. This metaphor really helps get a handle on the whole resurrection of the dead / afterlife / new heavens and new earth thing.

Just as a seed is incomparable to a plant and a butterfly’s glory completely eclipses the caterpillar’s so will the New Creation be.

Now this resurrection / tongues / prophecy stuff obviously requires quite some mental gymnastics for the modern, materialistic mind to get around. And I’m conscious that mine has been conditioned in a cultural milieu that would still on the whole probably relegate such hopes into foundless idealism. Maybe you also experience some ‘cognitive dissonance’ when trying to come to terms with the supernatural emphases of our faith?

What really interests me is that here in today’s reading is that we find people were already cynical about the afterlife as the New Testament was being written. Indeed you may remember Jesus admonishing the Sadducees for their lack of faith about the afterlife. So the cynicism of our time is no new gift afforded by scientific progress – it has been with us much, much longer.

But I love that Paul’s argument in favour stands on Christ’s own resurrection. So, while we haven’t - if we’re honest - really got a scooby do about what or where heaven is, or what the New Heavens and New Earth might come to be in the future - what we do know is that Christ came back to life with a new resurrected body. Many people, on multiple occasions witnessed a new Jesus body which could walk, and eat and drink, a body which bore the marks and scars of this life, while also not somehow being bound by the physical laws that limit ours.

But still this was not a ghost-like ephemeral body. Perhaps as with C.S.Lewis’ Edil of Perelandra - which are not less real than the walls they pass through, but more so. It is the denser object that cuts through to the marrow, it is the lead weight that can plumb the ocean depths.

What did it show me about Father God, Jesus or the Holy Spirit?

This teaching about resurrection suggests a more wonderful and if I can be forgiven for using the word - ‘magical’ - universe than reductive rationalism has perhaps lead us to think possible. I am no scientist but my understanding is that Einstein’s universe is much more mysterious and wonderful than Newton’s. Indeed I do wonder whether we might be on a trajectory as a species that will over the coming decades witness an ever-increasing confluence between the evidential findings of science and spirituality.

What am I going to do differently as a result?

I am going to allow my imagination, and my hope, freer reign. I am going to try to root out any hard-wired embarrassment about the supernatural claims of scripture and instead dare to believe that there really is just so much more going on in all of this than any of us have even begun to suspect.

God help me, and us, as we pursue a more radical life that images and radiates a God who is both in all things and beyond all things. As we allow his Abundant Life to flow in us and through us to the buried seeds around us.

Who am I going to share this with?

The impossible, miraculous masterpieces that populate this city.

C.S.Lewis - “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship”