Reflections on 1 Corinthians 15 (Part 4)

God loves the material world; He created it, and at the end of each day He saw that it was good.  God loves the human body; He created it, and at the end of the sixth day, He saw that it was very good.  Creation was completed with His greatest work, the masterpiece that is our body.  But what God created very good soon became very bad.  Our bodies were ruined by sin; they are now subjected to corruption and decay.  Disease attacks our organs; our bones deteriorate, our muscles wear out.   But the greatest dishonor to what God created very good is death itself, which returns this body to the dust from which it came.

But God loves the material world; He loves the human body.  And so He entered into that material world; He took upon Himself a human body.   He assumed a body to redeem our bodies; He walked this earth to free it from the corruption that had filled it since the Fall into sin.  He didn’t redeem only our souls, but our bodies as well.  “So is it with the resurrection of the dead.   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.  It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.”  Through sin, the body we received from our parents, indeed from our first parents, is a body tainted, corrupted, doomed to death.  Through Christ, that body is redeemed, delivered from its bondage.  We will follow Jesus’ resurrection victory with our own, as Saint Paul declares: “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.”  Our natural birth is in the image of Adam; our rebirth is in the image of Christ.  As Adam died, so we were doomed to death; as Christ was raised in victory over the grave, so we too will one day rise.  Alleluia!