Saturday, Twenty Fourth Week in Ordinary Time

Today’s first reading begins with questions that Paul quotes, ‘How are dead people raised, and what sort of body do they have when they come back?’ There are some questions that can be answered quickly without too much reflection. This is not one of them! Earlier in this letter, Paul had said, ‘No eye has ear, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived what God has prepared for those who love him’. If that is the case, perhaps it is better not even to attempt to try and answer the questions that Paul quotes others to be asking. Perhaps that is why he states, ‘They are stupid questions’! Yet, Paul loves an intellectual challenge and he addresses himself to these questions. We can only ever speak about the unknown in the language of the known, the language of imagery. It is the language of Jesus in many of his parables, such as the parable of the sower sowing seed in today’s gospel reading which Jesus sees as an image of his own ministry. Just as a lot of the seed the sower scattered never germinated and, yet, the harvest was abundant, so, even though Jesus’ preaching of the gospel met with great resistance, there were some who responded to the gospel and they would form a community through which the kingdom of God could come to earth. Paul uses the image of the seed somewhat differently. The seed has to die as a seed in order to be given new life in the form of a stalk of wheat. It sheds its seed body and it acquires a wheat body. There is continuity and discontinuity between the seed and the wheat stalk. Similarly, according to Paul, when we die we shed our earthly body and we are given a different body, an imperishable, glorious, body. There is continuity in that we remain the same person, but there is discontinuity, in that our new body is of a different order to our earthly body, being modelled on the risen body of the Lord, the last Adam. Paul understands life beyond death not as the release of the soul from a burdensome body, but as the transformation of our whole selves, including our bodies. This is one of the reasons why Paul in his letters calls for respect for the body, our own and that of others.