Easter morning. Tucked in between my mother and father on the church pew, shivering a bit from the walk through the spring rain, I’m drawn into the swell of the organ music, the joyous fervor of the singers around me. A feeling I can’t quite explain transcends my childish delight in my new plush bunny, the chocolate eggs waiting in my Easter basket, my frilly pink dress. I’m caught by a few of the song lyrics. “Who died eternal life to bring, and lives that Death may die”. How can Death die, I wonder.
The stripped down answer lies in the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe in the Resurrection of the Body.” Really? These are startling words in our post Christian times. Here is bedrock faith, not just a vague hope of some ethereal existence, but a physical resurrection, a transformation, an equipping for Eternity. After all, how would these bodies cope with Heaven?
Our modern day fascination with the care and feeding of our bodies is rampant. Just count the fitness centers in your town. We worship at the altars of physical beauty and health, yet we view our bodies as impermanent and without intrinsic value. We are urged to drench our bodies in pleasure while we can; life is short and “If that’s all there is,” as the song goes, let’s go for it. The body is only “Dust in the Wind”. Or is it?
Scripture pushes back. Six hundred years before Jesus burst out of the tomb on Resurrection morning, the prophet Isaiah wrote, “But your dead will live, their bodies will rise, You who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy. Your dew is like the dew of the morning; the earth will give birth to her dead”. Here is the death of Death. Yes, Dust shall sing! These words shout in the face of despair, pushing back our deepest fears. Too good to be true?
Later Paul the Apostle added this: ” …the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.” No longer captured in space/time, no longer subject to death and decay, we will live in His Presence, never to die again. No wonder we sing on Easter morning.