Natural Bodies and Resurrected Bodies: What is Different?

 In today's first reading, 1 Cor 15: 35-37, 42-49,  St. Paul speaks about our resurrection from the dead, answering the questions: "How are the dead raised? [and] "With what kind of body will [we] come back?"   He is flustered by the questions coming from the Corinthians, and perhaps from us as well!  ""You fool," he says to his listeners, "What you sow is not brought to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be but a bare kernel of wheat, perhaps, or of some other kind.....It [the natural body] is sown corruptible; it is raised incorruptible. It is sown dishonorable; it is raised glorious.  It is sown weak; it is raised powerful. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.. If there is a natural body; there is also a spiritual one."

Think of the seeds that you sow in  your garden: carrot seeds or pumpkins seeds, for instance, or seeds that produce flowers of all kinds. What you sow is a tiny seed. What that tiny seed becomes is totally different from what was sown. So, too, the difference between our earthly bodies and and our resurrected bodies.  What is sown here on earth, our natural bodies, St. Paul tells us, is corruptible, weak, dishonorable and natural. while our resurrected bodies, he says,  will be incorruptible, glorious, strong and spiritual! And he certainly is right! 

Toward the end of this passage, St. Paul tells us that "The first man, Adam, became a living being; the last Adam a life-giving spirit. But the spiritual was not first, rather the natural and then the spiritual." Here on earth, I believe that  I am both a natural and a spiritual body. The seeds of incorruptibility, of God's glory, of God's honor, and of God's power, I believe, exist within me through baptism and all of the sacraments and through the outpouring of grace into our hearts in our loving and being loved, in our forgiving and being forgiven!  Already here on earth, I believe,  we bear the image of Jesus, the second Adam, as, in baptism, we died and rose with Jesus. We rose to new life, a life of grace, imaging Jesus in all that we do that is of God: loving, forgiving, sharing, comforting, supporting, being present to others in their pain and suffering, doing that which is right and just, being truthful in all of our dealings with others.

And, as we pray in the liturgy's responsorial psalm: "...I know that God is with me. In God, in whose promise I glory, in God I trust without fear; what can flesh do against me? I am bound, O God, by vows to you; your thank offerings  I will fulfill. For you have rescued me from death, my feet, too, from stumbling; that I am walk before God in the light of the living" (Ps 56).