A Reflection for Saturday of the Twenty-fourth Week in Extraordinary Time
Someone may say, “How are the dead raised? With what form of body will they arrive back?” You idiot! What you sow is just not delivered to life unless it dies…It’s sown corruptible; it’s raised incorruptible. It’s sown dishonorable; it’s raised glorious. (1 Cor: 15:35-36, 42-43)
It’s essentially the most fundamental of Christian messages. We have now to die first so as to be resurrected. LIke Newton’s third law of motion but more so: For a Christian, every act of dying has a massively unequal and opposite response. We lose our lives, but are raised right into a latest life unequal to anything we will imagine. We die in corruption; we’re raised in glory.
The Corinthians (i.e., “You and I”) want clarity on what that glorified body can be like. Or, to place it more generally, we would like to know the precise specifications of how God works in our lives.
By calling us fools (fools! us!), Paul is attempting to shake us up and remind us that we’re pondering in human ways and never in God’s ways. Getting precise answers, gaining full knowledge of outcomes doesn’t work when talking concerning the fruits of God’s labors upon our death.
When asked once about what he hoped to perform together with his peace activism, Dan Berrigan said he stopped worrying way back about results.
And we die on a regular basis! Don’t we? The little losses, the failed attempts, the marginal put-downs, the small indignities. You didn’t get a promotion, you lose your pocketbook, you see your ex and he or she seems completely satisfied. The Dodgers lose the pennant. (No, seriously, sports losses can tank us, and hard. A friend told me that in 2019 when Roger Federer lost two match points and ultimately the Wimbledon championship to Novak Djokovic, it took him, my friend, weeks to recover from it.)
The one solution to “resurrect” from these items, to see our pain as seeds of recent life, is to imagine (stunningly, imagine) that they were meant to occur. To simply accept these hard things as God at work in our lives. To feel them, own them, not run from them.
This doesn’t mean, for example, accepting without protest every indignity someone heaps upon us. It simply means accepting the sufferings we cannot change, and there are such a lot of painful things in our lives we cannot change. And God cannot do great things through us if we pretend that pain is just not there, if we run from hard things.
If we allow them to, every difficulty shapes us, etches us into the people we are supposed to be. Shapes the world because it was meant to be shaped. We just don’t at all times know what that can appear like.
When asked once about what he hoped to perform together with his peace activism, Dan Berrigan said he stopped worrying way back about results. He just did the thing, went to the hard places, embraced the suffering, and let go of what happened after. The whole lot could be used. We’re called simply to simply accept and own the undeniable fact that we have now to die. Own it and let God care for the glory to come back, whatever which will appear like.
