Raised in the Same Bodies

Let our opponents — the people who argue against their own salvation — tell us this much. The high priest’s daughter who had died; the widow’s dead son, who was being carried out for burial near the city gate; and Lazarus, who had lain four days in the tomb — in what bodies did they rise again? In the very same bodies, plainly, in which they had also died. For if it was not in the very same bodies, then the ones who died were not the ones who rose again. The Scripture says: “The Lord took the dead man by the hand and said to him, ‘Young man, I say to you, get up.’ And the dead man sat up, and he ordered that something be given him to eat, and he gave him back to his mother.” Again, he called Lazarus “with a loud voice, saying, ‘Lazarus, come out.’ And the man who had been dead came out, bound hand and foot with the grave bandages.” That was a picture of the man who had been tied up in his sins, and so the Lord said, “Untie him, and let him go.” [a]

So the people who were healed were made whole in the very parts that had been afflicted before, and the dead rose in the same bodies they had died in, their limbs and their bodies receiving health and receiving the life the Lord granted them. He gives an advance picture of eternal things by temporal ones, and shows that it is he himself who is able to hold out both healing and life to his own handiwork, so that what he says about the resurrection of that handiwork may be believed as well. In the same way, then, at the end, when the Lord sounds his voice “at the last trumpet,” the dead will be raised, as he himself declares: “The hour will come when all the dead who are in the tombs will hear the voice of the Son of man and will come out — those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment.”

They are empty men, then, and truly pitiful, who refuse to see what is so obvious and clear but shy away from the light of the truth, blinding themselves like Oedipus in the play. Think of men with no training in wrestling. When they take on an opponent they grab hold of some part of his body with a fixed grip, and the very thing they are gripping is what brings them down; yet when they fall they imagine they are winning, because they have stubbornly kept their hold on the part they seized at the start — and so, on top of falling, they make themselves ridiculous. That is exactly how it goes with that favorite line of the heretics: “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” They take two expressions of Paul’s without having grasped what the apostle meant, and without examining carefully what the words carry; they keep a tight hold on the bare phrases by themselves, and over those very phrases they die, overturning as far as they are able the whole plan of God.

They will claim, then, that this passage is about flesh in the strict sense and not about the works of the flesh, which is what I have shown it to mean — and so they make the apostle contradict himself. For immediately afterward, in the same letter, he says conclusively, speaking about the flesh: “For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this mortal has put on immortality, then the saying that stands written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory. Death, where is your sting? Death, where is your victory?’” Those words will be said fittingly at the time when this mortal and corruptible flesh — which is subject to death, and is pressed down under a kind of rule of death — rises up into life and puts on incorruption and immortality. For then death will truly be beaten, when the flesh it holds down goes out from under its rule.

And again, to the Philippians he says: “But our citizenship is in heaven, and from there we also wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus, who will transform the body of our humiliation to be like the body of his glory, in the measure that he is able, according to the working of his own power.” What, then, is this “body of humiliation” that the Lord will transform to be like “the body of his glory”? Plainly it is this body made of flesh, which is indeed humbled when it falls into the earth. And its transformation happens like this: while it is mortal and corruptible it becomes immortal and incorruptible — not by anything belonging to its own substance, but by the mighty working of the Lord, who is able to clothe the mortal with immortality and the corruptible with incorruption.

And that is why he says, “so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. And the one who has fully prepared us for this very thing is God, who has also given us the down payment of the Spirit.” He says this in the plainest way about the flesh, since the soul is not mortal, and neither is the spirit. What is mortal will be swallowed up by life when the flesh is dead no longer, but stays alive and incorruptible, singing the praises of God, who has fully prepared us for this very thing. So, in order that we may be fully prepared for it, he says to the Corinthians, and says it aptly, “Glorify God in your body.” And it is God who brings immortality about.

That he says these things about the body of flesh and about no other body, he declares to the Corinthians plainly, beyond doubt, and free of all ambiguity: “always carrying about in our body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus Christ may also be shown in our body. For if we who are alive are handed over to death for Jesus’ sake, it is so that the life of Jesus may also be shown in our mortal flesh.” And that the Spirit takes hold of the flesh, he says in the same letter: “You are a letter of Christ, delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on the fleshly tablets of the heart.” So if fleshly hearts are made partakers of the Spirit in the present time, what is surprising about their receiving, in the resurrection, the life the Spirit grants? The apostle speaks of that resurrection in the letter to the Philippians: “having been made like him in his death, so that I might somehow reach the resurrection from the dead.”

In what other mortal flesh, then, can life be understood to be shown, if not in the very substance that is also put to death for the confession we make of God? As he has said himself: “If, as a man, I fought with wild animals at Ephesus, what good is it to me if the dead are not raised? For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either; and if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is empty and your faith is empty. In that case we are also found to be false witnesses about God, since we testified that he raised up Christ, whom he did not raise up. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is empty, since you are still in your sins. In that case, too, those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are more to be pitied than anyone. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who sleep; for since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead has come through a man as well.”

In all these passages, then, as I have already said, these men must either claim that the apostle holds opinions that contradict one another, on account of that one statement, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God”; or else they will be forced to twist and bend every one of the passages so as to overturn what the words say and alter the sense. For what sensible thing can they say if they try to interpret in some other way what he writes — “For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality,” and “so that the life of Jesus may be shown in our mortal flesh,” and all the other passages where the apostle plainly and clearly declares the resurrection and the incorruption of the flesh? So they will be driven to put a false interpretation on passages like these — men who refuse to understand even one of them rightly.

And since the apostle has not passed sentence against the very substance of flesh and blood, that it cannot inherit the kingdom of God, that same apostle has everywhere used the words “flesh and blood” of the Lord Jesus Christ — partly to establish that he was truly a man, for he did himself speak of himself as the Son of man, and partly to confirm the saving of our flesh. For if the flesh were not in a position to be saved, the Word of God would in no way have become flesh. And if the blood of the righteous were not going to be sought after, the Lord would certainly not have had blood. But blood has had a voice from the beginning of the world. God said to Cain, when he had killed his brother, “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me.” And because their blood will be required, he said to those who were with Noah, “For your blood, the blood of your lives, I will require, even from the hand of every animal”; and again, “Whoever sheds a man’s blood, his blood will be shed for it.” In the same way, too, the Lord said to those who would afterward shed his own blood: “All the righteous blood that has been shed on the earth will be required — from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Barachiah, whom you killed between the temple and the altar. Truly I tell you, all these things will come upon this generation.” [s]

In this way he points out the summing up that was to take place in his own person: the shedding of blood from the beginning — the blood of all the righteous men and of the prophets — and the requiring of that blood by means of himself. Now it could not be required unless it also had the capacity to be saved; and the Lord would not have summed these things up in himself unless he had himself been made flesh and blood after the manner of the original forming of man, saving in his own person at the end what had perished at the beginning in Adam.

But if the Lord became flesh for some other order of things, and took flesh of some other substance, then he has not summed up human nature in his own person, and in that case he cannot even be called flesh. For flesh has truly come to be by the handing on of the thing that was molded at the beginning out of the dust. If it had been necessary for him to draw the material of his body from another substance, then the Father would have molded the material of flesh from a different substance at the beginning. But as things actually stand, the Word saved what really existed — the humanity that had perished — bringing about by means of himself the fellowship that was to be held with it, and seeking out its salvation. And the thing that had perished had flesh and blood. For the Lord took dust from the earth and molded man, and it was for man’s sake that the whole plan of the Lord’s coming took place. So he had flesh and blood himself, summing up in himself not some other creature, but that original handiwork of the Father, seeking out the thing that had perished.

And that is why the apostle says, in the letter to the Colossians: “And though you were formerly estranged, and enemies to the knowledge of him by your evil deeds, yet now you have been reconciled in the body of his flesh, through his death, to present yourselves holy and chaste and without fault in his sight.” He says “you have been reconciled in the body of his flesh” because righteous flesh has reconciled the flesh that was being held down in bondage to sin, and has brought it into friendship with God.

Now if someone claims that the Lord’s flesh differed from ours in this respect, that it committed no sin and no deceit was found in his soul, while we for our part are sinners, he is saying what is true. But if he pretends that the Lord had flesh of some other substance, then what is said about reconciliation will not fit together for him at all. For the thing that is reconciled is the thing that was formerly at enmity. If the Lord had taken flesh from another substance, he would not by doing so have reconciled to God the thing that had become hostile through transgression. But as it is, by fellowship with himself the Lord has reconciled man to God the Father, reconciling us to himself by the body of his own flesh and buying us back by his own blood — as the apostle says to the Ephesians, “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins”; and again, to the same people, “You who were formerly far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ”; and again, “abolishing in his flesh the enmities, that is, the law of commandments contained in ordinances.” In every letter the apostle plainly testifies that we have been saved through the flesh of our Lord and through his blood.

So if flesh and blood are what secure life for us, then it was not said of flesh and blood, in the strict meaning of the words, that they cannot inherit the kingdom of God. Those words apply to the deeds of the flesh already mentioned, which pervert a man into sin and rob him of life. And that is why he says, in the letter to the Romans: “So do not let sin reign in your mortal body, to be under its control; and do not offer your members to sin as weapons of unrighteousness, but offer yourselves to God, as men alive from the dead, and your members to God as weapons of righteousness.” So in these same members, in which we used to serve sin and bear fruit for death, he wants us to be obedient to righteousness, so that we may bear fruit for life.

Remember, then, my very dear friend, that you have been bought back by the flesh of our Lord and restored by his blood, and that you are “holding fast to the Head, from which the whole body of the church, fitted together, grows.” That is: acknowledge the coming of the Son of God in the flesh, acknowledge him as God, and wait steadily for him as man; and make use of these proofs drawn from the Scriptures as well. Then, as I have shown, you will easily overthrow all those notions of the heretics that were concocted later on.