I BELIEVE IN THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY...

 I am retiring soon, after 40 years of working in the church, 35 of them as an ordained minister.  Naturally enough, given this transition and my age, I am thinking about death, MY death.  My own death is coming into focus in a way it hasn’t heretofore.

Maybe I have 10 more good years, maybe less or maybe more. But death is coming.  This knowledge can make one frantic…I’ve got to keep moving to do all the things I said I wanted to do.  It can also contribute to melancholia… to a deep sense of regret at all the things I’d hoped to do but didn’t.  Looking back contributes to sadness.  Looking forward contributes to anxiety and frantic activity.

When I start thinking this way, I betray my own faith.  After all, “I believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”  Those words, at this point in my life, are starting to have ever greater meaning.

One of the things I am doing as I retire, is giving away my theological library.  I am keeping very few things.  One book I received years ago, but never really read, is “Dogmatics in Outline” by Karl Barth.  I almost gave this thin volume away, but ultimately rescued it from the pile. I am glad I did so because it had a timely word for me regarding resurrection.

The origin of the book merits a word. The book relates a series of lectures given by Barth just after WWII.  “These lectures were delivered in the semi-ruins of the once stately Kurfürsten Schloss in Bonn…Most people in the Germany of to-day have in their own way and in their own place endured and survived much, almost beyond all measure.  I noted the same in my Bonn lads.  With their grave faces, which had still to learn how to smile again, they no less impressed me than I them, I who was an alien, the centre of all sorts of gossip from old times. For me the situation will remain unforgettable.  By a mere coincidence it was my fiftieth semester.  And when it was past, my impression was that for me it was the best ever”  writes Barth in the Foreword.

Now, on to the topic at hand. Toward the end of the book and in the section on resurrection, Barth says, “A Christian looks back (as done when talking about sin and the forgiveness of sin). A Christian looks forward, we now say.  This looking back and looking forward constitute the life of a Christian…the life of a (person) who has received the Holy Spirit, who may live in the congregation and is called to be in it a light of the world. A (person) looks forward.  We take a turn, as it were, of 180 degrees: behind us lies our sin and before us death, dying, the coffin, the grave, the end. The (person) who does not take it seriously that we are looking to that end, the (person) who does not realise what dying means, who is not terrified at it, who has perhaps not enough joy in life and so does not know the fear of the end, who has not yet understood that this life is a gift of God…the (person) who, in other words, does not grasp the beauty of this life, cannot grasp the significance of ‘resurrection’. For this word is the answer to death’s terror…”

This is a good sort of looking back and looking forward, released from sadness and anxiety.  And speaking of the future Barth goes on to say,  “And now the Christian…looks forward.  What is the meaning of the Christian hope in this life? A life after death? An event apart from death?  A tiny soul which, like a butterfly, flutters away above the grave and is still preserved somewhere,  in order to live on immortally?  That was how the heathen looked on the life after death.  But that is not the Christian hope.  (My emphasis!)   ‘I believe in the resurrection of the body.’  Body in the Bible is quite simply (humanity)… (humanity) moreover, under the sign of sin, (humanity) laid low. And to…(humanity) it is said, Thou shalt rise again.  Resurrection means not the continuation of this life, but life’s completion…”

So what I have to look forward to is life’s completion. I don’t have to be overcome with regrets or become frantic.  In God’s grace, my life and the life of all creation, will be completed.  That only comes through death, but death itself is transformed.  It is not simply a terror, but death becomes  the door, opening into new life in the age to come.  As I prepare to retire, and as I live with all the thoughts and questions this brings to the surface…I find myself saying, with new meaning, hope, and purpose… “I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come.”  So, onward to the future!

(Quotes are from "Dogmatics in Outline" by Karl Barth, trans. G.T. Thomson, publ by the Philosophical Library, New York, NY, 1949.  Foreword page 7, quotes on resurrection pgs 153 ff)