Butterflies are Free

The Epistle for the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity is a powerful one. In this epistle, St. Paul addresses several doctrinal and ethical problems that had arisen in the Church in Corinth. One of those issues was the individual believer’s bodily resurrection.

It seems that some of the Corinthians had come to believe that the bodily resurrection of Jesus himself was false. They also assumed that, given their false assumption, the resurrection of our bodies was not possible. Now, the Corinthians were Greeks and, being Greeks, they had no problem believing in an immortal soul. Such belief had been a part of Greek philosophy and mythology for centuries. However, they could not fathom a complete bodily resurrection. In the 15th chapter of this Epistle, Paul addresses this problem and in doing so gives us a powerful understanding of our own resurrection.

Paul makes some startling statements to the effect that if the resurrection isn’t true, then our whole faith is a lie. He says,

“…if there is no resurrection from the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.”

He’s right.

If Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is not true then nothing that we do as Christians is true. If His resurrection never happened then we’re wasting our time being in church. However, it did happen and Paul goes to great lengths to tell us that Jesus not only rose from the dead, but he was seen by over 500 people after his resurrection. That’s a pretty big deal. One could look with a jaundiced eye if only the apostles said they saw him, but over 500 people saw the physical body of Christ after his resurrection. So we know for a fact that Jesus did rise from the dead and, therefore, our faith is not in vain. This isn’t the only facet of our resurrection that St. Paul touches upon. Paul also addresses what kind of body we’ll have after our resurrection.

As I mentioned before, the Greeks believed in an immortal soul, but they didn’t believe in a bodily resurrection. What they were expecting is what many of us expect. If someone dies we rather expect a resurrected person to look at resurrection just like they did before they died. That’s an easy picture for us to hold in our minds, but Paul says that’s incorrect. He says this:

“But some one will ask, ‘how are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’ You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as He has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. For not all flesh is alike….so it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body….just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven. I tell you this brethren; flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable….for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.”

Paul’s agrarian analogy works very well because it helps us with our limited capacity to have some level of understanding of this miracle that is part of the promise of our salvation in Christ. It made me think of an analogy, too.

Think of the caterpillar that turns into a butterfly. The caterpillar has one kind of body which is completely different from that of a butterfly. It’s low to the ground and must crawl along on little stumpy legs. No one thinks much of a caterpillar until it goes into its cocoon. There it changes dramatically. What was once fuzzy and ugly and slow becomes through a miracle a beautiful butterfly. It becomes a different creature that can fly and float on the wind. It is as dramatically different from its former self as it could possibly be. To get there, however, it had to change. It had to die to its old self to be reborn miraculously into a new and more beautiful self. So it is, Paul tells us, with ourselves.

In baptism we die to our old sinful selves to be reborn in Christ. That doesn’t mean we can’t or won’t ever sin again, but we’re now different than we were before. After baptism we grow in Christ, nourished by his body and blood in the sacrament, until one day we also die. One day this body of dust that has served us here on earth; this body with which we encountered and grew in our Lord changes. It dies and rots away. Like the caterpillar and the butterfly we leave our body and emerge in a new, more wonderful spiritual body. A body that no longer feels pain, or suffering. Then, as paul says,

“…the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality.”

This, my friends, is the promise of the resurrection. It’s not a fantasy because we know by the truth of the resurrection of Christ that it is true. Here in the 15th chapter of First Corinthians St. Paul has reinforced for us this fact of our faith.

The fact that with every funeral there comes a resurrection.

That with sadness joy follows.

The fact that with our death… in Christ we are born to eternal life.

Think about that the next time you see a butterfly.