I was delighted on Sunday when I was able to sit in the congregation with my wife and received divine service under the leadership of brother pastors. I don't very often get this experience and when I do, I find it terribly uncomfortable after all these years of sitting in the front. While sitting there, however, I was struck by a particular part of this Sunday's epistle lesson in which Paul includes a reference to the future "redemption of our bodies" (Rm 8:23). The end times theme of ultimate redemption has a strange object to our modern ears: our bodies. My body will be redeemed fully at the consummation of the age. Our bodies are objects of redemption. Christ has paid the price to redeem our lowly bodies so that they can be like his glorious body (Phil 3:21).

The idea of a gnostic-only redemption, one devoid of fleshly or bodily outcomes is put very swiftly to death by the New Testament's anthropology, in which the bodily incarnation of the son of God through the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary is the source of our salvation; a salvation of both body and soul. The resurrection is always described as a bodily resurrection. It is never some airy-fairy spiritual-only resurrection. Christianity's view of humans as body and soul subsisting is pivotal to our view of salvation.

This passage in Romans struck me particularly because it drove me to wonder why we are so dismissive of caring for the human body in our contemporary funeral traditions. Why are we careless of how we treat the remains of the blessed dead, when in fact God has made it perfectly clear that the human body is an object of redemption? Are we trying to undo God's redemption? Or challenge it? Again, this does not mean that God cannot take care of the remains of those killed in tragic fires or by explosions, but over such things we have no control. However, how we treat those who have died in the Lord and their bodies is under our control. Shouldn't that treatment be shaped by the promise of redemption and bodily resurrection, rather than something else? Especially since this final redemption is a capstone to the work of God of creating our bodies. Oh yes, there is an enormous difference, because our bodies have been redeemed by Christ and will be raised, like His, incorruptible. But this Christlike nature granted to us in its fullness at the end does not issue in body-lessness. Rather, specifically because of the price paid by Christ our renovated bodies are returned to us at our final redemption.

We expect our doctors to work heroically to save the human body through the gifts of modern medicine. This is as it should be. However, the minute death ensues, we act like the body is of absolutely no value. Perhaps this is because our God-like capacity to keep the human body alive has failed. We want to turn away from our failure and ignore it. Then we treat death's remains as unworthy of any consideration whatever. The dead body is still a human body, just dead. You can't change that. Death does not. Notice the great care that is lavished on the dead body of the One who would slay death. Wouldn't the resurrection of Christ have been ever more theatrically spectacular if He had risen out of a blazing funeral bier, Viking-style? Yet, those who loved Him saw to the proper disposition of His precious body. His bodily death makes just as precious our own bodies. Let's treat them as precious, ultimately redeemed as they are by Him.