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Morning Devotion for the Season of Epiphany
January 20, 2025
Feast Day of Fabian, 250 CE
Reading: 1 Corinthians 15:35-44
Someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be, but a bare seed, 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. Not all flesh is alike, but there is one flesh for human beings, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. There are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one thing, and that of the earthly is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; indeed, star differs from star in glory.
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. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.
Meditation - Peter Vanderveen
“It’s a Philly thing.”
That might have been Paul’s retort if anyone objected to the insult embedded in his letter to members of the church in Corinth. After all, it’s an exceptionally useful line, one that by simple declaration excuses all manner of crudity, obnoxiousness, and over-served misbehavior – albeit for Philadelphians far removed in time and place from the city of the same name that Paul may have known. Nonetheless, there’s something inescapably offensive in addressing anyone as “a fool.” It’s a word that has much more punch as a noun than as an adjective. Foolishness is ubiquitous. But it takes a particular consistency of incompetence to be, justly, called a fool. One could reasonably wonder what it was that so got under Paul’s skin. What provoked his impatience?
It’s certainly natural to speculate about what happens at death and what it means to say that some kind of life follows after it. This might be even more the case in reference to the Christian declaration of resurrection, where one’s life is much more substantially tied to one’s body. It’s easy to muse about one’s immaterial and invisible soul escaping – slipping away to some other realm; but the Gospel accounts of an empty tomb and Jesus’ bodily appearances to his disciples hopelessly complicate dreams of an afterlife. What are we to make of this? Paul himself could only stammer about, offering in response a series of half-baked metaphors. But I don’t think that this was the problem.
I think that what prompted Paul’s intemperance was that pressing these questions too aggressively was to wander too assertively into what is strictly God’s business. Whatever lies on the other side of death is simply not ours to know, nor is it within our capabilities to determine what is or is not possible. Being too emphatic, either in denying life after death or in describing it, is to put ourselves in God’s place, as if we ourselves have God’s comprehension of the infinite. And to push God out of the way, then, to venture our own agenda and vision – well, that might well qualify someone as a fool.
It is appropriate to take stock of the limit of our reach. It can set us at peace about a lot of matters. And, with this, there is the accompanying beauty of allowing that God will take up into his infinitude all that is finite in us, transforming everything in redemption and reconciliation. I won’t try to say how this will be done or what it will look like; my foolishness in much smaller matters is probably quite enough.
Prayer
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name,
thy kingdom come, thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver from evil.
For thine is the kingdom, and the power,
and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen
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