The Resurrection of the body.

The last two articles of the Creed tell us of the final, sure and certain, results of going on and on trying to be a good Christian. (You realize that, when you say this article, you mean, not our Lord’s body on Easter Sunday, but yours. “I, Edward Ethelbert Eighteen or Florence Fatima Finkelstein, believe that my body will rise again from the grave in which it was laid at my death, and will be joined again for ever in heaven to my immortal and undying soul.”)

This will happen at the last day (2 Corinthians 5, 10). How it will happen, I cannot tell you; for I am not dead yet, and the last day is still to come. But I believe that God, who made human bodies out of dust {Genesis 2, 7), can again raise them out of dust.

Our resurrection bodies, says St. Paul, will be like our Lord’s on Easter Sunday (Philippians 3, 21). Real and our own (St. Luke 24, 39). But spiritual (St. John 20, 19); and very beautiful and glorious (1 Corinthians 15, 42 to 44: 4th verse of English Hymnal 431 or Ancient and Modern 232), yet, somehow, God knows how, still our own; like a chrysalis and a butterfly.

Sometimes I am sad when I see in Haggerston friends of mine who are old, deaf, blind, bent up with rheumatism; children who are hungry, crying, very tired; and when I go to them as they are dying I could often cry. Then I put on my radio-gramophone one of two records, Walter Widdop singing (Isaiah 40, 4) or Clara Butt singing (Isaiah 35, 5 and 6). [One day I hope you will like Handel’s “Messiah” as much as I do.]

It is because we Christians believe in both our Lord’s resurrection of the body, and its result - the resurrection of our own bodies - (1 Thessalonians 4, 14), that we are not too frightened of death, and not too sad when our loved ones die.