Paul addressed his fellow Christians this way:  “And you he made alive, when you were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the children of disobedience.  Among these we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of body and mind, and so we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.”

Most of us are inclined to think of life after death as some kind of prolongation of biological life, but Paul thought of it differently, as did Jesus.  Resurrection life is something much more real than physical life.

C.S. Lewis in his book The Great Divorce, writes of people arriving in the next world as being like ghosts who are so delicate before they become acclimatized to paradise that the soft grass hurts their feet like iron spikes, and raindrops feel to them like falling lead.  What is real, what is substantial, what endures, he argues, is spiritual reality.  

It is hard for us to let go of the idea that what is most ‘real’ is what we can see, touch, hear, taste and smell.  ‘Spiritual’ seems almost by definition ‘airy-fairy’.  But let go of this idea we must, for it is a necessary step on the road of conversion.

Oddly, what makes possible our transformation from living death to eternal life, is the physical resurrection of Christ, who took a mortal body into heaven.  Those who scoff at the idea of a bodily resurrection, and argue that it is merely a metaphor, have missed this most basic logic of the Christian faith.The resurrection makes sense of us: we do not need to make sense of it any more than a nursing child needs to make sense of her mother.  Understanding will come.  For now we see through a glass, darkly, then face to face, now we know in part, then shall we know even as also we are known.

Anthony Burton