Raised Clothed in Glory

…beauty, and is admired, so in this same way the human body too is sown in corruption, in weakness and in dishonor, but will come back to life clothed in honor and incorruption, and in power as well (1 Corinthians 15:42–43).

The sober watchfulness of the one who speaks for God deserves our admiration. For his faith is firmly grounded, and he is confident that the body will come back to life in every way and without fail; so he likens the body's corruption to sowing, and with great skill and wisdom makes the nature of the thing match the example at every point. So, he says, like the grain, the body will not come back to life bare, but richly clothed with incorruption and glory, and with strength besides, and enriched also with this: that it comes to be of a spiritual mind, since the grace from above and the incomparable power of the Creator of all in a way refashion what is in it into the very opposite.

For corruption and weakness and lack of beauty dwell in the body that has fallen and been sown, as it were, in the earth, and a natural mind as well, which we say is the same as the fleshly and more earthly mind. But it was not so by nature when it was brought into being in the beginning; these things crept in through the transgression and the sentence of death. Since our nature is being called back to what it was in the beginning, the putting off of what came in between is necessarily brought about by the power and working of God, and in exchange there is brought in a share in the good things that were ours first, in the beginning.

For we have been renewed in Christ, as the Scriptures say. A holy prophet said, “Take courage, Zion; do not let your hands grow slack. The Lord your God is in you, mighty to save you, and He will renew you in His love” (Zephaniah 3:16–17). For when God the Father loved us, then, at that very time, He renewed us in Christ. And indeed it is true that all things in Him are “a new creation; the old things have passed away, and new things have come” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

What old things does he mean? Those that have gone by. And what new things? Those that have been brought in. The old are corruption, and weakness, and dishonor besides, and the faults of the natural mind; the new, through Christ, are glory and incorruption and power and the spiritual mind. For our body will be spiritual (1 Corinthians 15:44).

What would “spiritual” mean, O teacher of the mysteries? Does he mean that it will no longer be flesh, and will in no way be composed, as it is now, of bones and sinews, through which the nature of our body is made complete, but will rather be thin and airy, hardly more solid than a shadow? Not at all. For if some think this is how things stand, then surely it will not be the very thing that falls into the earth that comes back to life, but something else beside it, in no way like the first.

I would say that “spiritual” means not what has the form of a shadow, that is, of a bodiless spirit, but rather what has stood apart from, and indeed been wholly set free from, the fleshly and more earthly mind. “For if there is,” he says, “a natural body, there is also…