In Between Death and Resurrection

As we looked at in the last post, resurrection is physical. It is about bodies. The Christian hope is not a disembodied hope, but an embodied one. It does not do away with creation, but awaits its renewal. Resurrection, then, is not only about our dead bodies being raised, but about the deliverance of the entire cosmos from the death dealing decay of sin (Romans 8:18-25).

This event of Resurrection, it is thought, will happen at the end of time. When that day comes all the dead will be raised together, all at once, to receive new bodies to live in a newly restored creation.

But what happens to those who die before the end comes? That is, what happens if we die and the end does not come for another thousand years? Where do we go in the time between death and resurrection?

A modern day analogy that is as winsome as it is theologically astute comes from the scientist and theologian John Polkinghorne. He puts it this way: God will download our software onto his hardware until the time he gives us new hardware to run the software again for ourselves.

What is helpful about this analogy is that it holds together the body-soul distinction in a way that honors both without prizing one over the other. The soul (software) is what is needed to make the body (hardware) “work” whereas the body is required in order for the soul to “run.”

Hardware and software are an integral whole. Likewise, body and soul. One requires the other.

If the whole computer analogy seems all too technical and machine-like, we can think in terms of God’s memory. When we die all that we are is firmly held within the loving embrace of God’s remembrance. In reality, there is never a time in which we are not kept secure in the memory of God, in which past, present and future are stored permanently and perfectly. But it is enough for us to remember, when Death shows its face and bares its teeth, that our lives are not and will not be forgotten.

In dying we are not erased. God remembers us.

And as those who are remembered by God, we find ourselves re-membered, re-collected within the communion of saints, welcomed among those belonging to the family of God throughout space and time. And there we wait together. Together we wait for the time when God will raise us from the dead, when we are given new bodies to inhabit a renewed heavens and renewed earth.

This is the hope of resurrection. It is our hope in and for the renewal of all things; when our souls will be embodied once again just as in the end creation will become the embodiment of heaven, which is simply another way of saying what we pray every week – “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”