An eternal today. . .

There are always questions to pastors about what kind of body or what will the body look like after the resurrection.  I cannot tell you how many people have very specific thoughts about which moment of their present lives and bodies they wish to be eternal.  We are a very picky people.  It seems that the resurrection is for many of us merely the undoing of death so that the present moment continues without end.  That may sound good but it is not.  God does not merely stop the body from dying and thus preserve it as it is forever.  It would be a good miracle, I guess, but it is less than the miracle God has prepared for those who love Him.

All of this remind me of a particular passage within the Eastern version of St. Thomas (at least in esteem, anyway), Maximus.  Maximus the Confessor (c. 580 – 13 August 662), was a Christian monk, theologian, and scholar who, in his early life, was a civil servant and an aide to the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius. He gave it all up to enter the monastic life.  Maximus had studied philosophy, particularly, the Platonic dialogues, the works of Aristotle, and numerous later Platonic commentators on Aristotle and Plato.  At this point in time you are glazing over and so am I.  Though Maximus is venerated in both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches, he was eventually persecuted for his Christological positions and, as punishment, his tongue and right hand were mutilated.  Now that was in the day when heretics suffered consequences other than a best selling book!

So I am getting distracted a bit.  Anyway, Maximus was asked by a bishop to respond to the some monks who claimed that, after the resurrection, the glorified bodies of the saints will be similar to our present bodies, just not subject to death.  They said:

In the resurrection, bodies will once again be sustained in their life by phlegm and blood, by yellow and black bile, by drawing breath and physical food. Thus, through the resurrection, nothing foreign to or beyond this present life will appear except the inability of the bodies to die again.

That was probably too much information for most but you get the idea.  Life goes on and on and on just like it is today except that death is no more.  Maximus thought the monks had set the bar entirely too low, settling for a snapshot of this life with the annoyance of death but with everything else associated with this moral existence as enough.  That was shocking to Maximus.  

They thus espouse an everlasting death and an endless corruption. For if death is the corruption of those things constitutive of bodies; and if the body is being forever corrupted in its very constitution by the influx of various nourishments along with the flux of its exhalation, all due to the natural antipathy of the interior humors by which it is also constituted—then they are assuming that, after the resurrection, the body is forever sustained by means of those same constitutive elements, thereby proclaiming that death is preserved in unbroken perpetuity. We ought instead to believe that the body is raised in its essence and form, yet is incorruptible and immortal and, as the Apostle says, “spiritual” instead of “psychical,” insofar as the body’s invariable, constitutive property suffers no corruption at all. For God knows how to dignify the body itself, transforming it into an impassible body. 

They were not paying attention to St. Paul.  As the Apostle Paul teaches, in the resurrection human beings will be raised with incorruptible spiritual bodies in the general resurrection (1 Cor 15:35-56).  Now, to be fair, nobody gets what this all means exactly.  We are not given a preview of how this actually works out but enough to say it is not going to be an endless today with all else being equal.  Yet, like the monks of old to whom Maximus contended, we too often are ready to settle for just that.  We want nothing more than the best moment of this life preserved forever.  If that is all we want, we have sorely underestimated the Lord.  Worse, we have overestimated the best moment of this life.  I have a feeling that Joel Osteen with his best life now would have liked these monks.  Not so much Maximus, however.  

You do not get to choose soul or body for both are constitutive parts of the human being.  Even when death dissolves this union, the person is not simply left with a soul but looks forward to a new and glorious body like unto Christ's own.  Our salvation is neither the liberation of the person from the physical nor the simple elimination of death from the physical but a new and glorious body in which body the soul is joined forever.  The Kingdom is populated not simply by souls, but by embodied persons.  Now I will admit that I find many of the Eastern church fathers somewhat obtuse and hard to follow.  Maximus is no exception.  I write this only to show that there is no new error and that Maximus could be addressing those today who hope from God little more than a preserved moment in time rather the promise of all things made new.