The Body That Light Will Wear

I told you in an earlier section about the iron in the forge — how it takes the fire's heat and light into itself until you can barely tell, looking at it, where the iron ends and the fire begins. I want to come back to that image now, because the end of the story is not just that you carry the love of God through you in this life. The end of the story is that the love, poured in long enough, changes the vessel.

Not into something other than what you are. Into what you were always meant to be.

Look at the risen Christ, because He is the prototype — the first one through, the firstfruits of what happens to everyone who is His. He was not a ghost. He ate fish in front of His friends to prove it. He told Thomas to put his hand in the wound. A spirit does not eat; a spirit cannot be touched. This was the same body that had been crucified, real and continuous, the same person raised and transformed.

And yet this same touchable, fish-eating body walked through a locked door. The room was sealed and He was simply there, inside it, without the door being opened. He could be touched and He could pass through walls. Not less embodied than He had been. More — flesh finally freed from every constraint that does not belong to it.

That is what waits for you. Not escape from your body. Your body, freed.

The teachers of the old Church looked at the risen Christ and at what Paul wrote in First Corinthians 15, and they named four things that will be true of the body in the resurrection. I will give you those four things in plain English, because the words they used were Latin and the plain English is more beautiful anyway.

First: it will not decay. The slow running-down that has been at work in your cells since the day you were born — finished. Done with disease, done with diminishment, done with the ache that greets you some mornings before you have even gotten out of bed. Not escaped. Healed, permanently, from the inside.

Second: it will be free in matter the way the risen Christ was free in a locked room. No longer a weight that blocks and is blocked. Moving through the physical world with a freedom your present body has never known.

Third: it will move at the speed of your willing. No more negotiation with gravity and fatigue. Where you intend, you go.

Fourth — and this is the one this whole book has been walking toward — it will shine. Not with light borrowed from outside. With light that comes up from within, the way the sun shines from its own burning. Three of His friends saw the preview on a mountain — His face blazing like the sun, His clothes dazzling white, the glory that had been inside Him all along breaking through the surface for a moment before the veil came back down. That is the preview. The resurrection is when the veil comes down permanently, not just for a moment, for every child of light who stayed on the vine.

The shining is not your own. Hold that, or the whole thing goes wrong. The iron glows because it is in the forge, not because iron is luminous by nature. The child of light shines because the Spirit of the God who is Light has been poured in, and dwelt there, and done His patient work long enough that the glory within finally breaks through the outside. It is still His light. It will always be His light. The glow is the indwelling, made permanent and visible. Take the branch off the vine and it does not shine. It withers. The shining is abiding, carried into forever.

John saw this and wrote it simply: When He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him as He is. The likeness is caused by the seeing. The glorified body shines because it finally beholds the One who is Light without any veil between them — and the beholding completes what the Spirit began. Daniel saw it coming from a great distance: those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens. Jesus named it plainly: the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.

The shining is the knowing, made visible in a body that can finally hold it all.