Back to the Stone

She is still standing there. The flag is still in the ground. The heat is what it is.

Here is what the map says about her husband.

If he knew Christ — if the relational knowing that John 17:3 calls eternal life was present in him — then the condition he entered at the moment his heart stopped is what the tradition has called Paradise, the Lazarus side of the divided house, the place of conscious rest in the presence of the one he knew. Paul, writing from prison in Philippians 1:23, describes his own desire to depart and be with Christ as "far better" than remaining in the body. Not merely different. Far better. The intermediate state for those in Christ is not a waiting room of reduced experience. It is a state of heightened nearness to the one whose nearness is what life is.

He is not in that ground. His body is in that ground, doing what bodies do after the soul has departed, waiting for what Daniel 12:2 and 1 Corinthians 15 describe as the resurrection. But he is not in the ground. The "far better" is where he is. Outside the sequence she is inside. Already in the presence she will eventually enter. Aware, conscious, himself — not a ghost, not a shadow, but the person he was, more fully himself than he ever was while the fog of mortality was on him.

She will see him again. Not as a comfort-phrase designed to fill a silence. As a literal description of what the resurrection means. The body in the ground and the soul in the far better will be reunited at the last day, and what emerges from that reunion will be what Paul calls in 1 Corinthians 15 a spiritual body — not a ghost and not a resuscitated corpse, but a mode of embodied existence that corresponds to the new creation the way a seed corresponds to the wheat that grows from it.

The map does not answer every question she has. It does not tell her what he experiences in the interval, or whether time as she understands it has any meaning where he is, or whether he is aware of her. Those questions belong to Part Seven — the chapter on what it means to be outside the sequence. What the map does tell her is this: he is not nowhere. He is not nothing. He is not asleep in a condition of unconscious waiting. He is in the presence of the one he knew, held by the same love that raised Christ from the dead, more himself than he has ever been.

The map is not finished. The map develops further as the New Testament traces the full picture of Sheol's conquest and the resurrection's meaning. But what has been drawn here is enough to stand in front of a stone in the heat and know that the stone is not the end of the story.

The next two chapters take the map further — into the question of what it means to exist outside of time, and then into the event that changed the map entirely.