Cancer Blog #81
By Brian Zimmerman
Begun on July 31, 2021
Email: dyingman1@yahoo.com
My Dying Words
Entry #81– The Hope of Handel
April 17, 2023
[1Co 15:50-53] 50 Now I say this, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. 51 Behold, I tell you a mystery; we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, 52 in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. 53 For this perishable must put on the imperishable, and this mortal must put on immortality.
We come to a passage made unforgettable by the music of Handel in “The Messiah”: “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed …”. Paul does not use the word “mystery” very often, but here is one of those. The libretto used by Handel highlights this passage with good reason. Here is a wonderful description of our great hope, one that is mentioned by us too little in our modern faith.
What Paul focuses on is not this present life, this veil of tears. To study our plight in this fallen world is necessary, but cannot offer the consolation we receive from Paul as he discusses our fate when Jesus returns. The mystery he tells us here is not just something previously unknown but now revealed, but also the manner of this revealing, the mechanism as it were. The kingdom of God has already been revealed and established with the first coming of Jesus but we cannot fully take it on if we stay as we are now. We are only flesh and blood that will perish, corpses walking and waiting to complete our decay in the grave. We cannot possibly inherit and completely participate in a kingdom that will never end, never decline or decay if we are not made fit to be part of such a kingdom.
That change is of course the mystery. How will such a change occur? There is no process, as it were, says Paul. It will not be like waiting for flowers to grow, bud, and bloom over time in the spring. Instead, the surprise we learn and the mystery that will one day occur, what will be “revealed”, will be instantaneous, in the blink of an eye. Instead of being people who live a life of constant decay, or perhaps joining the multitude who have died and completed that cycle, we will be transformed into a race that is whole and who can never experience that decay, who will never perish again. That transformation will be immediate when Jesus returns a second time. No wonder Paul says elsewhere in this letter: “Our Lord, come!” (16:22)
And so Paul encourages us to see that this change is the culmination of all we hope for, a change so complete and dramatic that our joy will be full, no longer one of hoping and waiting, but one of completion, a stunning healing of all that is wrong with us now. This is a blessing that we should meditate on in this present life to keep from being overwhelmed or discouraged, or worse, despairing, as we see not only our own lives, but the life of the entire planet share in the ultimate decay: death. For Jesus will come back to transform us and give us life not just as He did Lazarus, as part of the old and still dying creation, but an eternal life, a life with no more growing old, no more suffering or pain, because our new bodies and our new planet, will no longer be capable of corruption, no longer doomed to perish as they are now. As Paul says, our mortal bodies will put on immortality. Let that thought, that hope give us joy as well as courage. It is no wonder that one of the fruit of the Spirit is joy!
NEXT: Death is Swallowed Up