WHEN we stand at the bier of our dead, the church of Christ puts upon our lips the mysterious confession: “I believe in the resurrection of the flesh.” And from this point, every representation must start out, which we form of the lot and the condition of our dead.
It does not avail you, that you say to yourself, that you have to leave with the Lord the lot of your dead. This will do with one dead, who leaves you indifferent. But it does not do, when by the dying of one of your loved ones you were deeply wounded in your heart, and when his image still rises every time before you, to interest you and keep you engaged and to overtake you with that multitude of questions, that with the mystery of death presses upon you.
This is so true, that also the nations, which by reason of their sins have been given over by God to a reprobate mind, yet could not rest, until, in however imperfect a way, they had discovered some answer to those questions. And it is only the unbelievers of our nineteenth century, who at the grave of their dead impose silence upon all thought; hide the casket under wreaths of flowers; and scarcely dare to mention still a hope of immortality.
In the end cremation of the body is yet most fully in harmony with their nihilistic somberness.
But so it is not with God’s child in the cemetery.
To him a light is risen in this darkness of the grave. And in that light Christ’s church does not leave him perplexed, but gives him so much assurance in his representation, that, in thinking of his dead, his heart is no playball of anxiety and uncertainty, but comes at length to rest.
WE know,” so spake the holy apostle, “that, if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (II Cor. 5, 1).
And you know what in their mutual antithesis “Tabernacle” and “House” indicate.
Moses first built a “Tabernacle” which was adapted, to serve on the pilgrim-journey through the wilderness. And afterward Solomon built the Lord an “House,” on that Zion, which He had chosen as a place of His rest.
Beautiful and striking thus is the apostolic comparison.
Our body, in which we continue our pilgrim-journey to the grave, is merely our tabernacle, which is destined once to be dissolved and to disappear like the tabernacle, Moses built. But when that tabernacle of this earthly body is dissolved, there comes afterward for that tabernacle a fixed “building,” an “house,” a real “dwellingplace” in its stead, that shall very far excel the tabernacle in splendor and glory.
He who looked attentively upon Solomon’s temple, saw in that temple the tabernacle. The same thought lay expressed therein; it was built after the same division of ground; the same fundamental lines were traced therein. And yet that temple was so altogether different. Everything fixed what in the tabernacle was loose. The finishings were far richer. The form far more ornamental. The splendor far more brilliant.
You could say: In the tabernacle lay the germ of the temple; and again in the temple the tabernacle was gloriously risen.
And by the mouth of the apostle, the Holy Spirit applies this to the mortal remains of your dead.
Also that provisional body, in which you have known them, even as the tabernacle, attracted you by charms of many sorts; but it was weak in its articulations, it remained frail and transitory. Once it had to be dissolved, and as afterward in Israel you heard nothing more of the tabernacle, so also that earthly body of your child, of your wife, of your husband, of your brother, of your sister had quietly to perish.
But because the tabernacle disappears, every form of the sanctuary of Israel does not pass away.
On the contrary, in the breaking down of the tabernacle lies the prophecy of the temple that is to come. And so also in that dying, in that breaking down of the body of your dead, lies for you the glorious prophecy of a far more glorious form, in which once they shall arise.
For, also when their body of this earthly tabernacle is dissolved, God’s Word says to you: This your dead, provided he departed in life-fellowship with Christ Jesus, shall have a building of God, an house, not made with hands, and shall once be clothed upon with his “habitation” from the heavens.
Solomon built his temple not from the several parts of the tabernacle, and so also that flesh and blood, that goes into dissolution in the grave, shall not inherit the Kingdom of heaven. And yet tabernacle and temple are one, even as the blade is one with the kernel of wheat from which it sprang. It is the same fundamental trait. From the tabernacle the temple has come forth. But what was brittle wood in the tabernacle is hewn stone in the temple. And in the temple there was a ceiling covered with gold for what were skins over the tabernacle. Not something different, it is the same, and yet different, because so much more glorious.
Think how S. John on Patmos saw the Savior. Ever yet the same Who was born in the crib of Bethlehem, but now shining in majesty, His eyes as a flame of fire, His hair like unto white wool, His feet glowing as shining brass, and His voice as the sound of many waters. The same and yet an altogether different body. Now in splendor and glory. And it is like unto this His glorified body, that once He shall make the body of your dead; if indeed they are of His, adopted in the fold of that One and Only Shepherd.
Thus you have firm ground under foot.
Before everything else the main question, whether he who went from you, was incorporated in the mystical body of Christ. If this were so, then likewise the full assurance, that now the “tabernacle of this earthly body” is truly broken down, but that your beloved dead shall one day obtain back a far more glorious form. For that frail tabernacle a glorious temple. A new and glorious body, that shall be a temple of God in the Spirit. An habitation eternal in the heavens. A heavenly and pure form, always according to the fundamental traits and fundamental division of the body that here went under, but then no more subjected to corruption. As the apostle says: an house of God.
ONLY, for this you also know, so it is not yet.
All this tarries and bides till the sign of the Son of man shall be seen upon the clouds. For, then only shall your dead arise, and you with them.
Until that illustrious day your dead are what in II Cor. 5, 3, the holy apostle calls “unclothed” or “naked”; that is to say, that they exist only in their soul, as spirits, and, for a time deprived of all external appearance, they lack the possession of the body.
They have their tabernacle no more, and their temple they have not yet.
Just as for a time the ark of the Covenant stood on Zion, while there was no more tabernacle, and the temple had not yet been built.
Something that certainly sounds very strangely to the wise of this age, who have told you, that soul and body cannot possibly be two substances, but a fact, that has nothing in the least problematical about it for him who knows, that God in Paradise first formed Adam’s body, and then in that body increated the soul.
It is indeed noteworthy, therefore, that later philosophers already now again incline to similar representations. Herbart, the philosopher who exerts so great an influence, already preached something, that comes much closer to what God revealed unto us.
But whatever the wise men of this age may cogitate and ponder, we know, that there is a God Who lives, Who can destroy both body and soul in hell, but also a God, Who can take up, both body and soul into His glory.
As now God’s angels always exist without body, so also your dead, because they have a soul, can exist for a time as spirits, without body. Only with this difference, that an angel without body is not “naked” and not “unclothed,” because a body does not belong with him. But that your beloved dead, on the other hand, in that separated spiritual state of soul, are indeed “naked” and truly “unclothed,” because they lack their corruptible body, and have not yet received from God their eternal body.
THUS they are blessed.
For they have died unto all sin. All their tears have been wiped away. Nothing separates them longer from the blessed fellowship of their Savior. And they share the joy of their God.
Only, they are not yet glorified.
Therefore it is said in Revelation, that there are blessed ones who cry: “How long yet, O holy and righteous Ruler!” and that they are told, that they must yet wait awhile.
Therefore not only love, but also hope went with them across Death and Grave into eternity. For also their outlook and their blessed expectation is ever directed to that illustrious day, when God Triune shall forever triumph over Satan and all the power of darkness, and nothing more shall resist the glory of Christ, their King.
Then also they shall be “clothed upon.” They simultaneously with you, provided it is also granted you, blessedly to die in your Savior. They shall not come in in advance of you, and you shall not come in in advance of them. But it shall be in one moment of time, with one sound of the trumpet, that every soul, that is reconciled in Jesus, shall receive their glorious body, then after soul and body eternally to live unto God.