by Stanley Anderson » January 28th, 2009, 11:02 pm
I should probably stay out of this since I haven't followed this all the way through (and don't really have time to "catch up") and perhaps this has already been stated and debated earlier. But in response to talk about glorified bodies and such, we at least have to take into account the one "physical" example we have -- that of the resurrected Christ himself who seemed to go out of his way to verify to doubting Thomas the "real" nature of his body and to the others by eating "mundane" fish and such. And yet at the same time he could seemingly walk through walls, appear out of nowhere, and, oddly enough in light of the Thomas incident later, didn't want Mary Magdalene earlier on to "cling" to him, and also, numerous times he was not even recognized by his closest friends -- and isn't it interesting that even his wounds as shown to Thomas were not "healed up" as we think of healing, but were still there to be seen and felt, as though even those could be a glory of some kind in their very "open wounded-ness". This, at times oddly conflicting and seemingly chaotic, set of qualities, suggests both a "real" (at least in some way to our current understanding of real) solid body, as well as amplified or "meta-physical" or whatever aspects will be coordinated into those glorified bodies.
I like to think that it must be something akin to that illustration that -- hmmm...was it Corrie ten Boom? I'm not quite sure -- gave about the needlepoint tapestry that, from the back is unrecognizable and chaotic, but from the front is a clear picture. So those seemingly chaotic and conflicting aspects that we see in Christ's resurrected body may only be the result of the limitations of our fallen nature so that we can only see the "tangled up" side of the tapestry, but when we are able to get to "the other side", it will all fall together into an integrated and glorious wholeness, beautiful to behold.
--Stanley
…on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a fair green country under a swift sunrise.