The same precise distinction between 'fashion' and 'form,' which we have
had occasion to notice in Chapter II., recurs here. The 'fashion' of
the body of our humiliation is external and transient; the 'form' of the
body of His glory to which we are to be assimilated consists of
essential characteristics or properties, and may be regarded as being
almost synonymous with 'Nature.' Observing the distinction which the
Apostle draws by the use of these two words, and remembering their force
in the former instance of their occurrence, we shall not fail to give
force to the representation that in the Resurrection the fleeting
fashion of the bodily frame will be altered, and the glorified bodies of
the saints made participant of the essential qualities of His.
We further note that there is no trace of false asceticism or of gnostic
contempt for the body in its designation as 'of our humiliation.' Its
weaknesses, its limitations, its necessities, its corruption and its
death, sufficiently manifest our lowliness, while, on the other hand,
the body in which Christ's glory is manifested, and which is the
instrument for His glory, is presented in fullest contrast to it.
The great truth of Christ's continual glorified manhood is the first
which we draw from these words. The story of our Lord's Resurrection
suggests indeed that He brought the same body from the tomb as loving
hands had laid there. The invitation to Thomas to thrust his hands into
the prints of the nails, the similar invitation to the assembled
disciples, and His partaking of food in their presence, seemed to forbid
the idea of His rising changed. Nor can we suppose that the body of His
glory would be congruous with His presence on earth. But we have to
think of His ascension as gradual, and of Himself as 'changed by still
degrees' as He ascended, and so as returned to where the 'glory which He
had with the Father before the world was,' as the Shechinah cloud
received Him out of the sight of the gazers below. If this be the true
reading of His last moments on earth, He united in His own experience
both the ways of leaving it which His followers experience--the way of
sleep which is death, and the way of 'being changed.'
But at whatever point the change came, He now wears, and for ever will
wear, the body of a man. That is the dominant fact on which is built the
Christian belief in a future life, and which gives to that belief all
its solidity and force, and separates it from vague dreams of
immortality which are but a wish tremblingly turned into a hope, or a
dread shudderingly turned into an expectation. The man Christ Jesus is
the pattern and realised ideal of human life on earth, the revelation of
the divine life through a human life, and in His glorified humanity is
no less the pattern and realised ideal of what human nature may become.
The present state of the departed is incomplete in that they have not a
body by which they can act on, and be acted on by, an external universe.
We cannot indeed suppose them lapped in age-long unconsciousness, and it
may be that the 'dead in Christ' are through Him brought into some
knowledge of externals, but for the full-summed perfection of their
being, the souls under the altar have to wait for the resurrection of
the body. If resurrection is needful for completion of manhood, then
completed manhood must necessarily be set in a locality, and the
glorified manhood of Jesus must also now be in a place. To think thus of
it and of Him is not to vulgarise the Christian conception of Heaven,
but to give it a definiteness and force which it sorely lacks in popular
thinking. Nor is the continual manhood of our Lord less precious in its
influence in helping our familiar approach to Him. It tells us that He
is still and for ever the same as when on earth, glad to welcome all who
came and to help and heal all who need Him. It is one of ourselves who
'sitteth at the right hand of God.' His manhood brings Him memories
which bind Him to us sorrowing and struggling, and His glory clothes Him
with power to meet all our needs, to stanch all our wounds, to satisfy
all our desires.
Our text leads us to think of the wondrous transformation into Christ's
likeness. We know not what are the differences between the body of our
humiliation and the body of His glory, but we must not be led away by
the word Resurrection to fall into the mistake of supposing that in
death we 'sow that body which shall be.' Paul's great chapter in I.
Corinthians should have destroyed that error for ever, and it is a
singular instance of the persistency of the most unsupported mistakes
that there are still thousands of people who in spite of all that they
know of what befalls our mortal bodies, and of how their parts pass into
other forms, still hold by that crude idea. We have no material by which
to construct any, even the vaguest, outline of that body that shall be.
We can only run out the contrasts as suggested by Paul in 1st
Corinthians, and let the dazzling greatness of the positive thought
which he gives in the text lift our expectations. Weakness will become
power, corruption incorruption, liability to death immortality,
dishonour glory, and the frame which belonged and corresponded to 'that
which was natural,' shall be transformed into a body which is the organ
of that which is spiritual. These things tell us little, but they may
be all fused into the great light of likeness to the body of His glory;
and though that tells us even less, it feeds hope more and satisfies our
hearts even whilst it does not feed our curiosity. We may well be
contented to acknowledge that 'it doth not yet appear what we shall be,'
when we can go on to say, 'We know that when He shall appear we shall be
like Him.' It is enough for the disciple that he be as his Master.
But we must not forget that the Apostle regards even this overwhelming
change as but part of a mightier process, even the universal subjection
of all things unto Christ Himself. The Emperor reduces the whole world
to subjection, and the glorifying of the body as the climax of the
universal subjugation represents it as the end of the process of
assimilation begun in this mortal life. There is no possibility of a
resurrection unto life unless that life has been begun before death.
That ultimate glorious body is needed to bring men into correspondence
with the external universe. As is the locality so is the body. Flesh and
blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. This whole series of thoughts
makes our glorious resurrection the result not of death, but of Christ's
living power on His people. It is only in the measure in which He lives
in us and we in Him, and are partaking by daily participation in the
power of His Resurrection, that we shall be made subjects of the working
whereby He is able even to subject all things unto Himself, and finally
be conformed to the body of His glory.
_EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE_
ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D. D., Litt. D.
PHILIPPIANS, COLOSSIANS, FIRST
AND SECOND THESSALONIANS
AND FIRST TIMOTHY