Max
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Dear AskACatholic.com,
Matthew 22:23-30 states:
| 23 The same day Sadducees came to him, who say that there is no resurrection; and they asked him a question, 24 saying, "Teacher, Moses said, `If a man dies, having no children, his brother must marry the widow, and raise up children for his brother.' 25 Now there were seven brothers among us; the first married, and died, and having no children left his wife to his brother. 26 So too the second and third, down to the seventh. 27 After them all, the woman died. 28 In the resurrection, therefore, to which of the seven will she be wife? For they all had her." 29 But Jesus answered them, "You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. 30 For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in Heaven. |
- If, after the Resurrection, we shall be like angels in Heaven, how should I comprehend our Resurrection in the flesh?
Angels do not consist of flesh and blood but we shall, according to the Resurrection of the flesh. Personally, I think the Church believes that we will enter Heaven or Hell in our body.
The reason why I am asking this question is because we recently learned about:
- John Donne - Holy Sonnet VII: At The Round Earth's Imagined Corners Blow.
Check it out, it's really beautiful, and
- Signorelli's frescos in the cathedral of Orvieto.
On the frescos you can see how the Resurrection of the flesh happens and how it will be in paradise.
- It will clearly be a process involving resurrected bodies, not spirits, or is there a stage two when the resurrected bodies are transformed into spirit-like beings?
Please let me know what the Bible or the Church say about this.
Thank you very much,
Max
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How can we be resurrected in the flesh, when Matthew 22 says we will be like angels in Heaven? }
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John replied:
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Max —
When Christ said we'd be like angels, he was using a figure of speech.
We will not be physically like angels. We won't even receive our old broken down bodies back, as we now know them. We will receive glorified bodies like the one Christ and the Blessed Mother have. They will be incorruptible.
What Christ meant to say is, we will not be given into marriage as the angels are not given into marriage. He was responding to a technical question about the law.
If we really spend time on it, the implications of the answer have more to do with the fact that there will be no need for laws and covenants as we know them in this life, because there will be
a total self-giving that we will experience, because we shall all be the Bride of Christ.
The analogy ends there. It has nothing to do with our appearance after the Resurrection. We will not be spirit beings like the angels who often take corporeal forms. We will have our own incorruptible, physical bodies, but they won't be subject to the same laws of physics like our current bodies. Notice that Jesus just appeared in rooms after the Resurrection, yet he also ate fish with the Apostles, so clearly we will eat; not out of the same need, but because it is good.
We will be part of a New Heaven and a New Earth that we can't begin to imagine.
We will be all that God planned to give man in the garden of Eden and much more, because we will participate and partake in His Divine Nature. If we are His Bride, — as it is written — "the two become one." (Matthew 19:5)
Our bodies will be the way God originally intended them to be, before sin entered the world.
No one living in eternity will have the effects of sin on their body or soul. Remember that along with sin, sickness and death entered the world as a result of Adam's fall. So birth defects,
or bodies that have been deformed by illness or abuse, will not be present in Heaven, not because they are evil, but because they are the scars of the attack of satan on the human race.
John
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