I ran into a buzz saw while teaching Sunday school a few weeks ago. I mean that in the most appreciative way. Let me explain.

I’ve been teaching a series on Ephesians in that class and have sought to show the way in which Paul’s vision of the exalted and glorified Christ, ruling as human king over all creation, informs Paul’s own strong sense of the Christian hope and calling. In articulating this vision I’ve made much of the way in which God has fulfilled his good creation purposes in our Lord Jesus—and in us too insofar as we are “in him.” God’s purposes in creation are comprehensive, then, including our bodies as well as our souls. Our redemption is not finally from creation but in creation, as (I’m convinced) Paul’s letter to the Ephesians demonstrates.

So how did I run into a buzz saw?

Well, in the course of making my point that God’s purposes for us are not complete until our bodies (and all creation) are restored, I also claimed that heaven as such is not our hope—that while it is true that, should we die before his coming, we will be with our Lord in heaven, it is also true that death is not finally defeated until the resurrection of our bodies and the new creation. Indeed, this seems to be the point in 2 Cor 4:16—5:10, where it seems that Paul’s desire not to be naked (as a disembodied soul) is only finally resolved in his assurance that he will, even in that state of bodily loss, be in the presence of Christ.

It was my conclusion that going to heaven thus involves loss that started up the saw. And while I would (and did) maintain my position—that the full restoration of God’s purposes for us, as already displayed in Christ, involves both a restoration of what we might call our ‘priesthood’ (our contemplation and worship of God) and our “kingship” (our habitation in and rulership over creation); that anything less is an incomplete reception of our inheritance; that somehow we have to avoid pitting our twin human vocations (priesthood and kingship) against each other as if they were mutually exclusive—I can also feel the force of the objection… and even welcome it. That dividing and double-edged quality I felt was not just that buzz saw, I think.

For what my sharp friends and critics astutely recognized was the danger of playing creation off against the Creator, as if one could long for the gift apart from the Giver. That, of course, is the very definition of idolatry—worshipping the Made rather than the Maker—and it remains a great danger. It is, perhaps, the Primal Danger: Adam and Eve, faced with the alternative (so it seemed) of royal wisdom and rulership on one side and obedient worship of their own Master on the other, began the long and tragic tale of the human will-to-power for the enjoyment of their bodies and their world apart from the one who made them.

One could argue, of course, that the undoing of idolatry lies in a proper recognition of the Giver in a grateful and thankful reception of all God’s good gifts. The Christian response is not a rejection of food and sex, for instance, but an appreciation of them as good gifts of God when properly used. This is certainly true.

And yet, I think, the buzz saw cuts deeper. For in this “body of death” and “flesh” in which we now live, even the constant satisfaction of our earthly appetites (inordinate as they now are) leads almost inexorably to a lack of gratitude and an indulgence in idolatry. I think, for example, of C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra, where the hero, Ransom, is tempted (three times, significantly) to gorge himself on the intensely pleasurable fruit of that unfallen world.

But he was restrained by the same sort of feeling which had restrained him over-night from tasting a second gourd. He had always disliked the people who encored a favourite air in the opera—“That just spoils it” had been his comment. But this now appeared to him as a principle of far wider application and deeper moment. This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backwards… was it possibly the root of all evil? (p. 43)

In Lewis’s vision, the insistence on saying “Encore!” to the Good That Is blinds one to the Good That May Come. The fixation on this moment’s embodied pleasure may actually cause you to miss the whole point of embodiment. Indeed, a kind of longing, an intense desire that the Germans (and Lewis) called Sehnsucht is inextricably part of our present bodily experience. To fail to recognize that is to miss the agony of present embodiment in the focus on its future glory. Not for nothing did Francis call his body “Brother Ass.” Not for nothing did Paul long for release from this "body of death."

“Precisely so,” I can hear my buzz saw saying.
 

And yet… And yet the fact remains, as stubbornly offensive and tangible as a body raised from the dead: The Word became flesh, that flesh was glorified, our destiny as the people of God is to share in the human dimension of that glory and that reign. And however discontinuous our present existence is to that (yes, perishable to imperishable, dishonor to glory, weakness to power), it is also true that there is continuity as well (psychical Body to Spiritual Body). It is when the trumpet sounds and the dead are raised imperishable and we are changed that “Death will be swallowed up in victory.” Not before. Not even in heaven before.

But until then “we are full of courage and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Cor 5:8). On that my buzz saw and I are fully agreed.

And I remain grateful for iron sharpening iron, even if it comes in the form of a buzz saw.