“It’s not the flower,” I explained through tears. “It’s all that it represents.”
It had been ten days since Dad’s funeral. After lowering the coffin into the grave, we each took a rosebud from the floral arrangement that had decorated it. The flowers had opened beautifully within a few days.
And now it was the 85th anniversary of Dad’s birth and also happened to be the day when ‘my’ rose had clearly passed the point of beauty. It appeared … well … dead.
Lakeside Lessons
Rewind forty years. I remember sitting in the front passenger seat of the family car after Girls’ Brigade or a church youth service, travelling along the road that wound alongside the lake. Dad was healthy and fit then … and super intelligent. We would discuss things that mattered … really mattered … things like what actually constituted ‘reality’.
Dad was fascinated with something called ‘string theory’ at the time. It involved atoms bouncing so fast that they escape the very limitations of time and space. Like a string curled up or stretched out appears shorter or longer yet is still essentially the same piece of string, these atoms morph into another dimension. It is the stuff of science-fiction, yet it is, Dad assured me, ‘science’.
Time and space – four dimensions – breadth, width, depth and time – this is usually all we experience in our limited bodies, Dad explained. But that’s not all there is to reality. God is big – very big – bigger than anything we can fathom. In our resurrection bodies, which will be perfect like Jesus’ resurrection body is, we too shall experience reality as it is and not just as we perceive it now.
I went on to gain a science degree but still never quite grasped string theory. It’s not that I doubted it was ‘a thing’ … I trusted my dad implicitly … but my mind is just not flexible enough to grasp it.
A Fresh Perspective
Dad’s perspective brings a freshness to the stories a good Christian kid like me learnt in Sunday school.
When God became man, it wasn’t just a sweet story about shepherds and mangers for us to re-enact year after year with tea towels wrapped around our heads. Far more significantly, the infinite became finite.
When Jesus was killed on the cross – an abhorrent story really, the dramatisation of which could justifiably be restricted to adult viewings – it was more than just tragic. The infinite briefly appeared silenced – finished – defeated. Who knows what three days actually is in a dimension beyond time that we can’t quite fathom. From our perspective, it took three days … and on another note, Dad was always adamant that the crucifixion happened three full days before the resurrection, a special Sabbath in addition to the regular Sabbath filling the void. But that’s another story. You can look at John 19:31 if you’re interested in checking that out.
Jesus’ resurrection body was similar yet different to his temporal body. He would be walking with others on a road, talking and then sharing a meal with them, then suddenly he would be gone. He would appear in a closed room through locked doors, and invite the man who has ever since been known as ‘Doubting Thomas’ to put his hand in his pierced side and hands. He would sit by a fire on a beach, inviting his disciples to join him for breakfast. He would ascend to heaven in full view of many.
After his ascension, he would appear to the apostle Paul. Some would suggest … and it makes sense to me … that even before his birth, it was Jesus himself who had appeared to a variety of Old Testament characters and who was referred to as ‘the Angel of the Lord’ – a phenomenon we call ‘theophanies’.
As for Jesus’ bodily ascension, that was taught but not emphasised in Sunday School … something I now consider an unfortunate oversight. Broken, limited, cursed humanity was restored, released and sanctified. Humanity in holy form was incorporated into the very Godhead itself through Jesus, the ‘first fruits of those who have fallen asleep’ (1 Corinthians 15:20).
A Divine Coincidence
Return with me now, however, to my limited here-and-now sadness earlier this month as I stood by a wooden coffin covered with flowers and containing the broken remains of my father. It was positioned on two sets of webbing and two stout bars (called ‘putlogs’) and balanced above a very deep hole.
Then I heard the minister say something quite unexpected. It wasn’t ‘dust to dust, ashes to ashes’ that I heard, but ‘Don has been released from our limited dimensions.” (It was words to that effect, anyhow.) It turns out that the minister has his PhD in mathematics and, like my dad did, has quite a complex view of reality.
He knew that my father was an avid reader. Even after Dad wasn’t really able to follow a convoluted argument due to failing health, he still found comfort in holding a book in his hands. The pastor referred to Dad’s voracious appetite for knowledge. But, as he confirmed afterwards, he had no idea that Dad had spent time explaining string theory and the possible physics of theophanies to his teenage daughter decades earlier.
That comment at the graveside was providentially provided in part, at least, as a comfort to me, I suspect. The minister made other comforting comments that were full of meaning too.
Memories and more
The rose that I wrote about at the start of this piece with has gone. Well, strictly speaking, the matter that comprised that rose remains somewhere, but not in a vase and not in a form that brings joy to those who view it. Effectively, it is no longer a rose. Only its memory remains.
Dad’s limited body too has gone. Well, strictly speaking, the matter that comprised Dad’s body remains in a box at the bottom of a deep hole in a cemetery, but that is not the person who was my Dad. Yet more than just a memory remains.
My father lives on in a different form. His ‘soul’ (‘nephesh’ in Old Testament Hebrew) or ‘spirit’ (‘psyche’ in New Testament Greek) is no longer constrained in a limited, failing body but in heaven itself.
In Dad’s words, he now exists in a dimension that is beyond my ability to grasp in my limited, temporal form. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn in eternity that string theory somehow features. We can debate the what and where and when of heaven, of the new creation and of our resurrection bodies, but those very questions reflect our limited perspectives, fixed as we are in time and space. Eternity with God is reality. I can’t explain it or picture it, but I can be sure of it.
Hope
The rose has gone. The memories remain.
My dad has gone. But far more than memories remain.
The great apostle Paul, to whom the resurrected, ascended Christ appeared, wrote a beautiful passage about resurrection bodies. He quoted in part the prophet Isaiah who had himself glimpsed the Lord in human form. I shall finish with his words:
For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’
1 Corinthians 15: 53-54 NIV
