Hello Father: I would like to know what the resurrection consists of.

Dear friend:
The resurrection consists in the reunion of the individual soul with the body that it animated while the person was alive.

José Antonio Sayés says:

In affirming the resurrection of bodies, the Church relies fundamentally on the Resurrection of Christ, victor over death, as she was able to verify in his appearances, as Paul would say. Jesus himself had to defend the doctrine of the resurrection before the Sadducees (cf. Mt 22:23-33).

The resurrection of the dead will take place at the end of history, with the coming of the Lord in the Parousia. Thus the Church has confessed throughout all her history, from the Athanasian Creed to the Credo of the People of God and the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “at the last day,” at the event of the Lord’s Parousia (CCC 1001).

According to the faith of the Church, we shall rise with the same bodies we now have, but transfigured in glory: “Christ is raised with his own body: ‘See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself’ (Lk 24:39); but he did not return to an earthly life. So, in him, ‘all of them will rise again with their own bodies which they now bear’ (Lateran Council IV: DS 801), but Christ ‘will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body’ (Phil 3:21), into a ‘spiritual body’ (1 Cor 15:44)” (CCC 999).

This realism of the Christian faith is what led Saint Irenaeus to say: “Let those who affirm the contrary tell us—that is, those who contradict their own salvation—in what body did the dead daughter of the chief of the synagogue rise, and the son of the widow who was being carried dead near the city gate, and Lazarus, who had already been four days in the tomb? Evidently, in those very bodies in which they had died; for if it had not been in those same bodies, these dead would no longer have been the same persons who rose.”

And this is also the Fides Damasi: “We believe that on the last day we are to be raised by him in this same flesh in which we now live” (DS 70), and the confession of Leo IX: “I also believe in the true resurrection of the same flesh which I now bear” (DS 684). And the profession of faith prescribed to the Waldensians: “We believe in the resurrection of this flesh which we bear, and not of another” (DS 797).

Saint Augustine used to say that, in the polemic against Christianity, nothing was more rejected by the pagans than the doctrine of the resurrection of bodies; to this the Fathers of the Church replied:

— God, who created man from nothing, has the power to raise him: he knows how and from where to raise him;

— God can raise our corrupted bodies, just as he is able to work miracles above the laws of nature;

— they appeal to images, such as that of the seed, set forth by Paul, which always proves illuminating. This image serves to explain the continuity and the transformation involved in the resurrection of our bodies.

Author: Fr. Miguel Ángel Fuentes, I.V.E.

Source: El Teólogo Responde