Paul has established that Messiah was raised and that the resurrection of the dead follows from it. Now comes the objection he anticipates — the practical one, the one anybody actually asks.
What happens
"But someone may say, 'How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come back?' You fool! What you sow is not brought to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be but a bare kernel of wheat, perhaps, or of some other kind… It is sown corruptible; it is raised incorruptible. It is sown dishonorable; it is raised glorious. It is sown weak; it is raised powerful. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body… The first man was from the earth, earthly; the second man, from heaven… Just as we have borne the image of the earthly one, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly one."
What to notice
The answer to "with what kind of body?" begins with an insult — aphrōn, mindless, the same a- plus nous construction as the anoia that filled the scribes twelve days ago. Then Paul reaches for a farmer's fact. Gymnon kokkon — a naked kernel. What goes into the ground is a hard, dry, unpromising object; what comes up is a stalk. Nobody looking at a grain of wheat could deduce the plant, and yet the continuity is total. Then the four contrasts, each speiretai… egeiretai, it is sown, it is raised — and the fourth is the one to hold: speiretai sōmapsychikon, egeiretai sōma pneumatikon. Notice what Paul does not do. He could have said it is sown a body, it is raised a spirit — what most people mean by surviving death, and what the objectors would probably have accepted. He refuses. The noun sōma stays in both halves. The adjective describes what animates it, not what it is made of — and psychikon against pneumatikon is exactly the pair from 1 Corinthians 2:14, read here on the first of the month. The quotation in 1 Corinthians 15:45 is Genesis 2:7 in Greek: the man became a living psychē. Adam is the origin of the psychikon body, and Paul's argument is that the first man was never the final model.
A prayer from someone being hunted — its superscription places it when the Philistines seized David at Gath. It contains one of the tenderest images in the Psalter, three verses before today's selection begins.
The selected verses
Psalm 56:10–12."This I know, that Theos is with me. In Theos, in whose promise I glory, in Theos I trust without fear; what can flesh do against me?" Psalm 56:13–14."I am bound, Theos, by vows to you; your thank offerings I will fulfill. For you have rescued me from death, my feet, too, from stumbling, that I may walk before Theos in the light of the living."
What to notice
Psalm 56:9, just outside the selection, is worth having anyway: "my wanderings you have counted; put my tears in your flask — are they not recorded in your book?" The word nod is a leather bottle. The psalmist asks for his weeping to be collected in a container and kept. And the selection's last phrase is what the lectionary chose it for: le-hithalekh lifnei Elohim be-or ha-hayyim, to walk before Theos in the light of the living. The verb is a reflexive of halakh, carrying the sense of going about one's business. Set beside a reading about buried seed and raised bodies, it is a strikingly unspectacular hope: not to shine, not to ascend — to walk about, in daylight, where the living are.
The first parable in Luke, and the one Mark says is the key to all the others. Luke has just told us who was travelling with him and who was paying; now the crowd is very large, and he tells them a story about a farmer.
What happens
A sower goes out to sow. Some seed falls on the path, is trampled, and the birds eat it. Some falls on rock, springs up, and withers "for lack of moisture." Some falls among thorns and is choked. Some falls on good soil and produces "a hundredfold." Then the explanation: the seed is the word of Theos; the path is those from whom the word is taken away; the rock is those who receive it with joy but have no root and fall away in time of trial; the thorns are those choked by "the anxieties and riches and pleasures of life.""But as for the seed that fell on rich soil, they are the ones who, when they have heard the word, embrace it with a generous and good heart, and bear fruit through perseverance."
What to notice
Three details are Luke's own, and each shifts the parable. First, the seed on rock withers dia to mē echein ikmada — for lack of moisture. Mark and Matthew say it had no depth of earth and was scorched; Luke's diagnosis is not shallowness but dryness. Second,ho sporos estin ho logos tou theou — the seed is the word of Theos, stated flatly where the others are oblique. Third, the good soil gets two phrases the others do not use: the heart is kalē kai agathē — kalos kagathos, the standard Greek formula for the honourable gentleman, classical moral vocabulary dropped into a Galilean farming story — and the fruit comes en hypomonē, in perseverance, literally remaining under, staying beneath a weight without shifting. Matthew's good soil is graded by yield: a hundred, sixty, thirty. Luke's is defined by how long it holds on.
Lands on four surfaces, and only one of them has time in it
The lectionary has put the New Testament's two great seed passages on the same morning, and they do different jobs with the same object.
Luke's parable is about the ground. The seed is constant — the same sower, the same handful, scattered with the wide arc a first-century farmer used — and everything afterward is a fact about what it landed on. It is worth noticing how ordinary the three failures are. Nothing in the list is wickedness: the path is simply hard, the rock is simply dry, and the thorns are "anxieties, riches and pleasures," which is to say a life. The parable does not describe a struggle between belief and unbelief. It describes four different rates at which an ordinary week can absorb something. And Luke's addition names what he thought the difference finally was — not intelligence, not enthusiasm, since the rocky ground receives the word "with joy" — but hypomonē, the capacity to stay under something. His good soil is not the most fertile. It is the most patient.
Paul is answering a different question, with the part of the process Luke does not dwell on: what happens underground. What you sow is not brought to life unless it dies. His interest is the discontinuity — the sheer unlikeness of kernel and stalk — and his point is that unlikeness is not unrelatedness. A wheat grain and a wheat plant have almost nothing visibly in common, and are the same organism. That is his entire answer to with what kind of body? Which is why he will not let the noun go. It would have been so much easier to say the body is left behind. He says instead that it is sown — the same verb Luke's farmer is using — and raised, changed past recognition, and still a body.
Psalm 56 then supplies the least dramatic sentence of the three and possibly the truest. After all the burial and rising, what the psalmist asks for is to walk before Theos in the light of the living.Not glory. Errands, in daylight, upright. For a man who elsewhere in the same psalm asks to have his tears kept in a bottle, that is a modest and very concrete request — and it is what a raised body would be for.
A Question to Sit With
The thorns in Luke's list are not vices. They are anxieties, riches, and pleasures — worry about real things, resources I am glad to have, enjoyment of ordinary life. Nothing there is a sin, and the seed dies all the same, choked by a life going normally. That is far more uncomfortable than a story about wickedness. What is currently growing alongside the thing I actually care about, at exactly the same rate, and which of those competitors would I be embarrassed to admit is winning?