Resurrection Triumph

…he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit… Rom. viii. 11.

Hail, O resurrection morning!
When the Lord his saints recalls,
Mold’ring tents with life adorning
Till they stand, Jerus’lem’s walls;
Now they sleep, but future borning
Never fades and never falls.

(1 Thess 4:16-17; 2 Cor 5:1-2; Rev 21:2;
1 Thess 4:13-15; Isa 26:19)

If within us dwells his Spirit,
Then the death of Christ we share,
His our righteousness and merit,
His our life and peace fore’er,
And when we the earth inherit,
His the body we have there.

(Rom 6:3-4; 8:10-11)

What is dead must keep on dying
For undyingness to grow,
Till, in death’s dishonor lying,
Corpse at last in earth we sow,
Only boast left for our crying
Then, that we Jehovah know.

(1 Cor 15:50, 35-37; 1:30-31; Jer 9:24)

All thy prophets looked with longing
For thy fullness to appear,
And thy church, in patience thronging,
Waits thy second advent here,
When, with life eternal dawning,
Thou shalt dwell thy people near.

(Dan 12:1-3; Isa 26:19; Job 19:25-26;
Jam 5:7-8; Prov 4:18; Rev 20:4-6; 21:3)

Expiating our transgression,
Thou didst taste the altar’s knife
And, imputing thy perfection,
Reconciled our ev’ry strife;
Consummate O now election—
Raise our mortal flesh to life!

(2 Cor 5:21; Rom 5:10-11; 8:30, 23)

—3/10/26. To “Regent Square” (“Angels from the realms of glory”).

I would be remiss not to cite my sources. I have freely, joyfully plagiarized my pastor, Steve LeBlanc, from his March 8 sermon “The Assurance of Our Resurrection.” The astute may remember I copied his notes on baptism last June. (In eight months, we’ve covered two whole chapters!) This is more of a paraphrase than the last was. But it’s hard not to light your brain on fire thinking about the resurrection. Especially when I previously deep-dove 1 Corinthians 15 last November also.

I don’t know why parts of this read like Dies irae to me. I suppose it’s the meter of the A-rhyme lines and the morbidity of (half) the subject matter. (There is also the unfortunate similarity between “Only boast left for our crying” and Ambrose Bierce’s semironic “Cats from every bag escaping.”) I also couldn’t tell you* why or how “Regent Square” ended up being the tune, though I can tell you that the tune came first, followed shortly by the lyrics.

(*Actually I can: while I was searching as per the next paragraph, Sing! had Thomas Kelly’s wonderful “Look, ye saints! The sight is glorious” set to “Regent Square” instead of “Coronae” like God intended as I have remembered it.)

Why can I find no hymns on our triumph in the resurrection? I tore apart the Sing! hymnal looking, which is the only one I had accessible and possibly the only one I actually own? And I tried to tear apart the Cyber Hymnal, which is however too vast to adequately tear apart. But it appears that when resurrection is written about, it is usually/almost always from either the perspective of Jesus’ triumph, which is absolutely worthy of the far more and better songs that hymn it, or believers’ comfort as they stare down the barrel of a funeral, which is proper as commanded in 1 Thess 4:18.

But man. We share in the resurrection. A glorified body will grow from our decay. That can be a funereal thought (indeed, whether in joy or sorrow every treatment of resurrection must grapple with the already/not yet of it), but it isn’t prima facie sad. Where is the wild joy? Where is the full-body shiver of delight? Where is the adoring heart lifting wondering eyes and grateful hands to heaven? Echoing Isa 49:6: It is too light a thing for Jesus just to rule the world; he promises us to reign at his side, his queen, his bride! Amen! Come, Lord Jesus!