After death, which is the separation of the body and the soul, the body becomes corrupt while the soul, which is immortal, goes to meet the judgment of God and awaits its reunion with the body when it will rise transformed at the time of the return of the Lord.Howthe resurrection of the body will come about exceeds the possibilities of our imagination and understanding.
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992. God revealed the resurrection of the dead to his people progressively. Hope in the bodily resurrection of the dead established itself as a consequence intrinsic to faith in God as creator of the whole man, soul and body. the creator of heaven and earth is also the one who faithfully maintains his covenant with Abraham and his posterity. It was in this double perspective that faith in the resurrection came to be expressed. In their trials, the Maccabean martyrs confessed:
The King of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we have died for his laws.538One cannot but choose to die at the hands of men and to cherish the hope that God gives of being raised again by him.539
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993. The Pharisees and many of the Lord's contemporaries hoped for the resurrection. Jesus teaches it firmly. To the Sadducees who deny it he answers, "Is not this why you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God?"540Faith in the resurrection rests on faith in God who "is not God of the dead, but of the living."541
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994. But there is more. Jesus links faith in the resurrection to his own person: "I am the Resurrection and the life."542It is Jesus himself who on the last day will raise up those who have believed in him, who have eaten his body and drunk his blood.543Already now in this present life he gives a sign and pledge of this by restoring some of the dead to life,544announcing thereby his own Resurrection, though it was to be of another order. He speaks of this unique event as the "sign of Jonah,"545The sign of the temple: he announces that he will be put to death but rise thereafter on the third day.546
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995. To be a witness to Christ is to be a "witness to his Resurrection," to "[have eaten and drunk] with him after he rose from the dead."547Encounters with the risen Christ characterize the Christian hope of resurrection. We shall rise like Christ, with him, and through him.
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996. From the beginning, Christian faith in the resurrection has met with incomprehension and opposition.548"On no point does the Christian faith encounter more opposition than on the resurrection of the body."549It is very commonly accepted that the life of the human person continues in a spiritual fashion after death. But how can we believe that this body, so clearly mortal, could rise to everlasting life?
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997. What is "rising"? In death, the separation of the soul from the body, the human body decays and the soul goes to meet God, while awaiting its reunion with its glorified body. God, in his almighty power, will definitively grant incorruptible life to our bodies by reuniting them with our souls, through the power of Jesus' Resurrection.
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998. Who will rise? All the dead will rise, "those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment."550
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999. How? Christ is raised with his own body: "See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself";551but 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," but Christ "will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body," into a "spiritual body":552
But someone will ask, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?" You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. and what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel ....What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.... the dead will be raised imperishable.... For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality.553
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1000. This "how" exceeds our imagination and understanding; it is accessible only to faith. Yet our participation in the Eucharist already gives us a foretaste of Christ's transfiguration of our bodies:
Just as bread that comes from the earth, after God's blessing has been invoked upon it, is no longer ordinary bread, but Eucharist, formed of two things, the one earthly and the other heavenly: so too our bodies, which partake of the Eucharist, are no longer corruptible, but possess the hope of resurrection.554
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1001. When? Definitively "at the last day," "at the end of the world."555Indeed, the resurrection of the dead is closely associated with Christ's Parousia:
For the Lord himself will descend from heaven, with a cry of command, with the archangel's call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. and the dead in Christ will rise first.556
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