The Name of the Power

“The Name of the Power”—July 23, 2018

He [Christ] will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself." [Philippians 3:21]

If all of this business about our bodies being transformed someday seems just too fanciful, too… supernatural, to believe, well, here’s a fact to mull over.  The caterpillar and the butterfly have the same DNA. 

When it is in the caterpillar stage of its life, it already has the genes in place that will one day turn it into a creature with ten fewer legs (six versus sixteen), but two more wings than it started with.  Those genes are just “switched off,” so to speak, until the right time.

And when that “right time” comes, the transformation is really quite remarkable. The creature inside the chrysalis essentially liquefies, with most of the creature being internally recycled. Cells that used to be caterpillar parts become butterfly parts.  It is almost mind-boggling to believe such a thing could happen.  Imagine pulling your car into the garage, shutting the door for a few months, and using only the parts of your car, emerging after a while with the old sedan transformed into a helicopter!  You’d swear something like that was impossible.  And yet it happens all the time. The DNA of that caterpillar directs the whole thing, the whole production.  And that DNA is coded into every last cell of the creature, identical copies in each of millions of cells.

Now, here’s the real kicker for me: there is some scientific evidence that some of the “memories” or “learning” of the caterpillar are retained by the butterfly (there is research where caterpillars were conditioned to avoid certain scents, and the butterflies which came from these caterpillars kept the same training and avoided the same smells for no other reason than the conditioning).  In other words, even though it is a completely new creature, it is also at the same time the same creature that went into the chrysalis—not just the same molecules and cells for raw materials, but the same memories.  To the extent that insects have personalities, you as a caterpillar will still be you as a butterfly.

The fact that caterpillars become butterflies, and that all of these strange and wonderful things happen, is observable science. It is not up for a vote, a debate or a discussion panel. That means there is a power in the universe with the ability to transform the lowly, grubby body of a caterpillar and make it into something completely new, something butterfly-shaped. 

Scientists might go as far as saying that DNA is the name of that power, and then go no further in the search.  Christians find themselves pushed to look behind the DNA to ask, “But who would concoct such a curious and bizarre design, where one creature metamorphoses into another?”  Christians look behind the DNA to name that “power” that makes such transformations possible, a power that makes the DNA in the first place.  We are convinced that the “power” which creates things like DNA is a Personal, relatable Being, while also the Ground of Being itself.  The usual name we use is God.  And we are convinced that this God includes the One we know as Christ, by whom all things were made.

Now, it is certainly true that there are plenty of scientists out there who cannot bring themselves to even dare to imagine that the “power” behind butterfly DNA (and our DNA) is a personal, knowable Being.  But they do have to at least answer the question, “How did we end up with something so miraculous and evolutionarily inefficient as a butterfly?”  And once you grant that there is a power that makes the caterpillar-to-butterfly transformation possible, you have opened up the possibility of how resurrection could be real, too.

See, sometimes the watching world looks at us Christians like we are off our rockers when it comes to this Easter business.  They think we are more or less harmless when it comes to our charity work and potluck dinners.  They think we are occasionally useful in teaching morals and holding the glue of society together by teaching people not to kill or cheat or lie to one another.  But when it comes to the resurrection—to our belief that Christ can and will raise us up from death and transform us into something new and wonderful—quite often the watching world doesn’t know how to make sense of us.  The Golden Rule, they can understand.  The teaching on forgiveness or justice, they can respect.  But the Christian belief that there is a power available that can preserve our lives, our essences, our “us-ness,” even after death?  That sounds like more than a little nonsense to them.

But the butterfly’s mere existence forces us all at least to grant the possibility that there could be a power beyond the universe that can preserve the me-ness of me and still completely remake me from the ground up.  If there is a power out there that can turn caterpillars into monarch butterflies, then it seems we cannot help but allow that there could be a way to turn dead people into resurrected people. If such mind-boggling power is coded into every cell of every butterfly/caterpillar, well then it’s not too much of a jump at all to think that there would be a power that can do the same with me and you.  Easter doesn’t seem so far-fetched, all of a sudden.

For whatever other questions you and I may have about how this resurrection thing could really be, or what the resurrection life looks like, at least we can take a look at these other creatures God has made and live with the realization that if God can transform an insect and make a butterfly out of the raw materials of a striped worm, well then, there is no reason to believe God couldn’t do the same for you and me.  The power for that transformation is already visibly out there, fluttering on the breeze near your flower beds.  Christians are simply people who have learned to recognize that Power by the nail scars on his hands, and to call him by his name, Jesus.

Lord God, give us confidence in our hope of resurrection—the hope of both life beyond death and the hope that we will be preserved as our truest selves in your cross-marked hands.