Reflection by Pastor Shawn:
Lately at COGS we’ve been talking about resurrection, new life, heaven, and the new heavens and the new earth. It’s been very encouraging to see our current lives in the light of that very bright future to come.
In conversations about all this, some questions were raised to me: in the resurrection, what about my loved ones? Will I still recognize my sister, my uncle, my mother? We will remember each other? Since everyone will have the closeness and intimacy of being perfectly united together by the Holy Spirit in the full presence of God, will I still have my family that I have today?
Good questions.
Let me tell you about the East Company. The East Company is the 506th Infantry Regiment of the United States Army. They started as an experimental airborne regiment created in 1942 to jump from planes into hostile enemy territory, and they were involved in important missions during WWII in Europe, including the Battle of the Bulge. You might know of them from the TV series, “Band of Brothers”.
During the war these men formed strong bonds. Through boredom and chaos and horrors and death and senseless violence and rescue missions and trench warfare—they walked through it all together. Different personnel had different ranks and different roles, of course;—majors and colonels, captains and first lieutenants, on down to sergeants and privates—some gave orders and others obeyed, some made decisions that others carried out, some cooked meals and others treated wounds. But they were welded together by their experiences.
And those bonds last a lifetime. Even after the war, they carried with them a bond that time and distance and return to civilian life couldn’t tarnish. They remained connected, even though their wartime roles didn’t apply anymore.
Major Richard Winters wrote a memoir about his experiences with the East Company. He details how a soldier under his command named Floyd Talbert wrote to him many years later, just before Floyd died. Talbert wrote, “Dick, you are loved and will never be forgotten by any soldier who ever served under you. You are the best friend I ever had…you were my ideal, and motor in combat…you are to me the greatest soldier I could ever hope to meet.”
This, I think, is a helpful way to understand our relationships in the resurrection. We will still remember our friends and family and the history we’ve had with them, but those relationships will not govern our new resurrection existence. The marriage relationship, the parent-child relationship, the sibling relationship—all of these will be superseded by the bonds of the resurrection life.
This might be concerning at first—you mean my sister will no longer be my sister?—but upon reflection, I think it’s actually comforting. Whatever joy and intimacy and love we have in our current family relationships will be outshined by the new resurrection relationships we have among God’s people. When God’s children are all resurrected in the end, we’ll live as brothers and sisters in the presence of our Father, with our brother Jesus, in the unity of the Spirit.