St. Paul talks about a ‘spiritual body’ (1 Cor. 15:44) yet St. Peter describes how Jesus ‘preached to the spirits in prison’ between his death on Good Friday and his resurrection that first Easter (1 Peter 3:18-20). Is Peter talking about spirits without bodies?

Remember that our hope is ‘the resurrection of the dead,’ as we say in the creeds. We look forward to having a body like the one Jesus revealed to his disciples after he rose from the dead. Clearly it is not like ours in some ways. Jesus appears in locked rooms and so on. But in important ways it is like ours, and our Lord is careful to make this plain by inviting St. Thomas to place his hands in the crucifixion wounds, and by eating fish with his disciples. He is no ghost or disembodied spirit.

St. Peter is talking about the ‘time’ between death and resurrection. Whatever he means, it does not take away the fact that our hope is that we will be raised with a body like Christ’s.

Christ’s body is ‘spiritual’ because it is the perfect instrument of the divine Power, Wisdom and Love. His body is a perfect instrument of the life of the Trinity, which is a life of charity that must always exceed both our imaginations and our understanding. The hope of the resurrection is thus the hope to live a spiritual life -- the life of God -- in the body. After their disobedience, Adam and Eve found it necessary to hide from one another and from God. By his obedience Christ made his body the revelation of the Trinity -- an open book. And he has opened the way to undo the terrible damage we have done to our bodies. Our Christian hope includes the body. What we hope for is that the body may no longer be a barrier to union with God and with one another but a perfect means of such union in knowledge and love.