From Caterpillar Soup to Cathedral Wings

In 2019, biologist Andrei Sourakov at the Florida Museum of Natural History placed a monarch caterpillar inside a CT scanner to watch what happens during metamorphosis. What he captured stunned even seasoned researchers. Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar doesn't simply sprout wings. It dissolves. Its body breaks down into a biological soup — a formless slurry of cells called imaginal discs. From that seeming destruction, an entirely new creature assembles itself: compound eyes, coiled proboscis, wings thin as stained glass yet strong enough to carry it three thousand miles from Ontario to the mountains of Michoacan, Mexico.

Here is the astonishing part — the monarch that emerges shares the same DNA as the crawling creature that entered. It is the same being, yet utterly, gloriously transformed. No one who watches a butterfly riding a Gulf breeze would mistake it for the leaf-chewing larva it once was.

Paul reaches for this same mystery in his letter to Corinth. "It is sown a natural body," he writes, "it is raised a spiritual body." The seed that falls into the earth does not simply get repaired. It is reconstituted by the power of the Almighty into something beyond imagination — imperishable, glorious, and fitted for eternity. What we lay in the grave is not what God will raise. The continuity is real, but the transformation is total.