The Burial and Resurrection of Bach's Music

When Johann Sebastian Bach died in Leipzig on July 28, 1750, the world barely noticed. The city council's official response was to complain about the cost of his funeral. His manuscripts were divided among his sons, scattered across Europe, some reportedly used as wrapping paper in butcher shops. For nearly eighty years, the greatest sacred music ever composed lay buried in attics and archive boxes — sown in dishonor, forgotten.

Then in 1829, a twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn stood before an orchestra in Berlin and raised his baton. He conducted Bach's St. Matthew Passion for the first time in almost a century. The audience was stunned. What emerged from those dusty, neglected manuscripts was not merely the same thing that had been buried. It was alive, radiant, overwhelming — music that reduced hardened critics to tears and sparked a revival that continues to this day.

Paul tells the Corinthians that our resurrection will work like a seed planted in the earth. What goes into the ground bears no resemblance to what comes up. "It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power." The body we lay in the grave is not the body God will raise. Like Bach's buried scores becoming a cathedral of sound that fills the whole world, the Almighty will transform our perishable flesh into something we cannot yet imagine — imperishable, glorious, and fully alive in the power of the risen Christ.