The Satisfying Collapse of Notre-Dame's Scaffolding

On December 7, 2024, the world watched as the doors of Notre-Dame de Paris swung open for the first time in five years. The cathedral that had been consumed by fire in April 2019 — its ancient oak roof reduced to ash, its spire collapsing through the vault like a broken promise — stood renewed in ways no one anticipated. The limestone walls, blackened by eight centuries of candle smoke and then scorched by flames, had been cleaned to reveal their original honey-gold brilliance. The interior was not merely restored. It was more luminous than anyone living had ever seen it.

What struck visitors most was this: the fire had to happen for them to discover what the cathedral truly looked like. Layers of grime that generations assumed were simply the color of the stone had hidden a radiance no one knew was there.

Paul reaches for this same astonishing logic in his letter to the Corinthians. Someone asks, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?" And Paul, with the patience of a gardener talking to someone who has never seen a harvest, says: what you sow does not come to life unless it dies. You put a bare seed in the ground — and God gives it a body beyond anything the seed could have predicted.

Our present bodies, beautiful and beloved as they are, carry the grime of mortality. But the Almighty who gives each seed its own glory has something luminous in mind. What is sown perishable will be raised imperishable — not merely restored, but revealed.