The Dead Rise in Their Wounds and the Harp Gains Three New Strings

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The Dead Rise Still Carrying Their Wounds

The graves opened, and a blind man stood up into the light, and he was still blind. Beside him a lame man rose and could not walk. A deaf man came up out of the dust and heard nothing. A man who had died without speech opened his mouth and no word came. They stood in the field of the resurrection exactly as they had gone down into it, wound for wound, silence for silence, each one carrying into the new world the body the old world had broken.

Nothing had been mended. The eyes were still clouded. The legs still folded wrong. Whoever had gone into the ground clothed came up clothed, in the very garment the earth had received. Whoever went down halt came up halt. The world to come took them back without a single correction, and for a long moment it looked as though the God who raised them had forgotten to heal them.

Samuel Comes Up Wrapped in His Robe

This had happened once before, on a night when a frightened king begged a woman at Endor to bring a dead prophet up from below. "What do you see," the king asked, and she answered that an old man was rising, and he was wrapped in a robe. Samuel came back in the little robe his mother had sewn for him season after season when he was a boy serving in the sanctuary. He returned in the exact shape he had left. The grave changes nothing about what a person carries into it.

So the risen dead came up in their afflictions on purpose. God had ordered it that way. For if the blind had risen seeing and the lame had risen running, the wicked of the world would have folded their arms and sneered. "These are not the same people who died," they would say. "He healed them somewhere below and sent up strangers wearing their names. Death was never truly undone." God refused them the opening. Let them rise as they fell, He said, and let every eye that once knew them know them again.

The Healing No Skeptic Can Deny

Only then did the healing begin, in the open, in front of everyone. The clouded eyes cleared while the crowd that had buried that man watched him blink. The folded legs straightened, and the lame man leaped like a deer over the broken ground. The tongue that had never shaped a word came loose, and the mute man sang out loud. There was no trick to accuse, no swap to suspect. The same person who went down blind stood up and saw, and not one mouth could claim it was someone else.

The healing ran past the humans and into the animals. The wolf lay down in the grass beside the lamb, and the two fed together, and neither was afraid. Every creature God had ever struck was made whole. Every creature but one. The serpent, who had brought the first blow down on everything that breathes and dragged the whole world toward the dust, was not healed and never would be. Dust stayed its food. It had pulled all of creation down to the ground, so to the ground it was left.

The Harp Gains Three New Strings

Then came the music. In the old world the Levites had stood on their platform in the Temple and sung before the One who spoke and the world came to be, and the harp under their hands carried seven strings, one for each daily praise. David, who had praised God seven times a day, knew there would be more. In the days of the Messiah the harp would carry eight. In the world to come it would carry ten, the ten-stringed harp of the new song he had promised long before there was anyone left healed enough to sing it.

David and Samuel had set the divisions of the singers in place generations earlier, arranging who would stand where and when each voice would lift. Now the platform filled again. The Levites took their places, and their hands found three strings that had never existed in the first world, strings the old harp could not have held, and the whole assembly of the healed leaned in to hear a music that had been waiting since before the beginning.

Judah and Benjamin Sing on the Heights of Zion

On the heights of Zion the song broke open. Judah and Benjamin, the brothers who had once bargained and wept over a missing boy in a famine, stood together on the high places and sang aloud. From every direction the people streamed up toward the goodness of God, toward grain and wine and oil, toward the young of the flock and the herd. Their souls ran green as a watered garden after rain. They would never languish again. No more famine, no more mourning, no more going down into the dust in a broken body.

The new song rose off the ten strings and climbed the mountain, and the healed sang it with tongues that had once been silent and eyes that had once been dark. Far below all of it, at the very bottom of the mended world, the serpent went on its belly through the dust it would eat forever, alone, while over its head the harp that had learned three new strings poured its music down across Zion.