Pharisee had to purify himself if he had any physical contact with a corpse, because the God that was life itself could have nothing to do with the corruption of death. But when Paul saw that God had embraced Jesus’s filthy, degraded body and raised it to the highest place in Heaven, he realized that in fact God had an entirely different set of values. In honoring Jesus in this way, God had signaled a change in the way he approached humanity. To a man sentenced to death by Roman law, God had said: “Sit at my right hand and I will make your enemies a footstool for you.”
