Resurrection: Grounds for Faith? - Lectionary Reflection for Epiphany 6C (1 Corinthians 15:12-20)

1 Corinthians 15:12-20 New Revised Standard Version

 

¹² Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? ¹³ If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; ¹⁴ and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. ¹⁵ We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. ¹⁶ For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. ¹⁷ If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. ¹⁸ Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. ¹⁹ If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

²⁰ But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.

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                According to Paul, the message of resurrection, specifically the message concerning Jesus’ resurrection, is of first importance. It is the foundation for Paul’s message that he had delivered to the Corinthians when he founded the church. In the previous reading, he recounted the various witnesses to the resurrection, starting with Cephas (Peter) and ending with Jesus’ appearance to him, though he considered himself unworthy of this visitation (1 Cor. 15:1-11). Now Paul wasn’t present when Jesus made his original post-resurrection appearances, but he did have an experience with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus (Acts9:1-9; Gal. 1:11-17). So, he could claim apostolic status because he had encountered the risen Christ. Therefore, as he shared the Galatian churches, the message he proclaimed, he received directly from Jesus (Gal. 1:11-12). 

                Although Paul thought that there was sufficient testimony to the resurrection of Jesus, not everyone was convinced by the evidence he had presented. There were those in the church who apparently questioned whether the resurrection was real. These questions led Paul to ask the Corinthians if he had established that Jesus had been raised from the dead then how can some in the church can question the resurrection. That is, if Christ is proclaimed as having been resurrected then how can anyone say that dead are not resurrected? In Paul’s mind, if the dead are not raised then Christ has not been raised. If that is true then the message he had been preaching was meaningless. If the resurrection of Jesus is of first importance, and if Jesus had been killed and left in the grave, then there was no substance to their faith. They had believed in vain.

                Now Paul doesn’t reveal who is denying the resurrection or the basis of that denial. I know why some people deny the concept today. The empiricists among us want evidence for the resurrection, and that seems hard to come by. But why might members of the Corinthian congregation reject the idea of bodily resurrection? Though there are several possibilities, the most likely suggestion is that the idea of bodily resurrection was foreign to the majority of members of the community who came out of a pagan context. In fact, many Greeks looked forward to being freed from their bodies so they could experience a spiritual state of being. On the other hand, Paul’s understanding of the resurrection of the body was rooted in his background in Pharisaic Judaism. In other words, they were coming at this from two conflicting vantage points. He had to address the confusion of the moment.

                Paul’s attempt to address the situation logically might seem redundant, but he’s insistent that the Christian faith requires bodily resurrection. While many of the Corinthians might have been comfortable with a spiritual existence (an immortal soul freed from the body) or perhaps some form of reincarnation, when they heard resurrection they envisioned a resuscitated corpse, and that simply didn’t seem appealing. Nevertheless, Paul insisted that the resurrection of the body is a central piece of the Christian message. Everything rises and falls on it.

                Why is this? Well, for Paul, the message of Jesus is worthless if it only applies to this life. There has to be more to reality than this life. For him, that more involves a resurrected body. In other words, he offers the Corinthians and us an embodied faith. As we see in 1 Corinthians 12, the body is important. The church itself is understood to be the body of Christ, and it’s not just a spiritual (invisible) entity. It’s very much an embodied community.  

                Having addressed what he believed was an absurdity—that we trust in Christ only in this life—Paul offers us a positive word. In his resurrection, Jesus is the first fruits of our resurrection. He is the one who sets the course for us, blazing the trail of resurrection life. Mark Abbott writes of this message of first fruits in this way:

In Jewish apocalyptic eschatology, the resurrection of the dead would occur on the Day of the Lord, the day of judgment, but the gospel proclaims that God raised Christ first as a guarantee of future resurrection. This was totally new in Judaism, the raising of the messiah in anticipation of raising those who belong to him. [Connections, 247].   

Paul’s message is this: The resurrection is the guarantee of the fruit of God’s forgiveness of sins that is rooted in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Thus, the resurrection of Jesus is a non-negotiable dimension of the way of Jesus. If he is not raised, he simply died a broken man, defeated by the world. But, according to Paul that is not the truth.

                So, what should we make of this? There is a growing number of Christians who would agree with Paul’s opponents. The way of Jesus is fine for this life, but nothing more should be expected. We live but once, so let’s make the most of it. As for resurrected bodies, for many that holds no attraction. Though, interestingly enough, reincarnation is popular even among Christians. Many who believe in an afterlife don’t think too much about their bodies. In fact, they might be glad to be free of their bodies. As life spans continue to grow, we do our best to stave off death. The fact is, death will come to us all. So once again the question is: should we expect something more?

                As a pastor who has been asked to preside at funerals, the hope of those gathered is that their loved one is still living in some way and form? They may not know what that entails, but they in the hope that there is life on the other side of death. The message I share in these services is one of resurrection. I likely will turn at some point to 1 Corinthians 15 to reinforce that message of resurrection. The stories of Jesus’ resurrection speak of him inhabiting the same body, and yet it is a transformed body. There is continuity but difference. What our bodies will look like has yet to be revealed, but we can assume continuity and yet incorruptibility.

                One thing we can take from the message of resurrection is that the body is important. It is valued by God. This starts with the message of the incarnation, that Word would inhabit a human body and dwell among us, experiencing life as we experience it. He wasn’t a phantom. He got hungry and thirsty. When the nails pierced his skin, he suffered. Then, at the end of this ordeal, Jesus died. But that is not the end of the story. That is because three days later he was raised from the dead. Therefore, he serves as the first fruits of our resurrection. This is the good news Paul proclaims to us. Our hope lies in the message of Easter.

Image attribution: Koenig, Peter. Harvest Resurrection, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=58539 [retrieved February 5, 2022]. Original source: https://www.pwkoenig.co.uk/.