1 Corinthians
15:35-57
Embracing
Resurrection
James Sledge February
20, 2022
Portion of the
frescos
When I began thinking about a sermon for
today, I discovered that I have never preached on this passage from 1
Corinthians during my twenty-six plus years as a pastor. I’m sure there are
other passages that share this distinction, but this passage does discuss
something rather critical to Christian faith: resurrection.
in the Visoki Dečani Monastery,
Kosovo, ca. 1335
Come to think of it, I’m not sure if I’ve ever preached a sermon on resurrection at all. Oh, I’ve preached Easter sermons that proclaim, “He is risen!” I’ve preached sermons where resurrection is assumed or is lurking around in the background, but I don’t think I’ve ever preached a sermon where resurrection itself was the focus.
For that matter, I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard a sermon that was about resurrection, that talked about what it is and what it means. It seems that we in the church often operate as though everyone already knows what resurrection means and what it is, yet in my experience that is far from the truth.
The Bible itself may contribute to this problem. All four gospels are quite emphatic about the fact of resurrection, but none of them describe it or tell us how it happened. They don’t explain how the risen Jesus is different from the pre-Easter Jesus, although they do indicate that he is different.
So how do you understand resurrection? What do you mean when you say the words of the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe in… the resurrection of the body”? If someone who knew nothing about Christianity asked you to explain resurrection to them, what would you say?
I suspect many would say something about going to heaven after you die, although I’m not exactly sure where this idea comes from. You won’t find it in the Bible, and none of the first generations of Christians had any such notions. Others might talk about an immortal soul that continues on after death, but that idea comes from Greek philosophy, not the Bible. When it first began, Christianity did not understand the soul as something distinct from the body. It was integral to the body.
But if there are a lot of notions of resurrection that don’t pass theological muster, that is nothing new. In our scripture for this morning, the Apostle Paul is trying to correct some wrongheaded ideas about resurrection that were apparently circulating in the Corinthian church, and Paul is adamant that the folks there need to get this straight.
No one knows for certain what understanding of resurrection upset Paul so, but it is clear that there are some prominent church members, people who think of themselves as spiritual elites and church leaders who are pushing such ideas. A good guess is they thought of resurrection as something they had already experienced fully, some sort of spiritual state they had already achieved. Perhaps they even thought that resurrection was nothing more but this.
Such thinking might well have contributed to the divisions in the Corinthian congregation, with its focus on individual spiritual enlightenment rather than on the community of believers. And Paul works hard to counter such notions, insisting that resurrection is something in the future, and that it is bodily. It is no disembodied existence of souls. In fact, for Paul souls are part of our current bodies, not the future ones.
Paul uses words that we translate as physical, soul, spiritual, and so on quite differently than we do. That is why I so like the translation from the Jerusalem Bible I shared with you earlier. The NRSV translation we typically use here implies that the physical and the spiritual are opposites, but that isn’t what Paul means. When he speaks of the body as a seed that dies he says, when it is sown it embodies the soul, when it is raised it embodies the spirit. If the soul has its own embodiment, so does the spirit have its own embodiment. The first man, Adam, as scripture says, became a living soul; but the last Adam (referring to Jesus) has become a life-giving spirit.
For Paul, this continued embodiment before and after resurrection has profound implications. If resurrection is bodily, with some continuity to present conditions, then love, care, concern, and more for others would be attributes of resurrection life. In fact, an important reason to work for love and justice now is to make the world more and more like it will be in the resurrection.
And that brings me back to the question of how you understand resurrection. Frederick Buechner, in an Easter sermon entitled “The End is Life,” says this about what he sees as some woefully inadequate understandings of resurrection.
But when we are pressed to say what it was that actually did happen, what we are apt to come out with is something pretty meager: this “miracle of truth that never dies, the “miracle” of a life so beautiful that two thousand years have left the memory of it undimmed, the “miracle” of doubt turning into faith, fear into hope. If I believed that this or something like this was all that the resurrection meant, then I would turn in my certificate of ordination and take up some other profession. Or at least I hope that I would have the courage to.
If I thought that when you strip it right down to the bone, this whole religious business is really just an affirmation of the human spirit, an affirmation of moral values, an affirmation of Jesus as the Great Exemplar of all time and no more, then like Pilate I would wash my hands of it. The human spirit does not impress me that much, I am afraid. And I have never been able to get very excited one way of the other about moral values. And when I have the feeling that someone is trying to set me a good example, I start edging toward the door.[1]
I wonder if Frederick Buechner and the Apostle Paul aren’t on the same page about the critical nature of resurrection. If resurrection isn’t something real and substantial, why bother with worship and all this religious fuss. As Paul says just a little before our verses today, If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
Resurrection is not something natural like flowers blooming or butterflies emerging. It is not simply the next thing when we die. It is not simply a promise that some bit of what is truly good remains. No, resurrection is the power of God to overcome all that is evil and twisted and distorted in our world and in our lives, and bring about something new, something good. Resurrection is the promise that no matter how terrifying and hopeless the world may be, God will redeem and transform it, and not even death can stand in the way.
All that may seem an absurd claim. Why should anyone believe that God will transform and redeem creation? Why should anyone believe that Jesus has conquered the power of sin and death? Why should anyone believe that the power and promise of God are so far beyond our imagining and that resurrection is so much more than our puny visions of it?
To be honest, I can offer you no convincing, logical proof. I don’t think anyone was ever convinced of resurrection. The first Christians believed because people had seen the risen Jesus. People continued to believe because they experienced the risen Jesus in their lives through the working of the Holy Spirit. And in the end, that is all I can offer you, the witness of those who saw the risen Jesus, and faith nurtured by the Holy Spirit.
But I implore you, do not settle for those easy explanations of resurrection that are nearly effortless to believe but rob the empty tomb of its power. Don’t try to contain God in what you can understand. As many have said, “Any god I can fully understand is no god at all.”
Open yourself to power beyond your understanding, hope more grandiose than all the terrors of this troubled world, love so strong that death is no match for it. Open yourself to the mystery of the Holy Spirit who can nurture in you a faith that knows, even in the face of the world’s worst horrors and sufferings, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”[2]
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