EASTER SUNDAY
March 31, 2013
Since by one of us, came death…
by Jeff Taylor
focus passage for the sermon: 1 Corinthians 15: excerpts
Well this is quite a turn of events! Just a few days ago we gathered here in grief; but today God has turned our mourning into dancing. It’s hard to imagine the exhilaration Jesus’ followers must have felt, once they got past the confusion and uncertainty about the empty tomb. To walk and talk with Jesus again, to see him alive never to die again – how amazing that must have been! Mary Magdalene, the women mentioned in other gospels, the first two male disciples, the twelve, and the many that eventually saw Jesus alive again – they were totally overtaken by joy.
For us though, it’s not so much a surprise, is it. I mean, we knew what was coming this morning: we knew what the news would be before we got here. The knowing makes it a lot less dramatic, . . . perhaps less transformative too? We are not alone in this. That ennui, that existential “meh,” that can accompany familiarity has been known by believers ever since. Your grandparents have known it for 60, 70, 80 years! Your Christian ancestors have known it for generations. And the Christians in Corinth reading Paul’s letter twenty years after these events took place and John’s first readers listening to these events retold nearly 60 years after they occurred all knew this familiarity as well. Paul and John and the churches they nurtured weren’t so different than we are. Let’s approach their stories then, with open ears and minds.
The most ancient civilizations – Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, and others – tell stories of gods who lived in the high places: in the hills and mountains, or even in the skies (the heavens).
Up is where the gods are. Down there is only trouble. We are creatures of the earth; but we are not under it, nor are we above it. We exist in some place between the earth and the heavens. But we came from the earth, and when these bodies reach their expiration dates they return to it. But do we? Is that all there is to the story? Are we merely participants in the circle of life; or are we heirs of something greater?
I know this about people generally – it certainly is true of me: we’re a lot more comfortable with what we know than what we don’t. And we know how to be creatures of the earth. Creatures of a heavenly kingdom? We’re not always confident we know how to be that. We often seem to repel, maybe even rappel, whenever elevated or challenged to be elevated. Sometimes we’re like the 15 year old who is bored with school because it isn’t challenging enough, who one day looks up from various diversions to find they have actually fallen behind. Too afraid to face the humiliation of failure at something as lame as school, that young adult sets the bar of expectation low enough (perhaps to “failure”) so as to be sure to hit it. Then when this person fails, everyone will say, “well, they wanted to fail, so I guess they met their goal.” It’s much easier to plan for failure than for success. We dust creatures are more comfortable down here, we’ll just lie low and hope no one asks too much of us. But are we not more than dust now? Can we not see further than the limits of this mortal envelop? Can we not imagine ourselves being lifted up?
The evangelist Paul had a whole congregation struggling to do just that. The Corinthians – one of the earliest, mostly gentile, churches that Paul planted – always seemed uncertain about their calling, their gifts, about each other’s gifts, the apostles gifts; about what they should and could expect of themselves; and of course at the root of it all they were unsure about God’s care for them. They had trouble seeing themselves elevated above the fracas of this earthly realm.
Paul begins his letter with several early reminders that he came to them preaching a humbled, sacrificing, and sacrificed Christ:
1:23 “we proclaim Christ crucified”
2:2 “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”
2:8 “None of the rulers of this age understood; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”
But amazingly, Paul doesn’t mention the resurrection until the fifteenth chapter . . . though he then makes up for the earlier dearth. Let’s listen in on Paul, writing well before any of the gospels, possibly 40 or more years before our reading from John, as he reasons with this group of believers that is unsure of its higher calling.
1 Corinthians 15 (NRSV excerpts gently edited or paraphrased by the author)
Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I, Paul, proclaimed to you, which you in turn did receive . . .
For I handed on to you, as of the highest importance, what I myself had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures; and that he was buried and then raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures . . .
Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ can not have been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins; and those who have already died in Christ have completely perished. If we have hoped in Christ for this life only, we are the most pathetic people ever.
But the fact is that Christ has been raised from the dead, as the earliest ripened part of the crop of those who have died. For since death came through one of us – a human, the resurrection of those who have died also comes through one of us.
For, as in Adam, all die; even so, in Christ, all will be made alive.
But each in his own order: Christ first leading the way, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every principality and power of this age. For Christ must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The final enemy to be destroyed is death.
But some must be wondering, “How will the dead be raised? With what kind of body?” You dopes! What you plant does not come to life unless it dies. Furthermore, you do not plant the “body” that will eventually emerge from the ground, but rather a bare seed. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. Similarly, not all flesh is alike, but there is one flesh for people, another for animals, or birds, or fish. There are both bodies in the heavens and earthly bodies, but the glorious appearance of the heavenly bodies is one kind, and that of the earthly is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another of the moon, and another of the stars; indeed, star differs from star in glory.
So it is with the resurrection of the dead: what is planted is not what will rise up. For what is planted is perishable, but what is raised is not perishable. The seed is planted in dishonor, but is raised in glory. It is planted in weakness, but is raised in power. It is planted a physical body, but raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, “Adam became a living being”; and the last Adam (the Christ) became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first,
but the physical, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. [Both are human, like us.] As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.
Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that, in the Lord, your labor is not pointless.
[end scripture section]
Well, did you get all that? Maybe you’ll want to read it again later today. This is a Jewish Rabbi at his best: using his God-given imagination to draw connections between various scriptures and teachings in order to present a logical argument. But did we notice what the argument is?
Did you ever read this chapter of I Corinthians and think it was an argument for Jesus having been raised from the dead? So did I. Guess what. It’s not. Not primarily. Paul’s main argument is not that Christ was raised, he takes that as a fact apparently the Corinthians do as well. His argument is not that Christ is raised, but that we, following Christ, will also be raised from the dead.
The Corinthians were apparently fine with the idea of Jesus being raised from the dead; but some of them were saying there could be no resurrection for regular dead people. This might be expected of Greek speaking, Greek thinking people of this epoch. The separation of the body and spirit were important ideas among some Greek thinkers. Our gospel writer John may have been responding to an early form of gnosticism (from the word “to know”, i.e. to have divine knowledge). Late first and second century gnostics elevated the spirit so far above the body that soon the body was thought to be bad altogether with only the spirit having value. This was not in keeping with other Greek tendencies which valued the beauty of the human body as evidenced by the popularity of athletic competition (without the hindrance of clothing), the focus in classical Greek sculpture on the human form, and of course Greek Christians’ revulsion at the very idea of mutilating the human body through circumcision.
But the gnostics had turned away from the body; and they elevated the spirit so highly that some Christians began to question whether the holy Christ could ever really have been a man. Writing near the end of the first century to a largely gentile church, John began his story of Jesus by brilliantly echoing the beginning of the Jewish Torah, “In the beginning . . .” and then connected the gnostic ideal of wisdom, or “the word,” to the man Jesus, “the word became flesh and lived here with us.” John uses gnostic language in the telling of the resurrection as well, giving us a Mary Magdalene who does not recognize Jesus by appearance (for what is the body?) but rather by his word as he speaks her name. In John, Jesus asks not to be touched because he has not yet ascended (up) but he explains he is ascending. Later Jesus is found to enter locked rooms as though no longer encumbered in a normal fleshly body. This is consistent with what Paul had written about the resurrected body some 40 or 50 years earlier.
Though Paul would not have encountered Gnostics per se, he would not have been shocked to find some of his Corinthian converts reasoning that Jesus could be raised because he was, well special, a god, spirit not flesh; but that we, as carnal beings, could not be raised again.
Paul counters that, just as Christ became flesh, died in the flesh, and was transformed in resurrection; we who are are in Christ, are in the flesh, and who die in the flesh, must also be transformed in resurrection. What exactly is this transformed resurrection body like? That is not certain, but it is certain that it is not the same kind of body we had before death: just as a seed does not rise out of the ground as merely still a seed.
What of us non-gnostics? What’s our reason? Why would some of us, decline the invitation to our own resurrections? Are we too comfortable in the dust? Too absorbed in our own unworthiness? Too afraid of elevated expectations? Too proud to receive grace? If we are in Christ, this is one instance where we don’t get to set the bar lower; we don’t have the option of declining the compliment Christ pays in taking us with him into resurrection. He paid too high a price for our uncertainty to be that important any longer.
So there it is: just as the first man died and we after him, so the man Jesus overcomes death and we after him, in new, non-expiring bodies.
And, so what? What does that mean to us in our cultures and subcultures, in our personal lives fraught with delights, tragedies, and boredom. Okay, the story says God has conquered death, but I am still dying over here! Fair point and Paul has a response for the Corinthians in the last verse we read earlier; really, it’s the only possible response.
But in order to get there, we must take a step back to notice that, even though Paul’s main argument to the Corinthians is that they and we will follow Jesus into resurrection, he does also say emphatically that if Christ is raised; and that if Christ had not been raised that our faith is in vain. Indeed, he says we would be a pitiable people.
For Paul, and for me, a merely metaphorical resurrection doesn’t do me any good because the death I am experiencing is a lot more than merely metaphorical. I am literally (by which I do not mean figuratively) – I am literally dying before your eyes; and you, before mine. And we are experiencing death all along the way in so many other ways as well. We are experiencing the powerful grip of death in the death of every other of our fellow dust creatures, whether they die through frailty of years, or by a terrible disease, or by famine, malnourishment, in warfare, as victims of violence, in a dictator’s prison, by natural disaster, or accident of technology. We are experiencing the grip of death in unjust laws and self-serving governments and lopsided economic systems; in prejudice and bigotry; and in a myriad personal disappointments – whether professional, family, friendships, or mental health. We are groaning together with our entire eco system for some rebirth of conscience and sanity as we ravage our mother earth’s resources through over-harvesting or outright pollution and most especially by releasing CO2s at an alarming rate, destabilizing the climate and dependent eco systems upon which we all depend. The whole creation groans in agony! We need a real, earthly, from the ground up resurrection!
Good news! Christ is risen and so will you be if you are in Christ. So will the whole creation: her moans are transformed into labour pangs, signaling a new birth, a rebirth for us all.
And so Paul’s gives an answer for believers in Corinth and Toronto – the only possible answer given the real mortal struggle in which we engaged. He tells us:
“Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that, in the Lord, your labor is not pointless.”
So keep working for justice, for peace, for healthy relationships in your families, with friends, with fellow students and coworkers; for a healthy planet. Just keep working. Your renewal is already assured; the downpayment has already been made; our leader has already made the way.
“For as in Adam all die; even so, in Christ shall all be made alive.”