Faith’s Fulcrum – He Rose Again from the Dead

1 Corinthians 15:1-20, 35-58

 

            It is not often noticed by church goers but two of the hardest sermons to preach are Christmas and Easter.  Most people assume that these are the easiest days to preach; after all, they are so obvious, so well known.  Aha!  That’s precisely the problem.  Christmas and Easter are so well known: what exactly can a preacher say that you, the faithful Christian, doesn’t already know?  Sometimes when confronting Christmas or Easter I feel as if my sermon topic is rather trite and banal, “Let’s see, for Easter Sunday, should I preach about Jesus rising from the dead?  Yeah, I guess that sounds like a good idea.”  Oh please.

 

            One of my preaching professors told us that one way to confront the “problem of the obvious” is not to rehearse the story, be it Jesus’ birth or his resurrection, but to explore the significance of the story.  This suggestion seems like a good one to me. So it is that in looking back at my past three Easter sermons, for instance, I have sought to lure your hearts and minds with the poignant and the poetic.  In 2005, I preached about the great reversals made possible by the fact of Easter: 

 

God is as powerful as he is loving. God not only loves us, but he can do things in our lives that we cannot do on our own. He can turn death into life. He can turn sorrow into joy. He can turn suffering into service. Behold, the Power of God!

 

In my Easter sermon from 2004, I focused on the truth that, since Jesus is the Risen Christ, living and present, he continues to minister God’s grace, mercy and peace to all the world:

 

Where is Jesus?  Jesus is in Fallujah.  And Jesus is on the pile of rubble that used to be a train station in Spain.  And Jesus is with the club dancer who desperately desires to know her daddy loves her.  And Jesus is with the gal working three jobs to keep her family afloat.  And Jesus is with the guy getting desperate for a job because his unemployment is about to end. And Jesus is in the hospital with your dying parent. And Jesus is with you in your home and in your work and in your life.  Jesus is with you in your hands and in your head and, if you will but open it, in your heart. 

 

In my Easter sermon from 2003, I explored the profound truth that the resurrected Jesus is, according to John’s Gospel, still in possession of his scars, his marks of crucifixion, and if  we are but willing the Crucified One will share in himself of our own woundedness.

 

Touch the places where the wounds are in your own life and in the lives of others. No one is unscarred by living.  We all have wounds almost too painful to bear.  Wounds we cannot talk about even with those we love.  And we will never be all fixed up, not in this life.  But the wounded Christ comes to us saying, “Peace be with you…and stop pretending.”

 

            As I pondered what to say about today’s portion of the Apostle’s Creed, “On the third day He rose again from the dead,” it occurred to me that I am assuming that those who hear the message of Easter will have their hearts open to the powerful, life changing work of God for such is the significance of the Easter message.  However, being open to the significance of the Easter message assumes one understands and believes the Easter message.  But what of those who hear the Gospel story of Jesus but do not understand its meaning?  What of those who hear but do not believe?  What of those who hear and outright reject?  What significance can Easter have for them?  It seems to me that before Easter will have any significance in an individual’s or community’s life, Easter must be understood and believed.  Before credo ergo sum can have any consequence, the barriers to credo must be broken down.

 

*****

 

            The British scholar N. T. Wright has written an incredible little book called The Resurrection of the Son of God, a mere 800 pages devoted exclusively to the resurrection.  Among the many things Wright says is that modern Christians will understand the Scripture passages about resurrection more deeply if they understand the context in which Paul and the Gospel writers lived.  Why are the resurrection stories crafted the way they are crafted?  Why does Paul argue the way he argues?  Can Paul and the gospel writers be trusted?  Are their accounts of Jesus’ resurrection credible?

 

            One of the first things Wright does is help the reader understand the way ancient Greeks and Jews understood resurrection.  We hear “resurrection” and, most of us, link it to Jesus.  Some people might get “resurrection” confused with “resuscitation” or “reincarnation,” but for the most part we have a common meaning for the word resurrection.  Not so in the ancient times.

 

            Many Greeks denied the possibility of resurrection.  The poet Homer put the following words on Achilles’ lips as he spoke to Priam who mourned his son Hector: “You must endure, and not be broken-hearted.  Lamenting for your son will do no good at all.  You will be dead yourself before you bring him back to life.”[1]  The writer Aeschylus once penned the following: “Once a man has died, and the dust has soaked up his blood, there is no resurrection.”[2]

 

            Other Greeks believed there could be some kind of life after death, but such life was immaterial, non-physical, only of the spirit.  Homer saw the dead, at best, as shadows.  Homer wrote of Odysseus seeking his dead mother: “Three times I sprang toward her, and my will said, ‘Clasp her,’ and three times she flitted from my arms like a shadow or a dream.”[3]  Plato wrote of the righteous dead as becoming a part of the heavens by literally returning in spirit to the star that shared a part of their soul: “He who lived will during his appointed time was to return and dwell in his native star, and there he would have a blessed…existence.”[4]  Indeed, so profound was the rejection of the physical and material that Cicero could write of the dead that they were “freed from their chains, from that prison-house – the body; for what you call life is in fact death.”[5]  Or again, Cicero wrote of how humans must “allow your soul to stay in the body’s custody,” but upon death their souls will be “released from their bodies [to] dwell in the…Milky Way.”[6]

 

            The Jews meanwhile had very different beliefs about “resurrection.”  Some Jews, like some Greeks, did not believe in resurrection at all (Acts 23:7).  However, a large percentage of Jews believed in an actual, physical, material resurrection of the body and spirit of the dead.  But what is important to understand is that the Jews believed the resurrection would occur on the day of judgment, the so-called “Day of the Lord,” at which time all righteous Jews would be raised back to life.  So it was that Pseudo-Philo wrote: “But when the years appointed for the world have been fulfilled, then…I will bring the dead to life and raise up those who sleep in the earth…And there will be another earth, another heaven, an everlasting dwelling place.”[7]  Or again, the writer of 2 Baruch wrote: “It will happen…when the time of the appearance of the Messiah has been fulfilled and he returns with glory, that then all who sleep in hope of him will rise.”[8]

 

            To summarize, then, some Greeks and some Jews denied outright the possibility of resurrection.  Other Greeks accepted the possibility of resurrection but only as a spiritual concept in which the physical body was rejected and the spirit taken into shadows or up to the stars.  Most Jews accepted the possibility of a physical, bodily resurrection but believed it would happen to all righteous Jews all at once only when Messiah came.  We are now ready to hear more deeply Paul’s words to the Corinthians where, in chapter 15, Paul articulates his most extensive teaching on the resurrection. 

 

*****

 

            Clearly there was a problem in Corinth.  The problem was that some of the Corinthian Christians were teaching that there is no resurrection from the dead (15:12).  This makes sense knowing what we know about most Greek and some Jewish ideas of the day.  By and large, the Greeks had no use for the resurrection, and they certainly had no use whatsoever of the notion that Jesus would have been bodily, physically resurrected.  Now if Paul had taught that Jesus was now “our North Star,” perhaps the Corinthians would not have had a problem but that was not what Paul was preaching.

 

            On the other side of the ethnic aisle, Corinth’s Jewish Christians were also troubled by what Paul was preaching.  For these Jewish Christians, they would have struggled with the notion that “the resurrection” would have occurred already.  How could that be?  The dead – those who have falled asleep – are still dead?  The resurrection of all righteous Jews has not occurred, so how can someone teach that Jesus has been resurrected?  Now if Paul had taught that Jesus and all other Christians had been resurrected, perhaps the Corinthians would not have had a problem but that was not what Paul was preaching.

 

            So, what was Paul preaching?

 

            Paul preached what he had “received” from others.  Writing a mere 22 years after Jesus, as near to him as the Reagan presidency is to us, the Christian Church already had a clear, established teaching on the subject:

 

…he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve.  After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers [and sisters] at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.  Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also… (15:5-8).

 

Eyewitnesses.  Living witnesses.  “Go ask them,” implies Paul. “They will tell you that Jesus was resurrected in bodily, physical, material form.  They will tell you how he ate and drank with them.  They will tell you of his flesh made new, made whole.”  “Go ask them,” implies Paul.  “They will tell you that Jesus and only Jesus was raised.  They will tell you that no one but Jesus, was resurrected.”

 

            And the Greek Christians would wonder, “How can this be?  A physical resurrection doesn’t make sense?”

 

            And the Jewish Christians would wonder, “How can this be?  The resurrection of one but not all doesn’t make sense?”

 

            And Paul would explain to his Jewish brothers and sisters how the resurrection of believers will take place all at once, all at the same time, just like they have always been taught, but that Jesus is the firstfruits of the harvest of resurrection (15:20).  The firstfruit is that part of the harvest that ripens first and is picked first; the rest of the harvest still awaits.  But the firstfruits makes promise of the joy that will follow.  Jesus, says Paul, is the firstfruits of the resurrection harvest that will follow for you and for me.

 

            And Paul would explain to his Greek brothers and sisters how the resurrection of believers is indeed bodily, but bodily in a different sense, a transformed sense; it is a spiritual body but a body nonetheless.  Using an agrarian metaphor once again, Paul would explain that “you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed,” and like any seed that goes into the ground as one thing the full flower of that seed arises quite another.  And we hear in the passion of Paul’s poetry the glorious hope of our future:

 

The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body…For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.”  ‘Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’…Thanks be to God!  He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ (15:42-44, 53-55).

 

*****

 

            Now let us apply Ocham’s Razor to these questions: why would Paul go to all the trouble of making up a story about Jesus’ bodily, physical resurrection when he knew his Greek listeners would have wanted to reject the story before it left his lips?  Why would Paul go to all the trouble of making up a story about Jesus and only Jesus being resurrected when he knew his Jewish listeners would have wanted to reject the story before it left his lips?  If Paul was going to make up a story, shouldn’t he have done a better job?  Couldn’t he have created a better a story?

 

            And, of course, the answer is obvious: Paul didn’t make up anything.  The reason Paul tells this story in this way is because it is what the eyewitnesses saw, what the living witnesses saw, what he himself saw: Jesus raised again from the dead.

 

*****

 

            Behold the power of God!

 

Where is Jesus?  Jesus is with you in your hands and in your head and, if you will but open it, in your heart. 

 

Touch the places where the wounds are in your own life and in the lives of others and hear the wounded Christ who comes to us saying, “Peace be with you…and stop pretending.”

 

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