Baptist Bookworm: Resurrection?

A sermon for Provoking Faith in a Time of Isolation, the online gathering of Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, 24th May 2020

1 Corinthians 15.1-26, 51-57

In our reading for this morning,

Paul offers the most extended theological exploration

of the significance of resurrection that we find in the New Testament.[1]

And today, just a few days after the day of ascension,

we are invited to turn our eyes once again

towards the resurrected Christ.

In this chapter, Paul was responding to those in Corinth

who simply didn’t believe in the reality of resurrection.

We know quite a bit about the early Corinthian church

– and they appear to have been what, in ministerial terms,

is technically known as a ‘nightmare congregation’.

They were a multicultural, multi-ethnic, extremely diverse group

of recent converts to Christianity,

with religious backgrounds ranging from Torah-observant Judiasm,

to Greek paganism, to Roman emperor worship.

So getting any kind of agreement on even key issues

was always going to be something of a nightmare,

and we certainly see this in Paul’s letters to the Corinthian church,

where he has to address everything from money to sex to theology

as he tries to help this group of people work out

what it means to follow Jesus in their context.

And at the heart of all this, for Paul, is the issue of resurrection.

The question of how one should be a Christian in the world

is a second-order question

which follows directly on from what one believes about resurrection.

Or, to put it the other way around:

if you haven’t got your belief in resurrection sorted,

you’ll never work out the right answers to any of the other questions

that those who would follow Jesus are going to have to grapple with.

Part of the problem was that the diversity of religious backgrounds

in those he was writing to

meant that there was no common ground

on which to build an argument

for a Christ-centred understanding of resurrection.

The Jews had a variety of opinions about what happened when people died,

with the Hebrew Scriptures tending to speak of death

as a place of rest, or void;

with just occasional glimpses of the idea

that in some way the spirit of a person might return to the God

who had given the gift of life in the first place.

In Jesus’ own time, there were debates between different Jewish factions

on whether there was any kind of existence

for the individual beyond the grave,

and any notion of resurrection was tied up with the idea

of the resurrection of the whole nation,

and its restoration to its promised land.

For the Jews, the body and the soul

were largely considered to be a united entity,

and any resurrection involved the entire person

– both their body and their spirit.

But then when we turn to the Greek and Roman context,

the situation is equally confusing,

with an equally diverse set of opinions

about the relationship of a person’s spirit to their body.

Probably the dominant view was that which we call Platonic Dualism.

This is the idea, originating with Plato the Greek Philosopher,

that the soul is imprisoned in the body.

In other words, the body and the spirit are not united,

but rather they are divided,

forced together in an uneasy alliance for the duration of a person’s life.

Platonism taught that the physical world is merely a shadow

of the true reality which lies beyond,

and so the physical body of a person is a poor shadow of their true self,

which exists in its most real form as perfected spirit.

By this understanding, the corruptible body corrupts the soul,

but one day the soul will be freed from its mortal shell:

when the body dies, the spirit is freed

to become most fully real and perfect.

So, we’ve got multiple views on mortality and immortality,

and multiple views on the unity or separation of the body and the soul,

and all of these are in the background

to what Paul’s trying to say about the resurrection of Jesus.

From a Jewish perspective,

the resurrection of a person must involve their body,

because the body and soul are a unity.

Whether the person is resurrected

back into their old body to walk again on this earth,

or into a new body walking on a renewed earth,

the point is still the same.

However, from a Platonic Greek view,

any ongoing life of the Spirit must be about freeing the soul

from its corruptible and corrupting body.

So, for the Greeks any talk about resuscitating the corruptible body

was hardly an attractive idea.

So Paul responds by inventing a concept

to help try and draw together these two very different religious strands.

Listen again to what he says in verses 50-54 (translated by Nicholas King):

This is what I mean, brothers and sisters:

flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God;

corruption does not inherit un-corruption.

Look! I am telling you a mystery.

We shall not all fall asleep;

but we shall all be changed, in a nanosecond,

in the blink of an eye – at the final trumpet.

For the trumpet will signal

– and then the dead shall be raised undecayed.

And for ourselves, we shall be changed.

For this decaying part must put on un-decay,

and this mortal part put on immortality.

This is one of those passages that has been hijacked

by the kind of Christianity that looks to a future moment of transformation,

when suddenly some heavenly trumpet sounds from the sky

and all the believers are caught up into the air…

It’s one of the famous ‘rapture’ passages, as they’re known;

and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it!

Because when it’s heard in the context of those he was writing to,

Paul’s words make a lot of sense.

He’s trying to draw together

the Jewish and Greek ideas about the afterlife

and make sense of them in the light of Jesus.

One of the problems we can have,

encountering Paul’s thinking on resurrection,

is that as Western Christians,

we are the religious and philosophical heirs to Platonic Dualism.

And so we have a tendency to hear talk about body and soul

from a dualistic perspective,

as if one glad day our Spirits will be freed from this mortal and corruptible shell

to go and be with Jesus in heaven,

and this is resurrection.

Except, St. Paul would want to say to us,

as he said to the Platonic Dualists of Corinth,

it isn’t.

For Paul, resurrection is absolutely NOT about escaping

from the problems, trials, and tribulations of this present darkness

to fly away to a better place.

Rather, resurrection, and specifically the resurrection of Jesus,

is the defining and decisive moment

where Christ destroys every ruler, authority, and power

that has ever held dominion

over the lives of human beings.

Listen to verses 24-26 again:

²⁴ Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father,

after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power.

²⁵ For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.

²⁶ The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

The primary context that Paul has in mind here,

when he speaks of rulers, authorities, and powers,

is of course the Imperial rulers of the Roman Empire,

but he clearly also has in view

the spiritual forces that lie behind them,

including, interestingly, death itself!

To understand what’s going on here,

we need to remember that Paul wasn’t just

a Greek-educated intellectual,

he was also a Jewish apocalyptic mystic.

And what he certainly wasn’t

was a western scientific rationalist.

For Paul, the resurrection of the dead

wasn’t understood as a simple restoration

of ‘those who have fallen asleep’ (as he calls it)

to some kind of walking-talking-living-and-loving

post mortem experience.

Neither, for Paul, was the resurrection

the same thing as the zombie apocalypse,

where newly-undead corruptible and part-decayed bodies

are reanimated and re-inhabited by their immortal souls

to lurch the earth for eternity.

Rather, for Paul, the language of resurrection,

so central to his Christian faith,

needs to be heard in the context of the historical problem

for which God’s deliverance and resurrection was the solution.

In other words, for Paul, resurrection is about the end of imperial rule.

Specifically, it is about the end of Roman domination of the known world,

although it is also about the ending of the underlying spiritual powers

that gave the Roman empire its force and motivation

to distort, demean and destroy humanity in its own service.

And this is where and why, for Paul,

it all comes down to the resurrection of Jesus,

rather than just to the concept of resurrection more generally.

Because Jesus was crucified.

For a Jew like Paul, the crucifixion of the Jewish messiah

was a potent symbol

of the victory of the Roman imperial domination system

over the Jewish God.

Crucifixion was a Roman punishment,

and it is not lost on Paul that Jesus died at the hands of Rome.

At the crucifixion, the messiah lost and the emperor won.

So to assert that Christ is risen

is to make a profound statement about the power of the emperor.

The resurrection of Jesus is a potent symbol

of the victory of God over the very powers that had killed him.

As Paul puts it, the resurrected Christ

‘has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power’.

It’s almost as if, in Paul’s thought,

God makes Christ the counter-emperor,

who will ultimately destroy the earthly imperial rulers,

having already defeated their spiritual power-base at the resurrection.

But Paul doesn’t stop there.

This isn’t just about first century Rome

and first century Israel.

Rome and Israel are just the examples in his time and place

of a far deeper victory.

To make this point, Paul borrows an image

from the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible,

and he says that ‘Christ has been raised from the dead,

the first fruits of those who have died.’

This idea of the ‘first fruits’ comes from the book of Deuteronomy (26.2)

and it was the idea that when harvesting,

the first fruit you gather, the first sheaf of wheat or whatever,

should be presented as an offering to God,

as a symbol of the fact that the whole harvest

that is yet to come also belongs to God.

We have a similar practice here

when we give our offerings of money,

and we often pray that the gifts we give to the church

are symbolic of the fact that all we have belongs to God.

So if the resurrected Christ is the first fruits, what is the full harvest?

If Christ is the first fruit of resurrection, what is still to come?

Well, it seems that Paul has set his sights rather high:

²¹ For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; ²² for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. ²³ But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. ²⁴ Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. ²⁵ For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. ²⁶ The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

The resurrection of Christ

isn’t just about the defeat of imperial rule in the first century,

it isn’t just about the overthrow of those earthly powers (in any age)

that take the imperial spirit and reinvent it in their own time and context.

Rather, it is about the resurrection of all things.

It is about the ultimate defeat of death itself,

as all of humanity, and indeed all of creation,

is freed from the tyranny of death and made alive once again.

This is a view of resurrection which changes, literally, everything.

This world is not something to be endured,

it is something to be redeemed.

It is not somewhere to escape from,