1 Corinthians 15
So far in this series we’ve been looking at some big themes. In the first sermon we looked at the hope of resurrection in the Old Testament as a promise that God would return and vindicate his people. Last week we looked at the resurrection of Jesus as the fulfillment of that promise and the launch of a new creation. The next step for us is to talk about what all that means for us, and nowhere does this get a better treatment than in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 15. This is Paul’s magnum opus on resurrection and Christian hope and a key text for us to get our hands around if we’re going to understand what resurrection is all about. So, I want to do a little bit of expository preaching on that text today. If you have your Bibles with you (and you should) let’s open them there.
We can break Paul’s argument about resurrection in I Corinthians 15 into three sections. In the first section, verses 1-11, Paul talks about the apostolic tradition around the death and resurrection of Jesus, which happened “in accordance with the Scriptures.” The “Scriptures” he refers to are the Old Testament, the story of Israel, the story of how the Creator God launches a mission to redeem his good creation and the people he made in his own image. We’ve talked about that at length over the past several weeks. Jesus is the climax of that story, and his death and resurrection represent the hinge point of history. This story is the basis of Paul’s ministry and a story of which he himself became a part. After talking about all the people whom the risen Jesus appeared to after his resurrection, Paul then says in verse 8, “Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me,” which would have seemed unlikely given that Paul saw himself as “unfit to be called an apostle because [he] persecuted the church of God” (v. 9). The grace of God in the person of the risen Jesus there on the Damascus road changed Paul’s life. Paul is who he is because of Jesus’ resurrection (v. 10).
In the second section, Paul goes on to refute the assertion of some in the Corinthian Church that there is no resurrection of the dead. That would have been a common belief in ancient Corinth because they were, as most Greco-Romans were, dualists who believed Plato’s assertion that the material world was weak and corrupt and the spirit or soul the pure representation of personhood. To be embodied was a bad thing, to be “spirit” was to be free. That philosophy led them and many others with that worldview to believe that they could do anything they wanted with their bodies because, ultimately, the body doesn’t matter.
In chapter 5, for example, Paul admonishes them for allowing someone in the church to be in a sexual relationship with “his father’s wife.” That’s just the tip of the iceberg of the kind of sexual immorality that was going on in Corinth, where ritual prostitution was a major business. The Corinthians, like most people in the Greco-Roman world, thought that sex really had no consequences because it involved their bodies only. Doesn’t matter who you have sex with, or how. Your body has little to do with the real you, so why not?
I would argue that that is still the prevailing worldview in much of western culture. We are the philosophical descendants of Plato and Corinth. Sexuality dominates our culture, and people seem to believe, even in the age of AIDS, that my body is mine to do with as I please. It’s not the real “me” anyway. Anything goes.
But Paul wants to make it clear to the Corinthians that this worldview isn’t the way things are. What we do with our bodies matters because they are an essential part of who we are. We are not separate bodies and souls, but a unified whole created by God in his image.
Look back at chapter 6 beginning at verse 3 where Paul is talking about the importance of the body. “The body is not meant for fornication,” says Paul, but for the Lord and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” He goes on to say that who we unite our bodies with matters—do we unite them with the others merely for self-gratification, or do we unite our bodies with the Lord? (v. 16-17).
Then, in verse 19, Paul says it plainly, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God with your body.” Paul is no dualist or Platonist, but understands that our bodies are really us and that they matter, even in the end. The hope of life isn’t that we become disembodied spirits, but embodied, resurrected and renewed persons.
That’s what Paul is driving at in this second section of chapter 15. Some of the Corinthians are questioning this whole idea of resurrection and embodiment, and Paul goes right at their false assumptions. His argument goes like this: Christ has indeed been raised. If not, then everything we’ve been talking about and your faith itself has been “in vain” (v. 14). If Jesus hasn’t been raised bodily from the dead, then we won’t be raised either, and if that’s the case then death is still the ruler of the earth and sin right along with it. If the resurrection didn’t really happen, then there is no hope. Without the resurrection, the whole project is a failure.
This is a major point. Much of Christian theology still buys into the same kind of Platonist understanding that Paul was challenging in Corinth. Many Christians hold the belief that the bodily resurrection of Jesus isn’t really that important, nor are our bodies really that important in the end. Paul is making it crystal clear here that that cannot be the case. Our bodies matter. Jesus’ resurrection matters.
Why does it matter? Look at verse 20. “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.” In the ancient world, the first fruits of a crop signified both the beginning of the harvest and a pledge or promise that the rest of the harvest would look just like this! The resurrection of Jesus, according to Paul, is nothing less that the first evidence, the long-awaited first fruit, of the kind of destiny that we and God’s creation both hope for. What happened to Jesus on Easter will happen to us, too! Resurrection of the body!
Indeed, Paul says that Jesus resurrection reverses the very curse of death itself. Verse 22: “For as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.” Death through one man, life through another. Jesus’ resurrection signifies the beginning of the end for capital D death! Jesus reigns over the earth, and his resurrection breaks down the authority of rulers and authorities and powers. His resurrection challenges and breaks their last weapon—the enemy of death (v. 26) . The empty tomb is a beachhead in the last great battle to come when Jesus returns and defeats death forever.
This is the message that Paul preached every day at the risk of his own life. It’s why he endured so much conflict, as in Ephesus and other places. If it wasn’t true, then what would have have gained in preaching it? Indeed, says, Paul, if the dead aren’t raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’”
That was the philosophy of many in the ancient world, and our own—a fatalism that leads to a purpose-less existence. You see this on some ancient tombstones as well. A common inscription on Roman tombs goes like this: “I was not, I was, I am not, and I don’t care.”
But no, Paul says, there is hope—the hope of resurrection and the restoration of meaning to life, to creation, to everything. How does that work? Paul addresses that in the third section.
“How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” Paul addresses those questions in surprising ways and in doing so gives us a prototype of our own future. He begins with an argument from nature. There are different kinds of bodies for different kinds of environments. Seeds, for example, have a body created for the soil and to raise a particular crop. Humans have a body suited to their environment, so do birds equipped for the air and fish equipped for the sea (v. 39). Every body in the universe is uniquely crafted for its environment.
And, says Paul so is the resurrection body. Like a seed it is sown one way, in a body suited for the ground, and raised another as a plant that is good for food and shade. It’s the same body, but it undergoes a radical change to suit its new environment.
This, says Paul, is what is resurrection means. What we have now is a body that is perishable, subject to decay and death. What we will have in the end is, like Jesus, a body that is imperishable, incorruptible, glorious—but a body nonetheless.
Look at verse 44, one of the most misunderstood in Scripture. The NRSV puts it like this: “It (the body) is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.” Now, hold on a minute, you might, that sounds an awful lot like a dualism between the physical and the spiritual. Is Paul contradicting himself here?
Well, here’s where the original language can help us. The word that the NRSV renders as “physical” is actually the word with the root “psyche.” The word “soma” refers to a body. We would never use the word “psyche” to refer to physicality, but rather what animates and motivates the person. So a better translation of the text here is “What is sown is an ordinary body, motivated and animated by the ordinary things of this world—including things like sin, decay, and death. The “soma psyche” is our present condition, and our bodies have an expiration date.
All well and good, but what about the “spiritual” body? Here’s another linguistic and historical problem. When we think of “spiritual,” what do you generally think of? Something ethereal, undefined, bodiless, imaginative, right? It’s very much in vogue in our culture for people to say things like “I’m a spiritual person” or, my personal favorite, “I’m spiritual but not religious.” For many people, spirituality implies something disconnected from actual embodiment, a “vague religious aspiration”—a head trip, if you will.
But that way of thinking about spirituality would have been completely foreign to Paul. The word he uses here is “pneuma, or pneumatikon”—the same word that he uses over and over again throughout 1 Corinthians to refer to the Holy Spirit or the work of the Holy Spirit. Note, too, that there’s that word “soma” again—this is a body. If the “soma psyche” is a body animated and motivated by life in the present, a “soma pneumatikon” is a body that is animated, enlivened and motivated by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, but still a body nonetheless. To put it another way, our hope is not in a spiritual, unembodied life far away but, rather in a new body that is a transformation of the old—a body that is built for the environment of the new heaven and the new earth that is to come. Rather than the body of Adam, a body made from dust, we will have a body like Jesus, a body clothed in God’s own Spirit.
Indeed, Paul says in verse 50, “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.” Instead, the mystery is that “we will all be changed” from one body to another, from one environment to another. Old body, old creation–new body, new creation. The body still matters!
That brings Paul’s argument to a crescendo in verse 54. Look at what he says, “When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality (notice, there is continuity here) the, the saying that is written will be fulfilled: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” Yes, in verse 52 talks about this happening “at the last trumpet”—a military image. The trumpet blows to send troops to battle and rallies them after it’s over. The king’s arrival signals the end of the battle and the defeat of the enemy. Resurrection is nothing less than victory over capital D death and small d death, and sin along with it. Resurrection is God’s ultimate victory and the full redemption of his good creation!
That’s such a different view than many of us were taught. We’re so used to downplaying death or circumventing it with spiritual language. Paul offers us a much different vocabulary of resurrection language—the redemption of our bodies and the redemption of God’s good creation. They both will be transformed. That’s the good news! Our hope is not to escape the world, but to be redeemed and resurrected within it. This is what God has been up to all along. We’ll talk about that some more in a couple of weeks when we talk about the new creation.
For now, though, a couple of questions usually surface at this point: 1) If resurrection is our future hope, then where are our loved ones who have already passed on? And 2) What does resurrection mean for our present?
The first question can have several answers biblically. On the one hand you have a statement from Jesus on the cross where he says to the thief, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” Paradise in some Jewish thought was a kind of garden, a place of rest and refreshment where people are with God in some sense, but awaiting resurrection. Revelation 6:9 has the image of the martyred saints under the altar who ask God when he will judge the earth, but are told to “rest a little longer.” Both of these and several other accounts seem to suggest that there is an intermediate state. On the other hand, you have statements from Paul and others equating death with “sleep.” Death puts us to sleep in this world and we wake up in God’s new world, just like sleeping at night leads us into a new day and we didn’t notice the time passing as we rested. The Bible holds both of these views in tension, and either or both can be gleaned from the text.
What’s most important, however, is that there is not nearly as much in the Bible about the intermediate state as there is about resurrection. Whatever happens in between, the ultimate hope is resurrection. N.T. Wright calls resurrection the “life after life after death.” It’s the thing we look forward to in the future.
But it’s also the thing we embrace in the present. Unlike the Platonist idea that the future is about escaping the world, resurrection calls us to ground our hope in God’s future for this world. God’s mission is to renew and remake this creation, and us within it. The new creation will have continuity with the old, just as our resurrection bodies have continuity with our present selves. What this means is that what we do now matters and carries over into eternity! Our work, our purpose, our participation in God’s mission for the world makes a difference.
Paul says exactly that in the last verse of this chapter, verse 58. After laying out his argument for the future resurrection, Paul thus gives the present application: “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 in vain.”
Here, Paul refers back to chapter 3 where he talks about building on the foundation laid in Christ. Our lives are all about building on that foundation and, in the end, how will build will be tested. We can build on Christ’s foundation with permanent and precious efforts worthy of his kingdom and in ways that reflect his Lordship, or we can be sloppy and only focus on the temporary things that don’t last like our own personal “spirituality.”
In the end, Paul says in 3:13, “the work of each builder will become visible, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire and the fire will test what sort of work each has done. If what has been built on the foundation survives, the builder will receive a reward. If the work is burned up, the builder will suffer loss; the builder will be saved, but only as through fire. Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit (God’s pneuma), dwells in you?” We are building for a king.
N.T. Wright offers a beautiful image of how this works that goes something like this:
If you’ve ever been to Europe you’ve seen some of the grand cathedrals that are there, many of them built in the middle ages. These are spectacular structures. Imagine, then, a guild of 11thcentury stonemasons working in a yard on the construction site, each chiseling out a design on a block of granite or limestone.. Some may think to themselves, “I’m just here to cut stone,” but others might think, “I’m building a cathedral.” Each has his own piece, and none has an idea of how it fits into the whole project. Only the master builder knows how it all fits together.
Then, after many years, comes the great day when the master builder announces that all the work is finished. He gathers all those stonemasons together and leads them through it, pointing up at the ceiling or to a column and saying to each craftsman—“There’s your piece. Here’s yours. You did this.” No matter how small or seemingly insignificant, every stone matters. Every stone is part of a cathedral.
Someday, I imagine, God will take each of us by the hand, as he will those who have chiseled out their work for the Kingdom before us, and tour us through the new creation. He will point out—“There’s your piece. Your act of compassion built that, your prayers did that, your visit, your giving, your leadership…all of it has a place in the eternal work of God’s Kingdom.
So, what will you do with your block? We all have a block of time, some material to work with, a life to fashion and build. We each have certain gifts, a certain piece of the whole project that God has given to us. What will you do with your block?
The hope of resurrection is a present hope—a call to mission, a call to celebrate life in God’s good creation. That’s good news!
