1 Corinthians 15

For Friday in Easter week, I thought I would simply give us the earliest discussion of the Resurrection of Jesus we possess, and that from an eyewitness, no less. 

The older I get, the stranger and stranger the New Testament accounts of the Risen Christ become. They simply don’t fit into any categories we possess and they didn’t for the original witnesses either. 

It’s common for moderns to imagine that lots of people believed the possibility of the resurrection of the dead in antiquity. Myths like Osiris and such are regularly deduced as “proof” of this.

But in reality, nobody but one very peculiar subset of one people, Pharisaic Jews, believed it possible that people might and would walk bodily out of the grave. Pagans did not think this for the very good reason that things which happen to gods in cloud cuckoo land were not regarded by them in the same light as what happens to your brother-in-law’s corpse after he kacks it and is stuck in a box six feet under. Ask any ordinary person in antiquity whether dead people walk out of their graves, and just like in modernity, the answer was no. That’s why we call them “dead”.

Alone in the ancient world was this peculiar group of Pharisaic Jews (and those in their theological orbit) who concluded from writings of Moses and the prophets that, since God has created us to be bodily creatures and God does nothing in vain, it therefore must follow that when God judges us at the end of the world, part of his work of restoring and renewing that bit of creation called “man” simply must involve restoring us to our bodily integrity. Not for Pharisaic Judaism a Platonic disembodied void of pure spirits or intellects no longer “encumbered” by bodies. God was going to give us the fullness of our humanity back in some mysterious way.

So Jews like Paul, that Pharisee of Pharisees, took it for granted that the Resurrection of the dead would occur–on the Last Day and at the end of the world. But what nobody expected was the Resurrection of one man right in the middle of history. That was not on the program at all and neither he nor the other apostles expected it.

Nor does the Resurrection fit with what Greeks like the Corinthians have been trained by their Platonism to expect: something disembodied. Like the apostles, they had no problem with and were prepared for an “apparition” of some sort of disembodied Something from the Spiritual Realm. Those of a spiritual cast of mind today are strongly inclined to the same thing. And indeed, it would have been infinitely easier for the early Christians to just say they saw a spirit or a ghost if they were just making crap up. Spirits and ghosts are not a threat to Caesar. But the claim of man who is both a real, bodily man and King of Kings and Lord of Lords? That was treason and invited ever so many crosses, stakes, beatings, incinerations and cries of “Christianae ad Leones!”

The difficulty for the first witnesses was that they were honest people stuck with having to actually relate their actual experience, and they could not just make crap up. So instead they strain at the limits of language to try to talk about what they actually saw with their physical eyes and handled with their physical hands and ate dinner with over the course of 40 days (and saw and heard once on the Damascus Road). 

Moderns desperately want Paul to just mean that Jesus dissolved into “pure spirit” when he contrasts the “natural body” (disastrously mistranslated as “physical body” in many English renderings) with the “spiritual body”. But that just simply is not what he is saying. When he contrasts the soma psychikos with the soma pneumatikos, he is not saying that ordinary people have bodies and the Risen Christ does not, but that the animating principle of the natural body is the soul (“psyche”) while the animating principle of the equally real and solid body of the Risen Christ is the Spirit (“pneuma”). For Paul, as for the rest of the New Testament, the Risen Christ is risen bodily, yet that body is weirdly related to the natural body it once was, as well as to the rest of the physical world which, like it, is now undergoing a process of transformation that will only be fully unveiled on That Day.

This brings us to another, often overlooked, feature of Paul’s discussion of the Resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15: namely, that it is not undertaken to persuade the Corinthians of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, but of their own. For some reason, their Platonism made it hard to believe, not that Christ was raised, but that the rest of us will be. It is to dispel this peculiar cognitive dissonance that Paul writes. Essentially, his argument is “Think about what you are saying! If you accept, as you do, the testimony of so many eyewitnesses to the encounters with the Risen and Glorified Jesus of Nazareth–including my own–then what on earth is the sense of saying that this Risen and Glorified Man, whose entire purpose is to share his risen, bodily, divinized human life with all of us, cannot or will not do exactly what he has promised us?

Paul, of course, no more knows how God will achieve this last and greatest miracle than we do and does not even attempt to speculate on that. He simply points, by the beautiful image of the plant that is both related to yet radically unlike the seed, to the fact that something like that is true of the Risen Jesus–and therefore will be of us in the New Creation. His tomb is empty and his body is alive, yet not the same. He is recognizable somehow, yet on three occasions he is not recognized. He can eat fish and be touched, but he can also appear and disappear at will. And above all, whatever weird transformative thing has happened to him will happen to us.

***

Now I am reminding you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you indeed received and in which you also stand. Through it you are also being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you, unless you believed in vain. For I handed on to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures; that he was buried; that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures; that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at once, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. After that he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one born abnormally, he appeared to me. For I am the least of the apostles, not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me has not been ineffective. Indeed, I have toiled harder than all of them; not I, however, but the grace of God [that is] with me. Therefore, whether it be I or they, so we preach and so you believed.

But if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some among you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then neither has Christ been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then empty [too] is our preaching; empty, too, your faith. Then we are also false witnesses to God, because we testified against God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.  If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all.

But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead came also through a human being. For just as in Adam all die, so too in Christ shall all be brought to life, but each one in proper order: Christ the firstfruits; then, at his coming, those who belong to Christ; then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to his God and Father, when he has destroyed every sovereignty and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death, for “he subjected everything under his feet.” But when it says that everything has been subjected, it is clear that it excludes the one who subjected everything to him. When everything is subjected to him, then the Son himself will [also] be subjected to the one who subjected everything to him, so that God may be all in all.

Otherwise, what will people accomplish by having themselves baptized for the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, then why are they having themselves baptized for them?

Moreover, why are we endangering ourselves all the time? Every day I face death; I swear it by the pride in you [brothers] that I have in Christ Jesus our Lord. If at Ephesus I fought with beasts, so to speak, what benefit was it to me? If the dead are not raised:

“Let us eat and drink,
for tomorrow we die.”

Do not be led astray:

“Bad company corrupts good morals.”

Become sober as you ought and stop sinning. For some have no knowledge of God; I say this to your shame.

But someone may say, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come back?”
The Resurrection Body. You fool! What you sow is not brought to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be but a bare kernel of wheat, perhaps, or of some other kind; but God gives it a body as he chooses, and to each of the seeds its own body. Not all flesh is the same, but there is one kind for human beings, another kind of flesh for animals, another kind of flesh for birds, and another for fish. There are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the brightness of the heavenly is one kind and that of the earthly another. The brightness of the sun is one kind, the brightness of the moon another, and the brightness of the stars another. For star differs from star in brightness.

So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown corruptible; it is raised incorruptible. It is sown dishonorable; it is raised glorious. It is sown weak; it is raised powerful. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual one.

So, too, it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being,” the last Adam a life-giving spirit. But the spiritual was not first; rather the natural and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, earthly; the second man, from heaven. As was the earthly one, so also are the earthly, and as is the heavenly one, so also are the heavenly. Just as we have borne the image of the earthly one, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly one.

This I declare, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does corruption inherit incorruption. Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all fall asleep, but we will all be changed, in an instant, in the blink of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For that which is corruptible must clothe itself with incorruptibility, and that which is mortal must clothe itself with immortality. And when this which is corruptible clothes itself with incorruptibility and this which is mortal clothes itself with immortality, then the word that is written shall come about:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.
Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?”

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be firm, steadfast, always fully devoted to the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.