Resurrection-Idea or Resurrection?
1 Corinthians 15:12-20
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 has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.
When I was in high school, I didn’t really go to church often, but once in a while, I’d tag along with my mom, and usually I’d help out in one of the Sunday school classes. One Sunday, I was helping out with the first graders. The teacher was reading a book to them, from what I remember, it was a pretty generic kid’s book about the life of Jesus. When the teacher got to the Easter story, this girl in the class, Philippa, looked at me and said, very matter-of-factly, with a little snark in her tone, “That doesn’t really happen.” I looked at her and said, “What doesn’t really happen?” She responded plainly, “That’s just a story. People don’t really rise from the dead.” Honestly, I don’t remember what I said to her. I certainly didn’t try to convince her otherwise. I had no way to prove the resurrection, after all. I think I just kind of nodded and affirmed her assuredness. And I don’t regret that at all. It would have been futile to try to get into a debate with a sassy first-grader, and I also would have been something of a hypocrite. Especially in my teen years, I was skeptical. And Philippa wasn’t really wrong—resurrection doesn’t seem to happen anymore.
And you know, I think when we think of resurrection, when we think of life after death, we like to think of this really peaceful idea of our soul slowly ascending to the heavens. But Paul uses the word “body,” not soul—and to add to that, a more accurate translation from the Greek would be corpse. It’s really hard not to imagine, then, these end times Paul is talking about as looking like anything but some kind of zombie apocalypse. As we talked about last week, there were probably some Corinthians getting cold feet about this whole Jesus movement because it would mean giving up some power—but these folks in Corinth were also pretty cultured, and well educated; many were well-versed in philosophy, in the sciences. So it makes sense that Paul would appeal to logic in attempting to convince the Corinthians of this foundational element of the Christian belief system.
So are we all heretics for not being able to fully grasp, or sometimes even fully accept this account of the resurrection? Is it true that if we have some doubt or skepticism that this whole coming to church thing, this whole gathering together in the name of Jesus thing is in vain?
I may be biased here, or maybe even a little self-serving, but I don’t think so. There was a quote I stumbled upon last Sunday after church. It comes from the early twentieth-century Spanish Catholic philosopher and professor, Miguel de Unamuno. Unamuno was alive during the Nationalist and fascist Spanish leader Francisco Franco’s rise to power. He watched in horror as his belief system began to be overtaken by forces who sought to distort it for their own power. During this time, Unamuno said of belief in God and Christianity,
Those who believe that they believe in God, but without any passion in their heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God-Idea, not in God…
The same, I believe, can be said for resurrection—if we believe in it with no passion or uncertainty or anguish, do we really believe in resurrection? Or is do we believe in the resurrection-idea?
When I was finishing confirmation class at my church in Salem, I spoke, along with the other youth of the church, about what it all meant for me. I spoke about my questions, my doubts, and my issues with Christianity that I held at the time. And I was encouraged to do so. After confirmation, I did stop going to church for a bit. But that open-mindedness, that welcoming of skepticism and questioning and wondering, that is one of the biggest reasons I was drawn back to the church. So I’m thinking of that Unamuno quote, I’m thinking of my own personal experience, and I’m thinking about Paul demanding, essentially, that these people of Corinth believe in this literally unbelievable thing that happened. And for all the Paul did for the church, for how much he evangelized and preached about working together and loving one another with capital-L Love, I can’t imagine that this attitude, logical or not, of his was especially compelling. Because here he was, not trying to comfort people and promote the peace and Love he had been doing, but rather, he was trying to create anxiety in people! Saying that if we do not believe in the literal absolute resurrection, if we have some questions or concerns, that our loved ones who lived in Christ are forever conquered by death and nothingness. Honestly, this is the type of stark, black and white thinking that, I believe, drives people away from the church. So does that mean we should just throw Paul out and disregard him? No, it doesn’t—as much as I’m tempted to sometimes.
We have to realize that Paul was preaching this all in a time when Christianity was still growing, was still in its infancy, and there was naturally some confusion around much of it, including its very foundations. We also have to realize that Paul was preaching during a time when it was thought that these end times were imminent; he was also working off of common Jewish apocalyptic thought at the time—that there would be a day in which God resurrects the dead and performs the ultimate judgement.
But here we are, literally thousands of years later, and we’re still waiting. And we have to remember that Paul, for all the good he did, is not Jesus. Jesus always made it clear, we don’t know the time, Jesus didn’t even know when the end will come. Jesus makes it clear that all are forgiven and loved regardless. And Jesus makes it clear that the God’s kingdom will not arrive until we do right by him—until we, as one people, as one body, as Paul says—and actually act the way Jesus would have us act.
In verse 19, Paul solemnly states, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied,” insinuating that if we don’t believe in resurrection in exactly the way Paul describes it, then we will have no eternal life, nothing next; there will be no hope for us. But it’s likely that this verse was a reference to Baruch. You may remember Baruch from our service for the second Sunday in Advent—he’s an apocryphal figure, thought to be the scribe of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah. Baruch was forced to flee to Egypt in his day, against the will of God, and lived his own personal apocalypse in exile. Paul is distorting his source a little here—obviously in terms of making it about Jesus, but he’s also kind of missing the whole point. Here’s the original line from 2 Baruch, chapter 21:
You know where You have preserved the end of those who have sinned or the fulfillment of those who have proved themselves to be righteous. For if only this life exists which everyone possesses here, nothing could be more bitter than this. For of what help is strength which changes into weakness, or food in abundance which changes into famine, or beauty which changes into ugliness? For the nature of men is always changeable. For as we were once, we are no longer, and as we are now, we shall not remain in the future. For if an end of all things had not been prepared, their beginning would have been senseless.
Baruch isn’t saying if we don’t believe in the ultimate judgement or in something very specific, we’re doomed—Baruch is saying that death, famine, struggles are just difficult parts of life. They’re things that we must work through, that we must cope with, all while remaining good, kind and faithful—because the nature of humankind is always changeable—that destruction and renewal and rebirth, that it’s all part of God’s plan in some capacity. You might remember that most of Baruch’s writing was about remaining hopeful in his own exile that better times would come—maybe not even in his lifetime, but they would come. With God all things are possible, but we have to do right by God and before those spectacular end times arrive.
But I don’t necessarily think that Paul’s vision and Baruch’s vision have to be mutually exclusive, or in any kind of competition. I think that we can be skeptical, we can change with our minds with our circumstances, we can question and wonder and ponder, but we can also have some kind of absurd faith that with God, all things truly are possible.
Now, so far, I’ve talked about all the reasons I don’t love what Paul’s saying in this passage. But what I do like about it is actually the fact that he is talking about bodies, that he is talking about corpses. And no, that’s not because of my affinity for horror movies. It’s because it’s real and it’s organic and it’s earthly. Paul is talking about the end times happening on this earth—the one we’re supposed to be taking care of, the one we’re supposed to be respecting. Paul is giving us a reason to respect our own bodies and the bodies of others. This is more in line with Jesus’ teachings than with any kind of ideas of the rapture or any kind of imagining of souls floating up to heaven. Paul is talking about our bodies that we know rising and coming together as one. Paul is talking about an earth as it is in heaven.
It’s really interesting to me—that in making this idea even more fantastical and honestly, less palatable than we usually think of it—not our souls, but literal bodies rising—that all at once Paul’s idea of the ultimate resurrection both harder to imagine, but also more real and more organic. And I think it goes hand-in-hand with Baruch’s apocalyptic vision that Paul borrowed from. Because we have to understand that before that final day comes, we will have to suffer now and then, we’ll have to change—sometimes our strength will turn to weakness, and sometimes our famine will turn to feast, but we’re working for the day when we will all experience that same perfect renewal, that same perfect resurrection as Jesus did. I believe we are allowed to be skeptical and to question. If we don’t question and wonder, I don’t think we really believe.
And as usual, what it really all comes down to for Paul, despite his kind of confrontational tone here, is Love. Since the Corinthians initially believed in Christ because he was resurrected, because of this spectacular thing, it’s thought that maybe they believed that Jesus, fully human and divine, was resurrected, but they couldn’t believe that they themselves could ever be resurrected. And this is where we really have to trust in God’s love—God loves us so much that Jesus was sent to our lowly planet to teach us and to live among us. And so if God loves us this much, then we should indeed remain faithful that God will do the same for us that God did for Jesus. And it will happen here, on this earth, in our bodies, as one body.
Times continue to be difficult, and it’s fair that we may be skeptical that something so good and amazing will ever happen; it’s fair to feel cynical at times; so for our passionate, zealous faith, we can look to and be inspired by Paul. But for our hope and our comfort, during these hard times, I think we can also look to Baruch. We will believe that someday, maybe next year, or maybe millennia from now, paradise will return to this earth, when God’s will is done. But in the meantime, let us remember that, as Baruch says, “the nature of [humankind] is always changeable.” We can question, and we can wonder. We can be skeptical, and we can philosophize, while believing that just maybe, one day, if we begin acting as one body, as one people, that we will all rise in these bodies on an earth as it is in heaven. Because that is how much God loves us. But until that time, let us take care of one another. And let’s work to see glimpses of resurrection in every day life, glimpses of God’s love for this earth and for us. That’s belief, not in resurrection-idea, but in resurrection. Amen.
