Resurrection Reality

Jesu Juva

1 Corinthians 15:12-20                                

February 16, 2025

Epiphany 6C                       

 Dear saints of our Savior~

        Corinth must have seemed like the last place on earth that God would have a church.  So vile and corrupt was the lifestyle of Corinth that the name of this city became a slang word for corruption.  Corinth rolled out the red carpet for immorality and overindulgence of every sort.  Yet, right there in Corinth was an outpost of heaven on earth.  The church is called to be holy even in the most unholy places.

        Located in such an inhospitable place, the church at Corinth was on life support:  Among that little group of believers was a party spirit—politics in the church.  They were very litigious—ready and willing to drag one another into court over trivial matters.  Sexual immorality was openly tolerated.  Their worship was disorderly.  Their celebrations of the Lord’s Supper were done carelessly and without love for the least among them.  Lastly, some in the Corinthian congregation denied and rejected the beating heart of all our hope:  the resurrection of the body.

        And so it is that in these waning weeks of Epiphany, we today get a little taste of Easter. We get a dose of resurrection reality. To those who would doubt or deny the resurrection of the body, the Apostle Paul makes a vigorous defense in 1 Corinthians 15:  Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?

        How could they say “no” to the resurrection?  Well, here’s how!  The Corinthians were Greeks.  And Greek culture of the First Century had little regard for the human body.  At death the soul was liberated from the shackles of the body.  Greeks believed that at death, only a person’s soul was ferried across the River Styx, to begin a gloomy, unhappy existence in the shadowy underworld.  Greek thought had no room for the resurrection of the body.

        The Corinthian Christians seemed to acknowledge that at least Jesus rose from the dead . . . but that was it.  For everybody else, the resurrection was nothing more than a metaphor—just a symbol of the new life and the spiritual change that God works in the lives of His people.  Physical death was simply the end of the body.  Dead is dead.  The image of the dead being raised—of corpses resuscitated—well, that was just silly.

        How could the Corinthians let go of the resurrection so easily?  How could they so casually toss aside this truth about the body—that the body is destined not for destruction, but for resurrection?  It’s not hard to imagine what may have driven this heresy.  You see, all this talk about the resurrection of the body was keeping the Greeks out of the church.  The church at Corinth wasn’t growing.  They couldn’t get any traction with their neighbors as long as they held onto this notion of the resurrection of the body.  So a compromise was reached: We’ll only talk about the resurrection of Jesus so as to be more friendly and welcoming to our Greek neighbors . . . and we’ll just drop this idea about a resurrection for every-body.

        Dear saints of our Savior, the same terrible tendency runs through every congregation in every culture.  The church laments: We’re not growing.  We can’t get any traction with our neighbors.  And what’s hampering our evangelism—what’s dragging us down—is doctrine.  Our culture embraces what the Scriptures condemn!  And this is especially true concerning the human body.  Our culture embraces every kind of adultery, immorality, and overindulgence.  Our culture embraces the destruction and murder of the littlest bodies of all—the bodies of the unborn who haven’t yet drawn their first breath.  And the church is called to speak a clear word of condemnation concerning these atrocities and abominations.  Where God has spoken, there can be no compromise.  Where God has said thou shalt not, who can dare to say otherwise?

        To compromise, to keep quiet, to bury what some Christians might consider to be “inconvenient truths,” well, this is to deny the loving kindness of God.  Why does God give us His doctrines?  Why does God give us even that truth which seems to hinder our evangelism?  He does this because He loves you.  He wants the best for you.  His word is truth.  He wants you to know the truth, because the truth will set you free.  Deny God’s truth—compromise God’s truth—make a mere metaphor out of God’s truth—and you are denying yourself the supreme comfort of God’s good and gracious will.  You are to be pitied.  Woe to you!

        We must embrace what God embraces; and we must condemn what God condemns.  God’s embrace of you begins and ends with your body.  Your body is not a random product of evolution; but God knit you together in your mother’s womb.  Your body is not merely genes and chromosomes; but God makes your body a temple of the Holy Spirit.  Your body has been cleansed and purified in the splash of Holy Baptism.

        God sent His Son, Jesus, into the world—in a body like yours.  Jesus knows all the tears and temptations that beset your body.  Because of Jesus, Paul could write this astounding truth:  You are not your own, for you have been bought with a price.  So glorify God in your body.  We can only understand that statement through the body of our brother, Jesus.  You have been bought with a price—bought not with gold or silver, but with the holy, precious blood of Jesus, and with His innocent suffering and death.  In that death your guilt is taken away, your sin atoned for.

        But we cannot stop there—at Calvary!  For now—in fact—Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.  With this one glorious sentence, God joins together the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of all men and women.  (And what God has joined together let not man separate!)  And so we confess that Christ is risen.  Death could not hold Him.  Our Savior lives; death’s stone is rolled away. 

        And this Risen Christ—He’s the firstfruits.  Now, the firstfruits were the first produce of the harvest.  In the OT, God had commanded the Israelites to bring their firstfruits to Him as an offering.  When we think of firstfruits in Wisconsin, we might imagine handing over to God those first ripe, red tomatoes, or those first ears of sweet corn.  (We can only dream about produce like that in this fierce and frosty February!)  You would only be able to hand over those firstfruits, knowing and believing that there were still tons of tomatoes and bushels of sweet corn yet to come.  Do you get it?  Jesus is the firstfruits to be raised from the dead.  You and I are all the fruits to follow.  We are the harvest yet to come.  We shall be raised in a resurrection like His!

        Can you imagine what this grand and glorious resurrection will look like? Please take just a minute to open up the inside of the

bulletin insert.  The painting you see reproduced there is by Stanley Spencer, a devout Christian.  This ginormous work was painted in the 1920s.  The painting is titled:  The Resurrection, [at] Cookham.  Spencer’s painting portrays Jesus’ final return and the Day of Resurrection.  Despite the painting’s large size, its scope is not cosmic, but very, very local.  The artist paints the resurrection taking place in the churchyard of Cookham, England—the Berkshire village where he himself lived.  We get to look on as people emerge from their graves.  The artist even painted some of the rising-dead with the faces of local family members and friends he knew and loved.  Does Spencer get it right?  Is this what we should expect? 

        The resurrection of the dead defies all expectations.  It invites us to be surprised—to be amazed—to be amused. This we believe.  On this truth we die . . . and on this truth we live.  Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.  He’s the first fruits.  And you?  You’re next!

        In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.