1 Corinthians 15.1-11
Believing that all Scripture is inspired by God does not mean that every chapter of the Bible has equal significance for Christian living and believing. 1 Corinthians chapter 15 is a towering giant of a text even amongst the writings of Paul the Apostle. It is honoured with the longest single quote from Scripture in the Nicene Creed: ‘he died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, he was buried, he rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.’ When Paul says something is of first importance – we sit upright, we stop talking and we pay attention. The saving events anticipated in Scripture are simple: his death dealt with sin, his burial confirmed his death and located his body and the rising of Jesus the Messiah brought resurrection to light. As Harold Dodd observed: the resurrection is a reversal, not just of the death but of the burial of Jesus. On Friday he was dead and buried. By Sunday morning the tomb was empty and Jesus was alive.
Later in this chapter Paul goes on to expound the key implication of the resurrection of Jesus for Christian believing: if Jesus is raised bodily then bodily resurrections are possible and she is no fool who hopes in God for a future bodily resurrection. Jesus, Paul teaches, is only the firstfruits. Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is only the first helping of the final resurrection of the dead.
Paul sets out his list of resurrection witnesses not so much to convince people in Corinth of these basic facts. No one was saying straight out: we don’t believe in the resurrection of Jesus. Rather he is tackling those who prefer a doctrine of the immortality of the soul and who regard the hope of the resurrection of the body on the last great Day as either unnecessary, philosophically incoherent, or just downright distasteful (surely bodies are not that great!). The core of Paul’s point is an argument by counterexample: if resurrections can’t happen, Jesus was not raised. But since Jesus was raised the assertion that resurrections can’t happen is just plain wrong. Christian faith and hope therefore rest on facts: the death of Jesus who shed his sacrificial blood for the sins of the world and his bodily resurrection as the basis of Christian hope. Moltmann captures the point perfectly when he says: ‘The immortality of the soul is an opinion – the resurrection of the dead is a hope. The first is a trust in something immortal in the human being, the second is a trust in God who calls into being the things that are not, and makes the dead alive.’
All this rests on a key fact: Jesus’ bodily resurrection. We don’t have direct access to the actual moment of Jesus resurrection: no one else was there. No one was up that early. What we do have is eye-witness testimony to both the empty tomb and the presence of the risen Jesus – passed on and passed down the centuries to us. But Paul’s pen practically elevates those witnesses from distant acquaintances in a far off land many years ago to being our neighbours two doors down. We hear Paul’s letter and Paul knew these people personally. Here we learn that Jesus appeared alone to broken Peter – Cephas – who Paul had met and spent time with. Paul also tells us that Jesus appeared to his own brother James. Neither of these encounters with the two men is recorded in the Gospels. Both Peter and James’s lives were turned right round. Nowhere else can we find the astounding report that the Lord appeared ‘to more than 500 brothers at one time.’ No wonder that so many who heard the testimony of Peter and the twelve, James and all the other apostles were irrevocably convinced that the tomb was empty and that Jesus had risen.
This gospel of Jesus’ saving death and risen life is God’s power to save. Down the ages people have been tempted to tidy things up a bit on God’s behalf and make the gospel more sophisticated or more respectable in the eyes of a watching world. Or to turn the Christian message into something essentially ethical or moral. But the gospel is not a clever set of ideas or a convincing argument. It is neither beautiful aesthetically (people dying on crosses are not pretty and Jesus didn’t come out of the tomb all shiny – he left that to the angels). Nor did the risen Lord Jesus overwhelm people with his power. In fact they hardly recognised him. Instead he pointed people to Scripture and said: this has now come true in me. The glory of this simple factual gospel is that it is God’s power to save us. As Paul says in the opening of this chapter, we are called to receive the gospel and to stand in it. When we do these things we will be saved by it. This is the foundation stone of all Christian faith. As we will hear tomorrow the whole edifice of Christianity stands and falls on this one matter: the bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Honestly, without this we may as well pack up our little religious games and go and do something more useful. But seen in the light of Jesus death and resurrection life the universe and everything is transformed.
To the sceptic Paul’s list of eye-witnesses trumpets loud and clear: all your philosophy, all your science, all your arguments, all your prejudices and all your predilections come up against this one great brute fact: Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. This is the great event with which we have to do. It means that the rest, as they say, is his story.
Lord Jesus, we rejoice from the bottom of our hearts that you became obedient even to death on the cross for us and for our salvation. And we rejoice that by your mighty resurrection you showed yourself to be the resurrection and the life. Lord, embed these simple truths in our hearts and lives by your Holy Spirit, so that we may live in all the good of your work for us.
Amen