Easter
1
Cor 15:1-11
4/4/21
St. Paul
faced some real difficulties when he was challenged by false teachers. The first was Paul’s background. Paul freely admits in our text, “For I am the
least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I
persecuted the church of God.” Paul had
not been part of the original group of apostles and followers of Jesus.
Instead, he had been an opponent of Jesus Christ. He told the Galatians, “For you have heard
of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God
violently and tried to destroy it. And I was advancing in Judaism beyond
many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I
for the traditions of my fathers.”
The second was related to the source
of Paul’s knowledge of the Gospel. On
the one hand, Paul was absolutely clear that he knew the Gospel because the
risen Lord Jesus Christ had appeared to him and revealed it. Paul told the Galatians, “For I would
have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not
man's gospel. For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it,
but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” The risen Lord
had appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus.
In this revelation Paul learned that God had vindicated Jesus who had
been crucified. He had come to
understand the cross was actually the means by which Jesus Christ had won the
forgiveness of sins. And Paul had been given the insight that this forgiveness
and salvation was God’s gift for all people – Jew and Gentile alike.
Paul was an apostle of Jesus Christ
called by God. As he says in the first verse of this letter: “Paul, called by the will of God to be
an apostle of Christ Jesus.” However, while this was
all true, Paul also freely admitted that he had not been one of the original
twelve apostles. He had not been there during
Jesus’ ministry. He had not been there
on Easter. While the risen Lord had revealed the Gospel to Paul in his Damascus
road experience, the Gospel had existed – it has been believed, confessed, and
proclaimed - long before Paul became a believer.
That is what we hear Paul saying in
the epistle lesson for Easter. It is a
great irony the we have two of the most important texts in the Bible about the
resurrection and the Sacrament of the Altar because the Christians at Corinth
were causing problems. We heard Paul’s
words about the Sacrament on Maundy Thursday. The apostle had to write those
words because of the way that the wealthy Corinthians were abusing the setting
in the which the Sacrament was celebrated as they mistreated those who were
poor.
We have this great chapter about the
resurrection – 1 Corinthians chapter 15 – because some people at Corinth were
denying the resurrection of the dead. They were denying the resurrection of
the body. They were doing this
because apparently they were taking the Christian teaching about how Christ had
brought the end times too far. In
chapter ten Paul had written, “Now these
things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our
instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come.” Paul and the New Testament church were very
clear in teaching that in the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus the
last days had arrived.
Some of the Corinthians heard this proclamation of the
“now” of God’s salvation in Christ, and ignored the “not yet.” They thought that as those who had received
the Holy Spirit, they were already “spiritual people” who needed nothing more.
In fact, they denied that there was a resurrection of the dead. Paul
asks incredulously in the verse right after our text, “Now if Christ is
proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is
no resurrection of the dead?” In the Greco-Roman
setting of Corinth and the Mediterranean world this would always a great
danger. Here, Greek philosophy had
established the belief that while the spiritual - the soul -was good, the
material world was bad. The body was
described as a “prison” from which the soul needed to be freed.
In dealing with this problem, Paul
takes the Corinthians back to what he originally proclaimed to them when he
arrived and spoke the Gospel. In doing so, he also affirms that this was not
something unique to him. Instead, it was
something shared by the whole church. It
was something that had been shared with him.
Paul begins our text by laying out
what is at stake – it is salvation itself.
He writes, “Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I
preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by
which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to
you--unless you believed in vain.” This
is something we must never forget. The Gospel – the good news about the death
and resurrection of Jesus Christ – is not something that people can just either
accept or deny as what is “true for them.”
It is the truth that determines whether a person is forgiven and has
salvation with God, or whether a person will be damned by God’s eternal
judgment.
Paul goes on to say, “For I delivered to you as of first
importance what I also received.” This
language of “receiving” and “handing on” is the language of tradition in the
true biblical sense of the word. It is
about receiving and handing on what the apostles of Jesus Christ have
delivered. And here, Paul gladly placed himself in the position of having
received and passed on. He affirms that
what he had taught is what the whole church had taught from the beginning.
There was nothing new about it.
And the Gospel is this: “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.” Paul says
that “Christ died for our sins.” Sins
are identified here as the fundamental spiritual problem. God is the holy God. He is the One created
this world and us. He ordered all things
to work according to his will. But since
the Fall when sin entered into the world through Adam, we have all been people
who are, as Martin Luther described it, “curved in on ourselves.” Our fallen inclination is to turn away from
God and serve ourselves. Because this is
our attitude toward God, it is also the way we treat our neighbor. We do what we want, in spite of the fact God
has said it breaks his will – his law.
We do what we want, no matter whether it hurts our neighbor. Sometimes we do this, even when we know this
is wrong and don’t want to do it.
These sins bring God’s wrath and
judgment. But Paul says that “Christ
died for our sins.” The background for
this statement is clearly what we heard in the Old Testament lesson on Good
Friday: Isaiah chapter 53. There Isaiah described the suffering Servant and
said, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have
turned--every one--to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the
iniquity of us all.” Jesus Christ is the One
upon whom God laid our sin. He took our sin to be punished and judged in our
place. As the prophet writes: “But he was wounded for our transgressions; he
was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us
peace, and with his stripes we are healed.”
Jesus Christ died on the cross to
take away our sins – to win forgiveness for us. But death that simply ended in
death would have been no victory. Paul told the Romans that the wages of sin is
death. For God to bring salvation to us, he needed to reverse the death brought
upon us by Adam.
Jesus died and was buried. But then Pauls
adds, “that he was raised on the third
day in accordance with the Scriptures.” God raised Jesus from the dead on
the third day. As was his plan all along, Jesus was the second Adam through
whom God has given us not only forgiveness, but also the transformation of our
bodies so that they will never die again.
On Good Friday, as Jesus died the shameful death of the
cross and then was hastily buried in a tomb, it looked like Jesus was a failure
who had been rejected by God. The resurrection of Jesus Christ changed
everything. Only the resurrection of Jesus could change the way his
followers viewed him and what had happened on Good Friday.
And that is why Paul goes on to say, “and that he
appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than
five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some
have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the
apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to
me.”
The risen Lord Jesus had appeared to
many different people, many different times, in many different places. Just
from the list here we learn that he appeared first to Cephas – a fact reported
in the Gospel of Luke. He appeared to the other apostles. Paul says that he was
seen by a group of more than five hundred Christians at one time – and then he
adds that most of these people were still living and could bear witness to
this. He had appeared to James, who
didn’t believe in Jesus during his ministry – and now James was a leader in the
Church. Jesus had appeared to others who now had been sent as witnesses to the
Gospel. And of course, the risen Lord had appeared to Paul.
Jesus had revealed himself in ways
that were unmistakeable. As Luke tells us in the Book of Acts, “He presented himself alive to them after his
suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking
about the kingdom of God.” This was crucial, because as Paul goes on to say
just after our text, if Jesus has not risen from the dead then the entire
Christian message is the worst lie ever foisted upon humanity.
Paul says that if Christ has not been raised, his preaching is in vain and our
faith is in vain. What the apostles
preached would be a lie about God. We
would still be in our sins and those who died believing in Christ would have
perished. Paul concludes the
thought by saying, “If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we
are of all people most to be pitied.”
That’s what’s at stake in the
resurrection. Paul knew it. The apostles
knew it. All the early Christians knew it.
And the reason they went forth to work, suffer, and die to proclaim the
Gospel was because of what Paul says in verse twenty: “But in fact Christ
has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen
asleep.”
Jesus lives! He has risen!
Because he has, we are forgiven.
Because he has, death has been defeated. If we die before Christ returns we will be with
Christ, which Paul told the Philippians “is better by far.” Death cannot separate us from Christ. And because Jesus has risen from the dead, we
know that we will too. He is the
firstfruits. He is the first part that
guarantees the rest. And so Paul says later in this chapter: “For as by a
man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the
dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made
alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his
coming those who belong to Christ.”
We live in the confidence that “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.” Because of this we are
the forgiven children of God who already possess eternal life with God – life
that does not end, even if we die.
Because of this we pray, “Come Lord Jesus” for as Paul told the
Philippians, when he does he “will
transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the
power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.”
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