Easter
1
Cor 15:1-11
3/29/13
In the middle of the first century
A.D., the apostle Paul went to Athens,
Greece. Athens
was one of the great intellectual centers of the ancient world. It was the center of one of the great schools
of learning – and had been for centuries.
And like many university towns, the people there were intellectually
smug and full of themselves. Believe me,
I know what that looks like – I grew up in one.
We are told that Epicurean and Stoic
philosophers were talking with him. Some people said, “What does this babbler
wish to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities”—because
he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. And they took him and brought him
to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are
presenting? For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore
what these things mean.”
Paul preached to them in a way that
engaged their own religious and intellectual heritage. But then Paul said, “The times of ignorance
God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he
has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom
he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from
the dead.”
Paul’s
reference to the resurrection marked the end of the conversation. While some indicated that they were open to
hearing more at a later time, Luke tells us that some mocked. In truth, based what we know about the
Greco-Roman world, we can assume that most mocked.
We
have gathered on Easter Sunday to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And on this day, our epistle lesson is from 1
Corinthians 15 – the great resurrection chapter in Paul’s letter to Corinth. We have celebrated Easter so many times and
heard Paul’s words so many times that it is easy to take the whole thing for
granted. Of course Jesus Christ rose
from the dead. Of course it proves that
Jesus completed his saving mission. Of
course it shows that Jesus has defeated death.
What we fail to realize is that for
almost the entire world that the first Christians addressed – the Greco-Roman
world that was the setting of every Christian congregation apart from Jewish
Palestine – none of this made any sense.
In fact, it was absurd.
It was absurd because for them the
resurrection of the body was not a good thing.
It was not something to be desired.
It was in fact the last thing anyone would want. It was a punishment,
not salvation.
From the beginnings of Greek
philosophy there was a basic assumption that continued on for century after
century up to Jesus’ day in the first century A.D. This assumption was that the spirit was good
and that the body – the physical – bad.
The body was a prison in which the spirit had been trapped. And the good
thing about death was that it finally set the spirit free.
This was the worldview of the people
to whom Paul was writing in Corinth.
It was the worldview of everyone the Church
sought to evangelize that wasn’t Jewish.
If you decided to make up a religion in the first century A.D. for which
you were going to try to win over the Mediterranean world, placing the
resurrection of the body at the center of it was the worst decision that you
could possibly make.
And yet … that’s exactly what the
apostles did. They said that truth of
the Christian faith was based on the fact that Jesus Christ had bodily risen
from the dead. And then they doubled
down by saying that the resurrection wasn’t only about Jesus. It was about the future, the salvation that
was in store for everyone who believed in him.
That’s what the apostle Paul says in
our text today. He begins by saying, “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.” Paul says that when he talks about
resurrection, he is talking about the Gospel by which the Corinthians are
saved. If there is no resurrection, then
there is no Gospel and there is no salvation.
Paul lays it out as he says: “For I
delivered 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, and that he appeared
to Cephas, then to the twelve.”
He says that Christ died for our
sins in accordance with the Scriptures.
The Gospel and the resurrection are needed because there is a
problem. The problem is sin. The problem is that ever since Adam disobeyed
God, everyone conceived and born in the normal course of nature is sinful. We are people who find disobeying God to come
naturally. We are people who find that
that hurting those around us by what we say and do comes naturally. It’s easy.
We don’t have to work at it. In
fact, we are really, really good at it.
The problem is that all of this sin
flies in the face of the holy God and the way he has ordered things. And you
know what: forget what our culture says about there not being any absolute truth – that there is only what is
true for you and what is true for me.
The holy and almighty God gets the final word. And his word is
clear: the wages of sin is death. Sin
brings death. That’s what apart from the
return of Christ, every single one of you is going to do.
And
God will speak the final word. On the
Last Day he will pronounce judgment and sinners will be cast out of his
presence in eternal damnation – what Jesus Christ describes as the weeping and
gnashing of teeth. As Paul told the Romans, “But because of your
hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of
wrath when God's righteous judgment will be revealed.”
Sin is the reason God acted to give us forgiveness and
salvation. God had revealed in the Old
Testament that he would do this. As we
heard in our Old Testament lesson on Good Friday, God said about his Servant,
the Christ - “But he was
pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was
the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are
healed.” Through Jesus’ death on the cross, God has given you forgiveness.
Yet that is not all he has done. He has also given you life. God didn’t just punish sin in Christ on the
cross. He also acted in his Son to bring
life – full blown bodily resurrection life.
You see, God says that things work very differently than the way the
Greco-Roman world viewed things.
When God had finished making his creation, we learn from
Genesis chapter one, “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it
was very good.” When he created Adam, he formed his body out of the dust of the
ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and Adam became a
living being. God created human beings
as the unity of body and soul.
In the first Adam, sin had entered into the world and
brought death. In the second Adam, Jesus
Christ, God worked to restore the life that we were meant to have. He restored the life of fellowship with God
by taking away our sins and giving us forgiveness. And he began the restoration of human bodily
life as God created it to be.
Yet it’s not just the Greco-Roman world that had no use
for the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.
It’s our world too. If you read
around in what so many so called “Christian” scholars and theologians have to
say; if you hear their pathetic dribble at places like the History Channel, you
will find that it is just as common to deny the resurrection of Jesus
Christ. If they don’t use the tired
rationalist explanations that have been around since the Enlightenment of the
seventeenth century, the you will be told that Christ has a “spiritual
resurrection.” Define this in whatever
way you want, it always ends up meaning that on Easter morning, the actual body
of Jesus Christ was still in the tomb.
And there is nothing that could be more stupid. For anyone who lived in the Jewish setting
knew what resurrection was – it was what happened on the Last Day when God gave
the physical bodies of his people triumph over death and raised them to live as
God had intended life to be. And Paul
new exactly what the stakes were. Just
after our text he said: “And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching
is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting
God, because we testified about 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, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised,
your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have
fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life
only, we are of all people most to be pitied.”
If Christ did not rise from the dead, then you are still
in your sins. If Christ did not rise
from the dead, then no one who has died will ever live again. If Christ did not rise from the dead, then
everything Christianity is a lie – and worse than that, it is a false witness
about God. And if Christ did not rise from the dead – if the only hope of the
Christian belongs to this life – then we are most to be pitied because the
suffering, sacrifice and service of the Christian is meaningless.
But
on Easter Sunday when the women went to the tomb, it was empty. The
announcement by the angel was, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek
Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come,
see the place where he lay.” Jesus
Christ did rise to the dead. In his
resurrection he did begin the resurrection of the Last Day. He is the first fruits, the beginning of the
resurrection that we too will share in when he returns in glory.
And
the resurrection of our Lord was something that was not only experienced in a
brief and confused manner on the morning of Easter Sunday. It was not something that was experienced just
the day of Easter Sunday. It was
experienced during the course of forty days. It was experienced in
Jerusalem. It was experienced on a
mountain in northern Israel in Galilee and at the Sea of Galilee. And it was not experienced by some small and
confused group of people. As Paul
declares to us this morning, the risen Lord was seen and heard by Peter and the
other apostless, by James, by more than five hundred Christians as one time;
and finally by Paul himself.
This
is the witness of the Gospel. Jesus
Christ died for your sins, according to the Scriptures. He rose from the dead, according to the
Scriptures. He appeared to many different people in many different place over
the course of more than a month. And
because this happened your sins are forgiven. Because this happened you will
rise from the dead to share in Jesus’ own resurrection on the Last Day. Jesus Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!
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