Easter
1
Cor 15:1-11
4/20/14
On
Wednesday of Holy Week, the movie “Heaven Is for Real” was released and began
to be seen in movie theaters. The movie
is a film adaptation of the 2010 New York Times bestselling book by the same
title. Written by Todd Burpo, it tells
the story of how his young son Colton
almost died after an undiagnosed ruptured appendix. The claim of the book and
movie is that during the life saving surgery, Colton made a trip to heaven and returned
with reliable knowledge of the fact that heaven is real and what it is like.
Now
I am certain the movie will be a huge financial success, just as the book
was. I have watched the trailers for the
movie and can report that it stars Greg Kinnear who is perfectly suited to play
the caring father. They have found the
cutest little boy you are ever going to see to play Colton.
The soundtrack will be filled with music that is deeply moving. And the story about the life after death of
loved ones is something people want to believe.
Todd
Burpo is a Wesleyan pastor, and so the story about Colton and his experience are framed within
Christianity. Christian groups are
pushing the movie as a way of getting people to think about eternal life.
Naturally,
the timing of the release of the movie is very intentional. It was released
during Holy Week – just days before Easter – because this is a time when people
are inclined to think about spiritual things.
Easter is, of course, one of the few times during the year when many
people drag themselves to church.
However,
the timing of the movie highlights the degree to which many Christians fail to
understand what the resurrection of Jesus Christ means. It underscores a failure to grasp what it
means to be a human being created by God.
And it emphasizes how often people fail to recognize the impact of sin
upon us and creation itself.
The
epistle lesson for Easter is the first portion of 1 Corinthians chapter 15 –
Paul’s great resurrection chapter. Like
so much of 1 Corinthians, we have this text and all of the important revelation
it provides because of problems with the Christians in Corinth.
It’s quite clear that the Corinthians were denying the resurrection of
the body.
Now
it’s not the resurrection of Jesus that they doubted. Instead, they didn’t believe that their
own bodies would be raised. They had a spiritualized understanding of the
faith in which they seemed to believe that in some way they had already shared
in Christ’s resurrection. They thought that they already had arrived – that
they were mature and wise in Christ – and that they already had
everything. They didn’t have doubts
about the resurrection of their own bodies.
Instead, they rejected it altogether.
And
it’s here that the message of the movie “Heaven Is for Real’ is relevant. In the strongest terms, the movie affirms
life after death. But the question arises: What kind of life is this? What kind of life are we intended to live for
all eternity? The answer is one that does not involve the human body in any
way. In reviewing the book, Dr. Jeff
Gibbs of Concordia Seminary wrote: “There is not one crumb, not one word in Heaven
is For Real that God’s full plan of salvation in Christ means eternal life now,
and on the last day, full bodily holiness and immortality for all believers and
for the whole cosmos. There is no
appreciation for the importance of our bodies, and of God’s promise in Christ
to redeem them and raise us to everlasting life.”
If
that is what we take away from Easter – from the resurrection of Jesus Christ –
then we haven’t understood it at all. We
haven’t understood what God made us to be.
And we haven’t understood what sin has done to us.
In
our text, Paul begins with the crucial fact about today – the crucial fact of
the Gospel. Jesus didn’t just die. He also rose from the dead. Paul 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. 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.”
On
Good Friday we focused upon the fact that Christ died for our sins. Isaiah chapter 53 told us in no uncertain terms
that Jesus Christ took our sins upon himself and died for them in our
place. Because of this we have
forgiveness. It’s the same thing that
Paul says in 2 Corinthians when he describes how God was in Christ reconciling
the world to himself and says, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no
sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
Jesus
Christ did this. And then on the third
day – on Easter – he rose from the dead.
As we heard in our Gospel lesson, the tomb was empty. But it’s not just that the tomb was
empty. Rather, the risen Lord appeared
and was seen by his followers. In our
text Paul provides a list of witnesses: Cephas, that is, Peter; all the
apostles at once; five hundred believers at one time; James the brother of our
Lord; and then finally Paul himself on the road to Damascus.
This
was no mere vision or apparition. In
Luke’s Gospel Jesus says, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in
your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see.
For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And then to
prove the point he asked for something to eat, and ate some broiled fish in front
of them. Jesus wanted them to know that
it was a true resurrection of the body.
Actually
after the resurrection it was – and still is – a bodily existence that is more
true than what we know now. You see,
God created Adam’s body from the dust of the ground and breathed into him the
breath of life. He created human beings
as a unity of body and soul. And the
only way you can have the life God intends for you is by having a body. That’s
simply the way God set things up.
Created
in God’s image, Adam and Eve lived in perfect harmony with God, with one
another, and with the very good creation God had made. They lived that way, that is, until they were
tempted by Satan into disobeying God.
They sinned. And sin brought pain.
It brought sickness. It brought
death. As Paul say in this chapter, “in
Adam all die.”
Unless
Christ returns first, you are going to die.
In fact, you are already in the process of dying – the pictures don’t
lie. On Facebook, Thursday is called
“Throwback Thursday.” It’s a day when
people post picture of themselves an and their family from the past. Now the pictures of children when they were
younger are cute. But when I look at
pictures of myself or the adults I know, the thought that crosses my mind is,
“Man we are getting old.” We are aging,
and that process of aging is a one way ticket to death.
You
are aging. You get sick. You have aches and pains. And all of this bears witness to the fact
that you are sinner. The impact of sin
on your life is not merely about the fact you think and do things you
shouldn’t, and fail to do things you should.
Instead, it is also the fact that your very existence is warped and
twisted by sin. Because of sin, you have an expiration date. You just don’t know what it is yet. You have that expiration date because you are
a sinner who sins. As Paul told the
Romans, “The wages of sin is death.”
The
Gospel as Paul defines it provides the answer to all of these problems.
Christ died on behalf of your sins.
Because of his death you are justified – you are righteous now in God’s
eyes and will be declared to be this on the Last Day. And then on Easter,
Christ rose from the dead. When he rose
from the dead, he defeated death. He began
the resurrection of the Last Day.
Now
we confess that in the incarnation the Son of God took humanity into himself,
without ceasing to be God. Though he was
without sin, we saw something on Friday that you should stop and ponder: Jesus
Christ was mortal - he was “killable.”
And the Romans used a cross to do just that.
On
Easter Jesus rose from the dead. But
this was no mere returning to the same existence he had lived before – a human
existence once again plagued by mortality.
Instead, Jesus Christ was raised by the Spirit with a body that was
transformed so that it can never die again. This is what the resurrection of the Last Day
is all about. Easter declares that it has already begun in Jesus. Just after our text Paul writes, “But in fact
Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen
asleep. 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.”
Many
Christians have died during the last two thousand years before Christ’s
return. You may die before he
returns. And so the good news is that the
one thing the book and movie have right is that, yes, heaven is for real. For the Christian death is not the final
world. When Paul contemplated the
possibility of his own death he told the Philippians, “My desire is to depart
and be with Christ, for that is far better.” Death cannot separate you from
Jesus Christ. If you die your personal
existence, what the Scriptures call the soul, will be with Christ and this is
what Bible also calls heaven. In Christ
you already have eternal life now and death cannot change that fact. There is
tremendous comfort in this.
But
if you die, there will be a funeral and your body will be buried in the ground.
And that is not very good. That is not what God intended for
you. Yes, heaven is real. Yes, heaven is
good. But heaven is not enough. Heaven cannot be the final destination because
it is not the bodily existence that God created you to have.
On
Easter, Jesus Christ rose from the dead with a body transformed so that it can
never die again. That is what is going
to happen to your body when Christ returns on the Last Day. Paul went on to say
to the Philippians later in the letter, “…we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus
Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the
power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.” Your body will be transformed, and so will
creation itself as it too is freed of sin’s impact – as it is freed from the
slavery of corruption.
Bodily
existence in God’s good creation - that is what God declared to be “very good”
in the beginning. That is what God has
already begun in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is what you will
receive on the Last Day when Jesus Christ returns in glory. Jesus Christ has risen from the dead, and
because he has, your body will be transformed too.
No comments:
Post a Comment