1 Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. 2 By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.
3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. 6 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8 and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.
9 For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. 10 But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.11 Whether, then, it is I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.
–1 Corinthians 15.1-11 (NIV)
Today I begin a six part series of reflections on Paul’s great treatise on the resurrection of Jesus and all that it entails.
“Remember who you are, Kevin.” My mother often said this to me before I went out to be with my buddy as a teenager. In saying this to me, she was reminding me to remember what our family name stood for and to act accordingly, i.e., she was reminding me not to act stupidly and to embrace all that my family had worked so hard to accomplish. Paul is doing something similar with the Corinthians in this passage today. He wants them to remember who they are and Whose they are. Why? Because when they embrace the hope and promise of the resurrection, they will have truly defeated the forces of evil and all that can go wrong in our lives. It hasn’t happened yet to its full extent, Paul is reminding us, but it is coming.
How can Paul say this? Because Jesus’ resurrection has indeed happened in history and is therefore a preview of coming attractions, and Paul here is reminding the Corinthians of this fact. It’s important to remember that Paul is writing this letter some 20-25 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, long before the first gospel accounts were written, so this is our first recorded eyewitness testimony that the resurrection is historical. Paul takes pains to explain the historicity of the bodily resurrection by recounting the testimony of various witnesses (neatly expunging the testimony of the first witnesses of the resurrection–the women–in the process, which is yet another reason why we can believe the gospels’ accounts of the resurrection).
It is critical for us to understand what Paul has in mind when he talks about resurrection because if we do not understand what the NT writers mean when they talk about resurrection, we rob ourselves of the real hope and promise of the Christian faith. When Paul talks about resurrection, he emphatically was not talking about dying and then living in some spiritual existence. Bishop Tom Wright says it best in his book, Surprised by Hope:
Resurrection in the first century meant someone physically, thoroughly dead becoming physically, thoroughly alive again, no simply surviving or entering a “purely spiritual” world, whatever that might be. Resurrection therefore necessarily impinges on the public world (75).
So here we see Paul building the solid foundation for his coming argument about the resurrection and all it entails. There are witnesses available, himself included, who can testify that Jesus did rise bodily from the dead. This alerts us immediately to the fact that God’s creation and its creatures are important to God and that God has something spectacular in mind for us. We will explore that throughout this week.
In the meantime, think about what Paul wants us to know in this passage. Our hope in Jesus’ resurrection is not founded on wishful or delusional thinking. It’s rooted in real history and we have evidence that it really happened, just like, for example, we have evidence that Lincoln actually delivered his famous address at Gettysburg. If you believe this, you’ve got the basis for Good News and hope in all circumstances (but not immunity from the evil that can beset all of us). Simply put, Paul is beginning to tell us that Jesus’ death and resurrection were the turning point of history because in these two events, God has intervened to defeat evil, sin, and death. If you cannot find good news in that truth, where can you find it?