…Christ has been raised from the dead. He is the first of a great harvest of all who have died.

 So you see, just as death came into the world through a man, now the resurrection from the dead has begun through another man.  Just as everyone dies because we all belong to Adam, everyone who belongs to Christ will be given new life.  But there is an order to this resurrection: Christ was raised as the first of the harvest; then all who belong to Christ will be raised when he comes back.

After that the end will come, when he will turn the Kingdom over to God the Father, having destroyed every ruler and authority and power.  For Christ must reign until he humbles all his enemies beneath his feet. And the last enemy to be destroyed is death (1 Corinthians 15.19-26).

You were dead because of your sins and because your sinful nature was not yet cut away. Then God made you alive with Christ, for he forgave all our sins. He canceled the record of the charges against us and took it away by nailing it to the cross. In this way, he disarmed the spiritual rulers and authorities. He shamed them publicly by his victory over them on the cross (Colossians 2.13-15)

New Living testament

Yesterday I preached about the unimaginably Good News of Christ’s resurrection because it comes from God’s power and realm. Humans don’t have the power to raise the dead and transform death into life. As St. Paul proclaims above, Christ’s resurrection signals the consummation of the defeat of the powers of Evil, Sin, and Death that was won on the cross of Christ. I preached therefore that the promise of the resurrection of the body is the only real antidote to the world’s pain and suffering, along with our own, because only when our bodies have been raised and transformed will the power of Death finally be defeated and we will be restored to God and our loved ones who have died in Christ. Because Christ’s Resurrection is the power of God on display for all to see and because it has such profound life-changing implications for us and those we love, I encouraged our folks, along with Christians everywhere, to be bold in our proclamation of the Resurrection.

It didn’t take long for that proclamation of the Good News of Jesus Christ to get challenged.

On the very day that the Church celebrated our Lord’s resurrection and the ultimate defeat of Death, Islamic terrorists attacked three churches and luxury hotels, sending homicide bombers to commit mass murder. They were successful. The current toll is 310 dead and hundreds wounded. Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy.

Words fail to express our sorrow.

The evil of this horrific act and those who committed it cannot be condemned too strongly, even as we pray God’s forgiveness on these murderers as our Lord Jesus commanded us to do, hard as it is for us to pray as such. We must let God impose his justice on these murderers.

And here we must address the elephant in the room. Don’t these murderous acts prove that the Resurrection is a farce? Does our Resurrection faith have anything to say to us at times like this? Well, no it doesn’t and yes it does.

As St. Paul reminds us above, the resurrection of the dead has already begun, but it is happening in two stages: first Christ’s resurrection and then our own. St. Paul boldly proclaims that the first fruits are so far reaching that even now they are working to bring restoration of all kinds, life from death, and to conquer evil, especially the ultimate evil of Death. But how can that be in light of these horrific mass murders?

We aren’t told. Instead we are told to remember the power of God demonstrated in Christ’s resurrection. Only the power of God witnessed in Christ’s resurrection has the power to fix and heal this.

Yet we can still peer into the glass dimly (1 Corinthians 13.12). We can talk about the transformed lives that are part of the first fruits about which St. Paul speaks. As Christians we are to bear the fruit of forgiveness and healing and compassion for those who were wounded and for those who lost loved ones in the attacks. We are not to retaliate, but to forgive, even as we pray for God’s justice to be done. We are to embody the healing love and forgiveness of Christ to the victims of this atrocity and to those who perpetrated it, impartial and incomplete as our efforts must be. St. Paul tells us as much at the conclusion of his treatise on the Resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15. Instead of telling us to have a party and celebrate Christ’s victory over death, he tells us to, “be strong and immovable. Always work enthusiastically for the Lord, for you know that nothing you do for the Lord is ever useless [emphasis added]” (1 Corinthians 15.58). In other words, we can have confidence that God in his power, enigmatic as it is for us to comprehend and see in times like this, is using our puny and imperfect efforts to embody the love and mercy and justice of Christ to bring about the new creation God launched when he raised his Son from the dead. In other words, this is the first fruits of Christ’s resurrection working in and through his people. That takes faith, my beloved, the kind of faith that knows and has experienced the love and power of God, however imperfectly and incompletely. Evil, while still terribly active in God’s world, will not have the last say. Life, not death, is the final outcome.

And for those who have had loved ones murdered, our resurrection hope can mitigate against the pain of losing their loved ones to death. One day, their loved ones will be raised from the dead and given new, transformed bodies that will be immortal and impervious to any kind of evil our mortal bodies are subject to. They will be able to see them, speak to them, touch them, hold them, and rejoice with them. They will be able to love them as God created humans to love. Evil and those who commit it will be banished forever. God’s justice will be fully implemented because the dead are brought back to life and restored to those they loved in this mortal life.

This hope, the sure and certain expectation of things to come because God really did raise Jesus Christ from the dead and promises to do likewise with those who belong to Christ—this is what St. Paul means when he tells us that God makes us alive in Christ; we share his resurrected destiny in God’s promised new world—will not keep us immune from the power of Evil nor will it prevent us from grieving. How can it as long as it remains hope unrealized? But it is what must sustain us until it is realized at our Lord’s return.

Our resurrection hope is rooted in the power and love of God, and in history. In the face of unspeakable evil it proclaims that the power of darkness and death will not have the final say, that God really is in control, even in moments like this, and that for those who are in Christ, there is a future and a hope that God promises for all his people (cf. Jeremiah 29.11). New bodies. Restored relationships. The power of God, unimaginable as it is for us is the only thing that has the power to heal us in our grief and sustain us in the living of our mortal days.

Pray for those who have been afflicted by this evil. Pray that they (and we) may not lose hope and heart. Pray that God will sustain us in the power of the Spirit and remind us that nothing in all creation can separate us from his love for us made known in Christ. Pray that we may consciously focus on God’s power made known in the Resurrection of Christ so that we may be reminded and strengthened by its hope that new bodily life is our future too.

Finally, pray God’s comfort and consolation for those who grieve, both in and through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on those who grieve and through the human touch made available by those who belong to Christ in this world.