Your daily dose of encouragement to seek Christ and the things of heaven during the midst of pandemic and fear. If yesterday you missed why I’m do this, you can read about it here.
Reading for Tuesday of Easter Week: 1 Corinthians 15.12-19
12 But tell me this—since we preach that Christ rose from the dead, why are some of you saying there will be no resurrection of the dead? 13 For if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised either. 14 And if Christ has not been raised, then all our preaching is useless, and your faith is useless. 15 And we apostles would all be lying about God—for we have said that God raised Christ from the grave. But that can’t be true if there is no resurrection of the dead. 16 And if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins. 18 In that case, all who have died believing in Christ are lost! 19 And if our hope in Christ is only for this life, we are more to be pitied than anyone in the world.
As we saw yesterday, resurrection is hard for us to imagine because it comes from God, not humans, and so it shouldn’t surprise us to see that even in St. Paul’s day there were folks who struggled to believe that Jesus Christ is raised from the dead. Here he tells us that our future resurrection is based on the fact that Christ is raised from the dead because our life here and hereafter are inextricably linked to his. No resurrection for Jesus, no resurrection for his followers.
Second, if the resurrection is a myth, then the things St. Paul and the other apostles had been preaching about the saving power of the cross were a lie. Without the resurrection, Jesus would have died the death of a common criminal and the cross would have remained a sign of shame and degradation rather than of God’s forgiveness, healing, and redemption of our sins and brokenness. If that were the case, then our sins have not been forgiven and we remain hostile and alienated from God. The trajectory of this world and our mortal life remains decay and death. We have no hope, no future. We are dead people walking.
Third, if we have no hope or future, we are living a lie and those who preached Jesus Christ crucified and raised from the dead are liars themselves. They lied about God, about life, and about death. No Good News there.
And finally, if there is no resurrection, anyone who follows Christ with his demand to us to deny ourselves and take up our cross is a fool and should be pitied. If we have no future other than this mortal life, we’d better be grabbing for all the gusto we can get (and other earthly things) before we die. With no real future, self-giving love is a farce and a delusion.
St. Paul’s point is that the resurrection was the course-changing event in history. It proclaims that we have a future and that even though we suffer mortal death and are afflicted by all kinds of evil, our future is life, not death. That’s why we have hope, the sure and certain expectation of things to come. We have this sure and certain expectation because we believe that Christ is alive, and because he is, we are taught that those who follow him are promised a share in both his life and death.
How can/does this hope (the sure and certain expectation of resurrected life in God’s new world) help mitigate the death dealing news of COVID-19 or other death dealing events in your life? What signs of new creation and new life do you see breaking through around you? Think it over and think it through. Then talk to other Christians and see what you come up with. This is keeping your focus on Christ and things of heaven. God in his grace and love for you will surely bless your efforts.
Tomorrow: 1 Corinthians 15.20-28