Jesus was raised from the dead. So what?

The apostle Paul had founded the church in Corinth, Greece, and discovered after he left that over time some problems had arisen in the church. One of these problems was a profound misunderstanding of the meaning of resurrection.

Paul explained to the Corinthians at the beginning of the letter that teaching Christ was raised from the dead would seem like foolishness to people who thought themselves well educated and full of wisdom, but that for those being saved it is the power of God.

But here’s the problem: the Corinthians did not understand resurrection conceptually. They seemed to think that the whole point of Christian faith was the resurrection of Jesus and only Jesus. They had made Jesus’ resurrection the stopping point of their faith. Paul knew that Jesus’ resurrection is beginning point, not the ending point, of Christian faith.

Jesus's tomb was empty. So what?

So Paul ends his letter to answer the “So what?” of Jesus’ resurrection, to correct the misunderstanding that Easter, by itself, is all that Christian faith is about. There were a lot of other issues Paul covered in the letter, this one was central. Here is what Paul wrote:

1 Cor. 15:12-20

12It is proclaimed that Christ has been raised from the dead, so how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ was not raised, either. 14And if Christ was not raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. 15Moreover, we are liars about God, for we have staked our reputations that God raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if all the dead are not raised. 16For if all the dead are not raised, then neither has Christ been raised. 17And if Christ has not been raised, your faith does you no good because you’re still in your sins. 18That means that those who died believing in Christ are gone forever. 19If Christ matters only for this life, we are more pitiful than anyone else. 20But Christ really has been raised from the dead; he was the first to be raised of all the dead.

Let’s remember that the concept of resurrection from death was alien to the pagan world, where stories of a mythical or divine figure dying and living again would not even appear for at least 150 years after Jesus lived. That the Corinthian Christians did not quite grasp the concept is understandable.

But what about us? For most of my life I was taught and believed that the Christian faith stands or falls based on the resurrection of Jesus. And in fact it does – as Paul emphasizes, if Christ has not been raised then we Christians are pathetic people because what we profess to believe would be false and we are still unredeemed of our sins and we just lie to each other at funerals because even “those who died believing in Christ are gone forever.”

Yet that is just the beginning point of what “resurrection” means. So, Paul teaches what the resurrection of Jesus means in the grander scheme of things. Jesus’s resurrection is the guarantee of a promise.

The resurrection that matters most of all, says Paul, is the general resurrection, yet to come, of all the dead. In this letter and in others, Paul is very clear that just as Jesus was raised from the dead, so will all of us. And that resurrection is really what is at the center of Christian faith.

The people in Corinth made a basic mistake: they did indeed profess that Christ was raised, but they dismissed the whole notion that all the dead would be raised. Paul explains that you can’t have one without the other. "How can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?" Paul asked. "If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ was not raised, either."

Paul was trying to explain that resurrection of the dead is a general category into which the resurrection of Jesus was a specific example. The Corinthians accepted the specific example but rejected the category.

It would be like saying, "I know that every October 31 kids go trick or treating, but there is no such thing as Halloween."

Or, "I have a basset hound, but there is no such thing in general as dogs."

Or "I watch the Daytona 500, but there is no such thing as NASCAR racing."

You can’t have the one without the other.

That Christ was raised was a real event, Paul wants to make that clear. But if Jesus’ resurrection is ripped away from its context of the general resurrection of all the dead, then Paul knows we are professing Christ for "this life only," and that’s just pitiful. Divorced from the resurrection of all the dead, the meaning and power of Jesus’ resurrection is lost, Paul says. Simply affirming Jesus’ resurrection cannot bring us to God, anyway. As Paul’s co-apostle James wrote, even the demons know that Jesus was raised.

Paul concludes this passage this way:

1.    Jesus really has been raised from the dead. He does not linger on that point because the Corinthians already believed it. But he restates it to set the grounds for what that means, which is:

2.    Jesus was the first to be raised of all the dead.

In the resurrection of Christ, Paul says, the general resurrection of the dead has already begun. That’s why the Corinthians were so profoundly in error about what Christ’s resurrection meant and why they were at risk of still being lost in their sins.

The fundamental promise of God is that he will bring human beings into reconciliation with himself and preserve the redeemed to live with him forever. The dead will be raised to a new life as the way God accomplishes this when, as the Scriptures put it, "Christ puts all things under his feet."

The book of Hebrews says, "And just as it is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that comes judgment ..." (v. 9.7). Which is to say that each of us dies and that afterward we are the judged by a wholly righteous God for how we lived this physical life and what we did. The passages emphasizing this point are so numerous that I hardly feel compelled to point them out. Start with Matthew 25, for example.

But how do we know that any of this is true? The whole idea of even a single dead person living again is so preposterous on the face of it that it begs credulity to proclaim it. Can we grasp scaling that up to every person who has ever lived? Paul could, and later he explained that it is not the physical body of the dead that is raised, but the spiritual body. This body of flesh and blood is like a seed. And just as seeds planted in the ground disappear as the plant grows, so does this physical body disappear but the resurrected body appears later of a different kind.

This body perishes, says Paul, but the raised body cannot.

This body is ordinary and unimpressive, but the resurrected body is glorious.

This body is weak, but the resurrected body shows the power of God.

This body is physical, but the resurrected body is spiritual.

But again, how do we know that we will be raised from the dead? We know because God has already raised Jesus from the dead. Jesus’ resurrection is how God has proved he will keep his promise to raise everyone the dead at the end of the age. In fact, Paul sees Jesus’ resurrection as the actual inaugural event of the general resurrection.

Now, I must be careful here because the near-universal belief among us Methodists – and American Christians generally – is that when Christians die, their souls are liberated from the physical body and fly immediately to heaven. This is actual doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, with a pit stop in purgatory along the way to work off unremitted sins.

But that is only one understanding. In Jesus’ day most Jews believed that the dead awaited the resurrection in a state of neither heaven nor hell, but basically are just “warehoused” until the general resurrection. And this is the teaching of the Eastern Orthodox Church. I think there is good reason from Jesus’ teachings in the Gospels that he affirmed this idea.

Another understanding is found in Lutheran and some other protestant teaching called “soul sleep” that the souls or spirits of the dead await the resurrection of the dead in a sort of spiritual deep coma. It was only after Luther’s movement succeeded that the RCC made its teaching dogma, about 450 years ago.

And another understanding is that the Bible does not teach the idea of life after death in which a disembodied soul floats out of the body into heaven or survives at all. This says that we do not exist as souls contained in bodies, but we exist as bodies of unified flesh and soul. The death of the body is therefore the destruction of the person altogether. Paul explains elsewhere that death is the most powerful enemy of God, so powerful, in fact, that it is the last enemy of God to be destroyed. So, the Bible does not promise us "life after death," it instead promises that we will live again after we die. After all, if we simply go straight to Heaven when we die, what is the point of the resurrection of the dead?

There is a story of a man leaving a bar after having a rousing time there. He decided to take a shortcut home at midnight by walking through a cemetery. He didn’t see an opened grave and plunged into it. The impact stunned him just enough to enable his whiskey-laden mind and body to go straight asleep.

At daylight he awoke, seeing the blue sky above and the walls of earth all around him. With a sudden fright, he leaped to his feet, stuck his head up and saw hundreds of tombstones and graves all about him. “How about that?” he exclaimed. “Here it is Judgment Day and I’m the first one up!”

That’s what Paul means: Jesus was the first one up. That’s why Paul calls Jesus "the first fruits of those who have died." Your resurrection and mine into eternal life have already begun. Jesus has showed the way. As Hebrews 12 puts it, Jesus is the pioneer of our faith.

Jesus’ resurrection, simply as an historical event, would be a mere curiosity unless it signified something greater than one day in the life of some women who went to a graveyard. The power of Jesus’ resurrection is about what it means for us now.

·        It means that the promises of God are true, that what God says and what God delivers are the one and the same.

·        It means that when God says we will be called to account for how we live out lives, we better take that to heart.

·        It means that when Jesus said and the apostles proclaimed that in him is the remission of our sins, then it is so.

·        It means that we can trust someone who died for us and whose promises of a more abundant life now can be realized now.

·        It means we really can live in love with God and one another. We really can live in peace, filled with joy, in habits of kindness and gentleness and self-control.

The resurrection of Jesus proves that destruction of the physical body is no impediment to God’s saving power, and so our own resurrection is a sure promise of God, also. Hence, we can say with certainty, as Paul later wrote, "If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's" (Romans 14:8).