For the winter months at St Peter's we've been working our way through
Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth and as we come into spring we have
almost come to the end of this great epistle.
Like a good movie or a good book, there has been tension and stress,
Paul was writing to a group that was split and squabbling over which leader was
the best, over what constituted Christian morality, differing views on how they
related to the culture round them, how you treated each other when they gathered
for worship, over who was more spiritual and what did that mean in the first
place. And like a good movie or a good book as we come to the end we come to the
climax. In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul tackles the core problem at Corinth and he
does it by going to the core of the gospel. Behind all the symptoms of disunity
and unloving behaviour comes a false understanding of how the resurrection of
Jesus Christ is experienced in our lives now and its future ultimate reality. How we view the resurrection and what it means
for us effects how we live our lives as God’s New People in Christ.
The problem that Paul addresses in this chapter is that some
did not believe in the resurrection from the dead. Gordon Fee says that there were cultural and
theological factors that contributed to some at Corinth not believing.
Culturally, most of the believers at Corinth had come to
faith from a pagan background; they had grown up with a Greek Philosophical
understanding of the world: An
understanding that, like our western worldview today did not believe in a
bodily resurrection. For the Greeks
there was a dualism between the spiritual and the physical, the body and the
soul or spirit. The body was seen as the inferior, it was the soul that
mattered. Their understanding of an afterlife was some shadowy existence of
that part of us known as the soul. In this life we were embodied spirits; in
any afterlife we became disembodied. You can still see some of that thinking
today when people talk about being human in terms of body mind and spirit and a
hangover in our Christian faith with people talking about saving souls. This
understanding impacted on how people lived as well with either an indulging of
all the bodies desires with no through of consequence, because it did not have
an impact on our soul, or a denying of the body a stoic aestheticism. You can
see elements of this in all the issues that plagued the church at Corinth.
The theological factor came with the “spiritual ones”
thinking that they had arrived, that they experienced in this life the fullness
of God. They thought that in Christ they had become like angels, and for them
being spiritual meant a final ditching of the body, not because it was evil but
because it was inferior and beneath them.
They had what is technically called an over-realised eschatology.
Eschatology means the study of the last things and realised eschatology means
people believe the kingdom of God had come in all its
fullness, that there is no future consummation at all.
OK Lets turn to look at how Paul addresses that issue.
He starts by pointing them back to the gospel that he
preached to them and which they believed,
a gospel based on an actual event in history, the death and the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. Without which, says
Paul, their faith is in vain.
With the same introduction Paul had used about the words of
institution for the Lord’s Supper, he shares with them what is seen as one of
the most ancient creeds of the Church.
Christ died for our sins
According to scripture
He was buried
and he rose again on the third day
according to scripture
And was seen.
It places this central event of the gospel in its context in God’s plans
and purposes because all was done according to scripture and it anchors it in a
‘historical reality.’ He was buried’ affirms the fact that Jesus actually died.
‘He was seen’ is an affirmation of an empty tomb. Jesus rose and was seen,
touched and encountered by people.
Like a detective story or a court room drama, Paul calls forth
witnesses. He lists the people that had met the risen Christ. Cephas was known
and respected by the Church at Corinth, James the brother of Jesus may have
been considered a hostile witness as he did not believe in Jesus before the
resurrection, but now had become the head of the Church in Jerusalem. This
forensic nature of this list may be why Paul does not name the women who had
the privilege of being the first to see Jesus risen. In the Jewish legal system
of the time women were not able to be witnesses.
He protects the chain of
evidence by saying that many of these
people were still alive, and by putting himself on the list of those who had
seen the risen Christ. Paul believed his encounter with Jesus on the Damascus Road
was the last of these encounters. The people at Corinth had heard from an eye
witness.
He says that he was like someone untimely born. But the power of that
encounter cannot be denied, as Paul digresses to say that he was the least of
the apostles. It may be here that Paul
is using a play on his name and stature as Paulus means little one. But also Paul
here is saying that he did not deserve God’s grace as he persecuted the church.
The meeting with Christ turned his life around. Now he works hard for the sake
of the gospel… but even then he says that all this was done by grace.
Paul does this to affirm the fact that the Christian faith is based on
the bodily resurrection of Christ. This passage is often used as an apologetic
for non-believers, but the key point Paul is making serves as a reaffirmation
to believers of the truth of what they already believed. The church may have
been split into various factions following various leaders but says Paul we all
proclaim this Gospel. It speaks to us as
much today as to the people of Corinth. Given the scientific materialistic
world view of our own culture, there are those who would want to see the
resurrection as nothing more than a myth, a way that simple first century
people explained the sense of Christ’s presence with them after he had died.
Paul’s argument is as much a challenge to this as it was to the Church at
Corinth.
Paul then takes up two contradictory positions. He takes the
Corinthians position that there is no resurrection from the dead, and shows how
it causes the whole of the faith to collapse like a pack of cards. If there is
no resurrection from the dead then Christ did not rise. Our preaching is in vain. It’s worse than that;
we are calling God a liar. We are still dead in our sins. There is no hope of
eternal life. We are just following another dead religious person and we are to
be pitied.
Then he contrasts that with the reality of Christ’s resurrection. He
says it is the first fruits of those who
have fallen asleep. He talks of the
resurrection in terms of God’s new creation, Just as death had come into the
world through one man Adam, so life and new creation has come through one man
Jesus Christ. Death and decay and sin have lost. However the fulfilment of that
for us is still a future reality. God’s kingdom has come, Christ reigns, but we
live between its inauguration and consummation. Christ is restoring all
creation to life and the last enemy to be defeated will b death.
Perhaps the best way to explain that is to talk about engagement. Kris and I got engaged while we were both students at the Bible College of New Zealand,
which is now Laidlaw College. We’d known each other for almost two years and
being going out for over a year. We’d been for a walk and sat down on a broken
down trailer full of garden rubbish. Romantic setting, right? Kris of Course focuses on the apple orchard we were looking at the sunset over the Waitakere rangers. We’d been talking
about weddings and being the smooth romantic guy that I am I said so we’ve been
talking about weddings do you think we should think about ours? Kris replied
‘Are you asking me to marry you?’ To which I replied ‘ If I did would you say
Yes? She stopped for a long moment then smiled and said yes. So I asked her,
and she said yes. Now Bible College was
jokingly called bridal college and there were a few of us engaged guys living
on the men’s side. Being good theology students we called ourselves the
inaugurated eschatology club. For us it meant already but not yet. We were
committed, life had totally changed, but it would have to wait to be
consummated. This is the reality that Paul wants to get across to the
Corinthians. Yes Jesus has risen from the dead, Yes we experience the new
creation and new life happening in our lives, but there will come a time when
Christ returns and the dead will be raised. That is a future reality.
Paul then goes on to show the futility of a lot of things if there was
no resurrection from the dead. We don’t really know what the practice Paul is
talking about when he says “baptism for the dead” it was a practice that was
known to the Church at Corinth, and if they didn't believe in the resurrection
from the dead, then it seemed absurd
that they would do it. Why says Paul should I bother risking my life for the
sake of the gospel. If there is nothing
after this then why put up with the things that he had put up with, he had been
mistreated in Ephesus and you tell the depth of his feeling by the way he uses
the metaphor of wild beasts. If this is
all there is says Paul why bother Wouldn't it make more sense to go the way of
despair and eat and drink whatever you
like? But because of the assurance he has in the resurrection from the dead,
because Christ was raised to life, he encourages the Church at Corinth to turn
from their sins and to live in a different way.
Ok, So how does this connect with where we are here and now. How does
it impact on us as God’s new people?
Firstly there is the affirmation of the resurrection. Even
when it runs in the face of our cultural understanding. We are a people of hope and new life because
Christ is alive. Gordon Fe asserts that “ Easter, which should be celebrated
more frequently in the Church, and not just at the Easter season, calls for our
reaffirming the faith to the converted”. Christ has been raised from the dead,
the new creation has started, you and I can experience that in our lives,
forgiveness, healing, wholeness, communion with God, engrafting into God’s
people.
Secondly, You've heard the saying “all heavenly minded and
no earthly use’, living in the resurrection reality says Paul is to be all
heavenly minded but that should work its self out in being of great earthly
use. In Colossians 3 Paul tells the church that as we have this new life in
Christ we should put of the old life, and he lists a whole lot of negative
behavior, and calls those who are God’s new creation to put on the new life. This
resurrection reality is to be lived out now in how we love, act and react to
one another. That’s been at the core of what Paul had been having to encourage
and teach the Corinthians to do all the way through his letter. Being Spiritual
isn't ditching this existence its infusing it with resurrection realty.
Secondly, The Christian understanding of what it is to be human comes
out of the Jewish understanding of a human, which is one in keeping in with what
we might call a holistic view. It’s based on the fact that we are made in the
image of God. Some people have wanted to quantify that in terms of things we
would identify with the soul or spirit, but the biblical narrative does not
support that. The whole of who we are matters to God. What we do and what is
done to us in our bodies matters to God. The whole of who we are as individuals
matters to God. How we are treated by
others and how we treat each other matters to God.
Lastly, we haven’t arrived, this is not the end. We live with the
tension between ‘already’ and ‘not yet’. Yes we have new life in Christ but we
still live in a world affected by the fall so we suffer; there is disease and
death. But God’s kingdom does not give us a way out rather it invites us to
enter into and bring (by the spirit and by grace) God’s reign and God’s new
life into these hard situations. We do this with the knowledge that, because of
the death and resurrection of Christ, God is able to speak into those
situations with new life and healing and restoration. The ultimate fulfillment of that however will
have to wait until Christ returns. Then we will be raised to life? What form
will that take… well we’ll have to wait to next week.
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