1 Corinthians 15:12-26
April 4, 2010
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!
The apostle Paul declares in our text that Jesus’ resurrection is our guaranteed. Because he lives, we live. But how long will we live?
If we were to look at our temporal bodies for a moment, how long might we expect to live? If you live in Japan, there’s a good chance you could live well past the age of 100. A 2008 survey revealed that Japan has more centenarians than any other country in the world with 36,000 citizens aged 100 or older. That’s a huge increase from 1963; the first year the country started recording the number, when there were only 153 people in the centenarian category.
Compared to other nations, Japan’s longevity factor leaves the rest of the world looking positively sickly by comparison. Out of 1.3 billion people in China, for example, there are only 18,000 centenarians, while in the United States the ratio is about 10 per 100,000. Life expectancy in Japan is a full four years longer than in America.
Japanese cultural traits, good genes and a focus on social activity and family may have something to do with long life in Japan, but diet appears to have even more of an impact. Unlike a typical Western diet, the daily Japanese diet doesn’t contain much meat or sugar. In fact, an average Japanese person eats 86.2 grams of fat per day, or about half of the 155.4 grams eaten by the average American. Some experts fear that as younger generations are influenced by the West’s eating styles, Japan’s edge in longevity will continue to be nibbled away like on an oversized Twinkie.
Now it isn’t as if we Americans don’t know that eating too much fat can shorten one’s life span, or that spending too much time on the couch may require a larger coffin sooner than later. We’ve been told over and over that just four things are needed to live a basic healthy lifestyle: Be a non-smoker, exercise at least 30 minutes a day five or more times a week, eat five or more servings of fruits and vegetables a day and maintain a healthy weight. Yet, a 2005 Michigan State study revealed that only three percent of Americans do all these things. How can we live longer?
Eat and Be Merry
Besides the fact that fatty foods taste good and that exercising requires sweating, our drift toward a shorter life span may have as much to do with ancient Greek philosophy. It’s the philosophy that Paul confronts in this section of his first letter to the Corinthians. He writes to people who have come to believe in Christ but still hold on to some of the ancient assumptions about the body—assumptions that many Westerners like us who are also church people still hold today.
In the fourth or fifth century B.C., philosophers like Plato postulated a dualism between the body and the soul. Speaking in general terms, Plato believed the body to be the enemy of the soul primarily because the body engages the world through its senses, which can deceive a person’s view of reality. For Plato, the real world was the world of eternal and universal ideas that can be seen only with the mind’s eye and can be known by humans only after death (or before birth, as human souls were thought to be pre-existent).
To put in another way, Plato saw the body, although beautiful and worthy of art and sculpture, to be a kind of prison: something to be removed at death so the soul could move to a higher plane of knowledge and existence.
This philosophical idea has permeated Western culture and, perhaps more tellingly, much of Christian theology and thought. The idea of an eternal and blissful heaven as the realm of the soul at death is a vision that many Christians and even nonreligious people believe to be true. In this view, the body has no ultimate use or value in comparison to the spiritual life lived on clouds behind pearly gates where souls have wings and plucking on harps all day long.
So if most people believe even unconsciously that their bodies are simply destined for the ground anyway while their souls will experience heavenly bliss, what incentive is there to care for the body in the present? Why live a long life on earth when eternity in heaven is waiting? Why not “eat, drink and be merry” in the present body, because tomorrow we’ll die (1 Cor. 15:32, quoting Isaiah 22:13)?
These may have very well been the questions the first-century Corinthians were asking, having been culturally steeped in Hellenistic philosophy and living in a prosperous cosmopolitan city where there were plenty of opportunities to eat, drink and make merry. So when Paul came to Corinth and preached a gospel centered on the resurrection of Jesus’ body as the “first fruits” of the general resurrection of human bodies at the end of time (v. 23), it’s no wonder that some of them scoffed at his message.
Bodies coming out of tombs may be a wonderful spiritual metaphor, but many of them, like Christians even today, believing it to be literally true was spiritually and intellectually repugnant.
Not a Metaphor
Paul insisted that the resurrection was anything but a metaphor. The empty tomb on Easter morning was central for the whole Christian movement and the only hope for all of creation. If the women who went to the tomb didn’t really find the tomb empty because Jesus hadn’t literally risen from the dead, then the consequences for Paul and the church were staggering. Without this reality, Paul’s preaching ministry would have been useless and deceitful, and his life of constant risk and danger on behalf of the gospel would have been in vain. The resurrection was not just an idle tale as some of the disciples felt when they heard from the women who saw the empty tomb.
For the Corinthians and other Christians then and now, the consequences that the resurrection never happened were perhaps even direr. Without resurrection, Paul says, “Your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (v. 17) and those who have died before are simply dead (v. 18). Notice that Paul wasn’t speaking about some disembodied spiritual heaven that Plato philosophized.
For Paul, the resurrection of Jesus was absolutely vital because it validated the essential goodness of God’s creation. Resurrection meant that God wasn’t abandoning the creation project that he had been working on since Genesis, despite humanity’s desire to engage its own failed self-indulgent and self-destructive project.
In the resurrection of Jesus, Paul says, God was doing nothing less than beginning to reverse the curse of sin and death that entered the world through human sin. “For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so will all be made alive in Christ” (vv. 21-22). The resurrection of Jesus was thus the first example and the beginning of the resurrection to come for all of us in “the end” when Jesus returns destroying the forces of evil, and God sets his good creation in the way that it had always been intended (vv. 23-25).
Unlike Plato’s philosophy, the resurrection of Jesus wasn’t trying to postpone death or simply seeing it as a better transition to a spiritual existence. On Easter, death itself had been place on notice that its reign of terror was nearing an end. For Paul, the body is not the enemy, as it was for Plato, but death is! (v. 26). The goal of life isn’t a ticket to heaven but a renewed body in a renewed creation. It’s trying to live a healthy and good long life as a centenarian!
This is the reason why we revere our seniors and do everything we possibly can to prevent people from committing suicide. Our goal in life is to have a renewed body in a renewed creation.
The point of Easter isn’t merely that it’s a nice metaphor for some kind of new life, often symbolized by dyed eggs, furry bunnies, green plastic grass and jelly bellies). Nor is it just evidence that Jesus was divine but eventually went back to heaven and if we just happen to pray the right prayer and do the right things, we’ll get to go be with him there someday in spirit.
Live Longer Now
No, the point of Easter is that this world, God’s good creation, matters. What we do and how we live, as people created in God’s image in this good creation, has ultimate significance when we understand ourselves to be part of God’s mission of a “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17). We care for ourselves. We care for each other and we care for the earth because we know that God has not and will not abandon this creation project but will ultimately make it whole again. This is the true reason why we recycle, compost, and installed solar collector panels on our rooftop.
As we wait for that great day, we are to spend our lives not giving into death but embracing the goodness of life.
When I wake up in the morning now that I am 60 and will be 61 in about a month, my body has aches and pains. I try to do those four basic things regularly so that I might live long enough to be a centenarian. But the aches and pains are still there all the time.
If I lie very still in bed (so I don’t feel my aching joints), I can imagine I’m still five, or fifteen, or even forty-five. I can imagine with my body in those different chapters in my life. I can still remember what it was like to wake up with what I called, in my childhood, the “morning feeling.” That morning feeling was not just that my body had no aches and pains but there was a thrill to what surprises or new experiences I might have in the new day. That’s what it feels to have a “resurrection” day here on earth.
The point of the gospel isn’t that we go to heaven and be with God but that God comes here to be with us: “Your kingdom come…on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10).
The prophet Isaiah said in Christ’s resurrection, God is creating new heavens and a new earth (65:17). In this new world, there won’t be any more weeping to be heard or the crying of distress. Isaiah goes on to say, “No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed” (65:20).
We are to live longer and there’s no better way to do that but to live longer in Christ!
Good News
You came to hear good news on this Day of Resurrection. The good news is that Jesus is risen! The tomb is empty. Jesus is the first fruits of God finally defeating death and what will come later is the resurrection of the rest of us. While we wait for that day to come, in the mean time we give shouts of rejoicing for new and everlasting life even while we live in the shadow of death.
We sing, we rejoice, because we know that all that we have now is not all we will ever have. We know that all we are now is not all we are ever going to be. We know that all we see now is not all we are ever going to see. If it were the case that what we have now is all we can expect than surely the world’s pity would be in order, but it’s not, more awaits—of this we can be sure.
You may have come this morning wondering, pondering, questioning, maybe amazed, astonished, and perplexed like those women and disciples who first went to the empty tomb. Whether or not you believe in the resurrection makes no difference! It makes no difference concerning the facts, but it makes all the difference concerning your fate. Your belief cannot alter the facts, but it can alter your fate.
So why not live longer in Christ? Why not live long and prosper today? Whether we are 10, 60 or 110, each day we live is another opportunity to advance the kingdom of God on earth and to bring the day of death’s ultimate defeat that much closer.
Let us pray.
O God, sometimes we act as though we have giving up hope in this life. If our only hope were in this life, lead us not to be pitied, but help us to care for ourselves, care for each other, and care for the rest of the world because Christ is risen for the hope of renewed lives in a renewed world. The fact is Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. If by one person came death, by this new person, Christ, has come life eternal. This means that both in this life and in the life to come, we rejoice, because we have been set free from sin and death through Christ our Savior. Therefore we need not fear or despair, but instead we can rejoice, knowing we are forgiven and empowered through his eternal Spirit. Amen.