I Corinthians 15:12-20
“No Pity”
February 13, 2022 – Sixth Sunday after Epiphany
The Department of Defense has a plan for the “zombie apocalypse.” Back around 2010 they created Conplan 8888, a “Counter-Zombie Dominance” survival strategy book. It wasn’t a serious effort to prepare for an actual attack of the undead, but it was felt to be a good training tool to prepare military and public agencies for a widespread disaster that included elements of infection and disease control. You may have heard of first responders in various communities conducting zombie-preparedness exercises.
I won’t try to explore all the reasons our society is fascinated with zombies. Just last week, Beth and I watched yet another television show in which zombie-like monsters stumbled around. But it is interesting that our culture has turned a key element of Christian hope and the Apostles’ Creed, the resurrection of the body, into a horror story.
Part of the horror surrounding resuscitated dead bodies may stem from thinking similar to that which existed in Corinth in the first century. As our text begins in verse 12, Paul remarks “some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead?” But why would they have said that? And what did they mean by it? Though classical Greece adored the human body—their sculpture and athletic games say it all—it may be that late Greek, neo-Platonic abhorrence for the physical body carried over among some converts to Christianity.
Just like today, a large majority of people in the ancient world would have believed in some sort of afterlife. However, just like today, many of them would have supposed that it had more to do with an escape from one’s body rather than a revival of one’s body. That is, following Plato and many other Greek thinkers, they would have believed in an immaterial soul that animates each human body, but which departs at death. Any conception of an afterlife would be about that soul going on in some bodiless form. That’s still how many folks, including Christians, see things today.
It is not uniquely Christian to believe in life after death. Hindus and Muslims believe in it. Even some atheists think advances in technology may one day allow us to preserve a human mind, an immaterial soul consisting of information, in a suitable computer. Hundreds of years before Jesus, Socrates and Plato argued persuasively for life after death, because the human soul is the sort of thing that just has to last forever. It’s not a distinctively Christian belief.
Yet Christian scholar N. T. Wright and others remind us that our usual talk about what happens when we die is not quite what Paul has in view here, not quite what we regularly recite in the Creed, not quite what Christian faith is all about. What do we often say about a Christian who dies? She goes to heaven, right? She’s with the Lord, right? Yes, and yes, but that’s not the whole story. That’s not quite the substance of Christian hope.
Going to heaven is not the whole story because when a person dies and goes to heaven, his body is left on earth. God willing, we bury that body, lay it to rest, but then we forget about it. We picture our departed loved ones as just that, departed into heaven and now happy and complete. They’ve already arrived where they will be forever, they already enjoy all the blessings of God’s kingdom. We speak of going to join them there, of being reunited with those we love in heaven. That’s our hope. We want to go to heaven.
Please hear this clearly. There is much truth in what I just said. If you believe in Jesus, you will go to heaven to be with Him when you die. But that is not our ultimate aim. That’s not what Paul is concerned with here in I Corinthians 15. Heaven is not our last and best hope as Christians. Our real hope is richer and better even than that. As Paul is going to unfold in this chapter, our true hope is not just immortality for our souls. It is immortality, it’s resurrection for our bodies.
So there are a few things those Corinthians might have meant by denying the raising of the dead. It’s possible, but unlikely, that they were materialists, people who thought that when the physical body dies, that’s just it. There’s nothing else, no further life. Few people believed that in the ancient world, but many more do now.
More likely is that they believed the kind of story many others do today, that all that lives on after death is an immaterial soul. Such Christians, just like Plato, and Hindus, and others, hope to escape from the body and live some sort of purely spiritual life.
Finally, if you turn over to II Timothy 2:18, you find Paul writing to him about two Christian teachers who are “claiming that the resurrection has already taken place.” He says they are upsetting the faith for some people. That upsetting claim is that resurrection is some sort of internal, merely spiritual change in a person that happens when they believe in Jesus, not a genuine, physical resurrection after death.
Yet spiritual life and blessing is not merely spiritual. It includes the body. The beatitudes in Matthew, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” and “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness,” might give you the idea that Jesus just uses poverty and hunger as metaphors for spiritual deficiencies. But Luke’s beatitudes we heard today are blessings on physical poverty and on bodily hunger. They are there to tell us that hope in Jesus is hope for our bodies too. Resurrection is bodily resurrection.
The rest of our passage is Paul’s argument that any of those views which deny a bodily resurrection for Christian believers will lead to unacceptable, even absurd consequences. His argument is a form of what’s known as indirect proof in geometry, a reductio ad absurdum in informal logic. To establish a conclusion, you assume its opposite, its contradiction, and then show that assumption leads to impossible or absurd consequences.
So Paul starts us down that somewhat depressing chain of thought. O.K., he says in effect, let’s assume what they are saying is true. The dead are not raised. Verse 13 begins with that assumption, “If there is no resurrection of the dead…” and begins to draw out the logical results of such a belief. He wants to “reduce” that denial of resurrection to the absurd, illogical, even pitiful ideas which follow from it.
The first point Paul wants to make is that a general denial of the resurrection of the body means denying it for Jesus Himself. “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised.” I’ve met a couple of Christians who came to that line about the resurrection of the body in the Apostles’ Creed and stumbled over it. They told me they believe everything else in the creed, but that one’s difficult. But Paul says it’s all tied together. You can’t refuse to say “We believe in the resurrection of the body” at the end of the Creed and still say, “On the third day he rose again from the dead” in the middle of the Creed. They go hand in hand. It’s a key point. Paul repeated it again in verse 16, “For if the dead are not raised, Christ has not been raised.”
Paul keeps following the logic. If Christ has not been raised, all sorts of Christian absurdities arise. In verse 14, “then our proclamation is in vain and your faith has been in vain.” Bring it right up to now. If Christ has not been raised, then why am I standing here preaching to you? If there is no resurrection, then what’s the point of all this? Why are we spending so much time, money and effort to talk about Jesus if He’s just a guy whose body rotted away a long time ago?
Even more, if Christ has not been raised, says Paul in verse 15, “We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom [so goes the assumption] he did not raise.” Without resurrection the whole thing is a terrible lie. Christian faith is a fraud, a deception, an illusion, as Freud called it a hundred years ago.
As I said, in verse 16 Paul simply repeats that basic inference, “if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised.” Then in verse 17 he goes on to another consequence of that, “your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” I first heard that point driven home by Covenant pastor Greg Asimakoupoulos who now serves at Covenant Shores on Mercer Island. We talk about Jesus dying on the Cross so our sins can be forgiven. But Paul says here that without the Resurrection of Jesus those sins still remain. We are still “in” them.
One church father said, “Forgiveness of sins comes through the resurrection.” Another said, “If Christ lied about his resurrection, then he lied about his claim to forgive our sins.”[1] Without the Resurrection, the Cross is nothing. The Roman Empire hung thousands of people on crosses. Why think one of those crucifixions could do anything for us if it was not followed by an event which made it different from all those other deaths?
In verse 18, Paul strikes close to our hearts, close to my heart. “Then those also who have died in Christ have perished.” Try to imagine your loved ones who have died without hoping for their bodies to be raised. What would “seeing” them again even mean? Are you going to wave to some point of light floating in a cloud? But what would you even wave with if your own body is not raised?
I believe my mother is in heaven with Jesus now. But my real hope is that there will be a day I see her again, red hair, fair skin, freckles and all. And, pardon my emotion, I expect to be totally surprised and overwhelmed with joy one day when Beth and I greet in the flesh the child we never knew, a miscarried baby lost between the births of our daughters Susan and Joanna.
A baby never born and a 79 year old woman. You could raise all sorts of questions. What shape will our resurrected bodies be in? How old will we look? Hugo of St. Victor thought we would all appear about 30 years old, because that’s the age Jesus was when He began His ministry. At 66, that sounds pretty good to me. Maybe not so great if you’re twelve. But we don’t know. Scripture doesn’t answer all our questions. Paul addresses some of it later in chapter 15: our resurrected bodies will be imperishable, immortal. Each one of us will be whole and complete and as beautiful and strong as God meant us to be.
I could go on. I look forward to seeing my grandmother’s slightly crooked smile again. I expect to see the small form of our old friend Ellis, a little person, but he will be standing straighter and taller than he was ever able to before. I’d like to greet the fat bulk of Thomas Aquinas and the wiry thin frame of Francis of Assisi. I hope C. S. Lewis has a pipe clenched between his teeth. I want to gaze on Mother Teresa’s marked and wrinkled old face smoothed into eternal beauty.
I have a new hope in that regard just this past week. Beth and I learned a few days ago that a dear friend of ours, someone our own age, may be in the first stages of some dementia. Along with memory, he’s also lost balance in the fine athletic body beside which I’ve run and walked many miles. I want to see my friend whole again, to engage him in deep conversation, to see him cast a fly line, to watch him run like he used to, faster and better than I ever could. Without faith in the resurrection, where would that hope be?
Yet all that is absurd, says Paul, if we deny the resurrection of the dead. The dead are just that, dead. And any imagination of them coming back to life is not beautiful at all. It’s all about stumbling, stupid zombies who are not our loved ones at all. Better dead, we might suppose, than that.
Paul’s final step down this logical path, his final reduction of denying the resurrection to absurdity is in verse 19. “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” There it is. There’s the sentiment that lurks under every conversation I have with another friend who is an atheist. He enjoys our conversations, but in the end I think he pities me, pities his Christian parents, pities all those who have a hope which he does not share. But Paul and you and I and every faithful believer would say that there is no need for such pity. In fact, it should go the other way. We should pity those who have no such hope.
Pitying Christians is the final absurdity in Paul’s reduction of the claim that there is no resurrection. There have been those who have argued that Christians are pitiful fools from the beginning, from pagan scoffers and mockers of Christianity to contemporary atheists who wish to pin all the troubles of humanity on religious belief. Unfortunately, there have always been Christians whose deliberate scorn for education and science have fueled that sort of pitying derision. Yet genuine Christians need no pity. They are not ignorant fools deceived by an ancient myth. They are courageous carriers of hope for a better world.
As I’ve quoted C. S. Lewis before, “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.” Hope in the resurrection has constantly empowered those who believe in it to do great things. Should anyone think a brilliant writer like Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkien needs pity? Or Madeleine L’Engle or Marilynne Robinson? Shall we pity Mother Teresa or Dorothy Day or Harriet Tubman? Are peacemaker Desmond Tutu or NIH director Francis Collins pitiful? Are all the countless men and women, who followed and hoped in Jesus while fighting for justice, saving lives, teaching children, and making this world immensely better than it would have been, to be regarded with a condescending smirk of derisive pity? I don’t think so.
Paul felt like he did not even need to draw out each opposite and true conclusion from his reductions to absurdity. They are left unsaid. Of course our proclamation and preaching are not in vain, not pointless. Of course we are not lying about God when we talk about Jesus walking out of the tomb. Of course our faith is not futile and our sins are forgiven. Of course Christians are not people to be pitied!
Yet the greatest “of course” opposes that first consequence, that if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. So he states it absolutely and definitively in the positive mode in verse 20: “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.” That’s where this chapter is headed. Not believing in the resurrection of the dead calls into question the Resurrection of Jesus. But, when we believe in the Resurrection of Jesus, our own resurrection follows from it like light from the sun. Jesus is the first fruits, the beginning of a great and wonderful harvest which God is going to gather in at the last day. That is the Christian hope. That’s why we’re not pitiful at all.
“We believe in the resurrection of the body.” Jesus is not going to simply yank us out of this world, out of our bodies. He’s going to save us, bodies, world, and all. Jesus came into this world, took on a body Himself, died on the Cross, and rose from the dead for that purpose, that whole purpose of raising you and me from the dead to walk this earth again.
I invite each one of you to believe that truth, not just a halfway hope of maybe getting to heaven, but a full hope that Christ has been raised from the dead and you will be too. If it’s not true, then we’re all pitiful fools. But we’re not. It is true and it’s the only truth worth all your faith, all your hope, and all your love. Believe it.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2022 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] See Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament VII (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press), p. 155.