“But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.” (1 Corinthians 15:20)
The Christian belief in life beyond death is one we can have confidence in because it is rooted in the historic event of Jesus’ actual resurrection. He is the first fruits of those who die, meaning that our life beyond death will be ultimately like his, a bodily physical resurrection, to a much better transformed life in close relationship with God. Yet, there is a consequence to how we live this life. God will judge the dead. It’s never too late to turn back to Him and receive his amazing grace and start living life for him now, but we do need to align ourselves with God in this life, if we want his blessings in the next.
Death makes a mockery out of everything. The illness, incapacity, indignity, discomfort, and pain that sometimes precedes death is not the worst of it. The grief and sorrow, the abandonment and regret, that are sometimes felt by others, for a time at least, they’re not the worst of it either. The worst that death does is emptying life itself of meaning. Thanks to death, life is like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Thanks to death, we are all living our own personal versions of the Bohemian Rhapsody, composed of dozens of parts – a number of which we find incomprehensible, and none of which really relate to one another – and ending not with a bang but a whimper: ‘Nothing really matters, anyone can see, nothing really matters to me’. The words we live by, our life motto, might as well be taken from the end of the passage from the Bible we have just heard read: ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’. All this is due to the fact that ‘the last enemy to be destroyed is death’. The oldest truth, according to the author Marilynne Robinson, is “right out of [the book of ] Genesis”: it is the truth that “we are not at ease in the world, and sooner or later it kills us”.1 One generation rises, matures, ages, faces the Grim Reaper, comes off second best, and gives way to a new generation, which rises, matures, ages, faces the Grim Reaper, with the same outcome, and so on around the treadmill, ad infinitum. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, sayeth the Preacher. Once the prospect of death has deprived us of meaning, life becomes a waiting room for death, and all we are left with in the meantime, for as long as we can afford it, is entertainment, and consumerism.
That is where we are, and always would be, were it not for the remarkable news shared with us by the apostle Paul in the fifteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians. This news was not of his making; rather he was passing on what he had in turn received. In communicating this news, he contemplates the cliff edge of hopelessness in a series of sentences beginning with the word ‘if’; and he rescues us from falling into despair with two sentences beginning with the word ‘but’. After discussing these, I want to add a short postscript about a verse from the reading that particularly jumps out at me.
Let’s first take a look at the sentences starting with ‘if’:
1. If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. (verse 13)
2. If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. (verse 14)
3. If the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. (verse 16)
4. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. (verse 17)
5. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men. (verse 19)
6. If there is no resurrection, what will those do who are baptised for the dead? (verse 29)
7. If I fought wild beasts in Ephesus for merely human reasons, what have I gained? (verse 32)
8. If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’. (verse 33)
I don’t know what you thought as you heard this list. For myself, I have to say that I got distracted by wondering what Paul could have possibly meant by asking the sixth question down, ‘what will those do who are baptised for the dead?’ It seems unlikely that he was referring to proxy baptisms undergone by the living on behalf of the dead, not only because this would have been highly unorthodox, but also because there is no corroborating evidence that anyone in the early church actually practised proxy baptism. The books I have read about this speak of forty possible interpretations of this verse2, so I don’t suppose we’re going to be able to solve the riddle today. I will just say that, to me, the most likely explanation is that Paul is asking ‘if there is no resurrection, what good would it do those who postpone their baptism until the imminent prospect of death?’, simply because we know that this was a practice of the early church. But in any case, we can see the general direction of Paul’s argument here: ‘if there is no resurrection, what would be the point of doing that thing with baptism that some people do with baptism?’
Moving away from the distraction of that sixth question, this is the same point that Paul is making throughout: what would be the point of anything? What would be the point of him putting his life at risk to do the work of an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the extent of facing down the lions in the Ephesian amphitheatre if necessary, if there were no resurrection? What would be the point of Christians pouring a lifetime of hope in Christ, if there were no resurrection? Because in that case there would be no forgiveness of sins, no truth in Christian preaching, and no secure basis for Christian faith. In that case, you would have to feel sorry for the poor, deluded Christians. You might as well just eat and drink, and die tomorrow, because death would always have the final say, and death would strip everything and everyone of all meaning… if … there were no resurrection.
Then Paul follows his ifs with a but:
But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. (verse 20)
And he follows that with another but:
As in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in his own turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. (verse 22)
With these sentences starting with the word ‘but’, Paul says that resurrection is the undoing of death. Death makes a mockery of everything, but resurrection imbues everything with indestructible life and meaning.
Another thing that is clear from these verses is that resurrection is not a human achievement. Sometimes you hear people using the word ‘resurrection’ as a metaphor, and in doing so they place it within the realm of human possibility. Sports teams are ‘resurrected’ if they start to enjoy success after a season of constant losses. Once I heard someone describe the start of a new romantic relationship, after the termination of a previous one, as a ‘resurrection’. The word ‘redemption’ is sometimes used in a similar way. One of my favourite TV game shows brings back losing contestants to play each other in what it calls a ‘redemption week’. You did badly first time around, but here’s a chance to do better and ‘redeem yourself’.
Well, that’s not how the apostle Paul thinks of ‘redemption’, and it’s certainly not how he thinks of ‘resurrection’. Death is indeed the last enemy to be destroyed. ‘But Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep’ (verse 20). The Gospels tell of others who were raised from the dead before Christ: the daughter of the synagogue ruler, the son of the widow of Nain, and Lazarus the brother of Mary and Martha. These miracles were likewise outside the sphere of human possibility, and were brought about by the Lord himself. They are probably best described in terms of re-vivification, rather than resurrection, because the people raised went on to live the remainder of their normal mortal lives, ageing and eventually dying like all of us will.
The resurrection of Jesus was different to that of Lazarus and the others in that he was the first to have risen to immortal life. This does not make his resurrection any less real than that of Lazarus– in fact it makes it more real, hyper-real. No-one who saw Jesus after his resurrection said, ‘Hello, Jesus, how good to see you again’. Instead they tended to react in the kind of way Peter, James and John did at the transfiguration, in wonder and worship.3
And it’s no accident that Jesus happened to be the first to be raised to immortal life. Without his resurrection to immortal life, there’d be no resurrection to immortal life. Once again, the oldest truth is right out of the book of Genesis: all of us have walked in the footsteps of Adam, in disobedience and selfishness, and that way leads to death. Christ, however, is the firstfruits of the undoing of death. He was not raised from death “merely as an individual … for himself alone … His resurrection is the assurance and guarantee of ours”.4 For us, resurrection is not a state of affairs that is within our power to attain. It’s not part of the cycle of nature. We might as well believe that a team of monkeys armed with a set of typewriters could reproduce the works of William Shakespeare line for line. The cycle of nature, as we experience it, leads inexorably towards death and dissolution, just as the literary output of the monkeys would tend towards being gibberish.
Resurrection is not a human possibility, but it is the promise of God to inject our lives with meaning they could never otherwise have. It is his promise to put grammar in place of gibberish, to give us beauty for ashes, to give us, in place of the Bohemian Rhapsody, the Apostles’ Creed.
And how can we believe that it is true? The apostle Paul tells us that the resurrection of Christ is our guarantee of all this. We long for hope, and truth, and faith, and forgiveness, and because of the resurrection of Christ, we know we may have these things. If Christ had not been raised, all preaching would be useless, and so would our faith; our faith would be futile, and we would still be in our sins. Hope, truth, faith and forgiveness would all prove illusory. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead. The battle with death and despair has been fought and won, by God. There is more to hope for than this life only.5 Death makes a mockery of everything, but resurrection restores meaning to it all.
And now for my postscript: you will have noticed that so far I’ve been moving backwards and forwards through the text of I Corinthians chapter 15 verses 12 to 34, following the ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ the apostle Paul uses to explain how foundational the resurrection of Christ is to the Christian life. I haven’t felt the need to comment on every verse, though I do think every last verse in this amazing chapter of Scripture is worthy of study and meditation. But there is one verse I think I’ve been circling around for a while now that deserves our full attention for a few minutes near the end of what I have to say. It is a verse that became particularly important to me a few years ago, in the run-up to and aftermath of the deaths of my father-in-law and my own father in 2021. Both of them were widowers and died full of years after periods of poor health and cruel incapacity. The amazing verse in this amazing chapter of I Corinthians, that provided me with insight and consolation in the face of these experiences, was chapter 15 verse 26, ‘The last enemy to be destroyed is death’, and I want to close by briefly sharing with you this insight and this consolation.
The insight is that death is the worst, most powerful and final enemy of humanity, and that it wreaks havoc on our all-too-human desire to live comfortable and carefree lives. I hope that no-one among us subscribes to a health and wealth caricature of Christianity, but even if we don’t, it’s easy to wonder where God is, and what he is doing, whenever we face obstacles, misfortunes, trial and tragedy. We read in 1 Peter that we are not to be puzzled by any painful trials we suffer, as though something strange were happening to us, because in them we participate in the sufferings of Christ (cf. 1 Peter 4:12-13). That is where God is, and what he is doing, in the face of our trials, and one day he will reveal his glory and bring this present chapter of history to a close. In the meantime, behind every painful trial lies the unholy, un-natural, and miserable trinity of sin, death, and hell. They rage against us, and will continue to do so until we are done with this mortal life.
The consolation contained within the fact that ‘the last enemy to be destroyed is death’, is that death will finally be destroyed. It will be mocked in the end; it will have no choice but to let its captives go. Did you notice how the deaths of those who belong to Christ are described in verse 20? Or have you noticed how the deaths of the faithful departed are described on the gold plaque next to the lectern at the front of St Luke’s Church? (You are welcome to go up there and see for yourself anytime.) They are described as those who ‘have fallen asleep’. This sounds a lot like a euphemism for dying – there are a lot of euphemisms used for dying – but, in fact, it is a profoundly Christian way of thinking about death, because it implies that those who have fallen asleep will one day wake up. And the thing that makes this way of thinking Christian, rather than simply make-believe, is the resurrection of Christ. “He has transformed death, for his followers, into sleep”,6 because his resurrection is the assurance and guarantee of ours.
So there will be an end to the reign of death over humankind. From the beginning of its reign through to the end, it has and does make a mockery of everything. Life and meaning will be restored, however, not by the power of our positive thinking, but by the working of God’s mighty strength in the resurrection. Hope, truth, faith and forgiveness will be secured. The raising of Christ is the promise, and the firstfruits, of all this. The resurrection will make a mockery of death in the end. This is our confidence, our joy, and our consolation in the face of every trial.
St. George's Church Ramsgate 