1 Corinthians 15:12 – 20
As we have seen over the past few weeks, the young Christians in Corinth are struggling with understanding the practical application of the new faith that the have been given. They are in spiritual trouble because they have lost their focus on the essential things of faith. They were fighting over who had been given which gifts, who they had been baptized by and how that made one greater than another. They were full of divisions. Some of even have begun to reject the resurrection of Christ which is of course our promise of life over death giving us eternal life. So, Paul wants to confront it head on. And to do it, he goes back to Jesus.
As we saw last week in the “Gospel according to Paul”, that Jesus was incarnated, became man, became like us on Christmas; lived, taught and served with and among the people of God for three years; then was arrested, tried and convicted and sentenced to death in the most unimaginable method known to the Romans, he died on the Cross.
Christ died for our sins according to the Hebrew scriptures, he was buried proving that he died, he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and he appeared to the Apostle Peter, and then to the other remaining 10 disciples and then to hundreds of other proving that his body was resurrected from the grave, to give us new life after death.
Those are tenants of the faith that the Corinthians had come to believe in and upon which they stood. But now there is some push back against that last part, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and in our lesson today Paul teaches us why this last part is significant to all Christians.
Paul opens our lesson with these words; now if Christ taught man that He has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? And if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is flawed, and your faith is empty.
Paul writes to the Corinthians that belief in the resurrection is not optional. It does not matter to him how incredible it sounds, in fact the unimaginable is part of the good news. Friends, we can hold on to all of the stuff from the birth of Jesus, through His life and ministry, the trial and the willing sacrifice of his life for the forgiveness for our sins yet IF there is no resurrection, then there is no hope for eternal life and His sacrifice, and our faith are meaningless and pointless because there is finality in death. If there is no resurrection, then everything we thought we knew about God is untrue. If there is no resurrection, then all we have is this life and nothing beyond it. And the gospel is not really “good news” at all. (UMC Discipleship)
Paul does not simply suggest that the person’s spirit is resurrected, or that the soul will go on and be with Jesus. He does not talk about loved ones looking down from heaven or floating around. The focus is on bodies, new and perfected bodies like the one in which Jesus walks, talks, eats and touches with after his resurrection. The resurrection is not a collection of ethereal spirits floating around but rather new bodies, like our old bodies but perfected.
Paul’s spiritual epiphany came in his experience of seeing the resurrected Christ in our scripture last week. It changed his life and perspective on when and how God renews and transforms His creation. As a former Pharisee, Paul’s hope of resurrection was no longer a distant future dream. God’s life-giving power had invaded the cosmos and conquered death by resurrecting Jesus who then comes to call Paul on the Road to Damascus. With this act, God declared certain victory over death and Paul was a witness to it.
Paul tells us that for believers Christ’s resurrection is required theology. It is what makes the Gospel work, it is the powerful penultimate work of salvation and redemption and Good News. If God did not actually raise Jesus from the dead, then God is not stronger than death which is inconceivable since God created life and death in the first place, certainly He can control each with a wave of His hand. God rules over everything, light and dark, good and evil, and life and death.
Carla Works tells us that for Paul, the great enemy “Death,” is the sidekick of sin. All of us from birth have been enslaved to the power of sin, yet Jesus defeats the power of sin over mankind when he dies on the cross. God’s resurrection of Jesus is the promise and the guarantee that God will defeat the powers of Death and Sin for all of creation. It is the decisive act that has determined God’s ultimate victory over the twin powers that terrorize mankind sin and death and we should be thankful and celebrate that fact. Paul goes on to say; “so indeed Christ has been raised from the dead, He is the first fruits of those who have died.”
What did Paul mean by that phrase ‘first fruits’? It’s a phrase that may sound a bit strange to us today. But it represents something that would have been very familiar to the Jewish people. “First fruits” was simply the name given to the very first portion of any harvest. When you grow produce of any kind, you would reap the very first of the growth, and set it aside as special, and celebrate it. It was considered the best of the harvest; and it represented the fact that harvest time for the year had arrived; and there would be much more yet to come. There was in fact a special festival and celebration given to the Jews by Moses in Leviticus in order to thank God for these First Fruits as a blessing to them. (Greg Allen)
But there something more Spiritually eternal in the way that Paul uses it here. The harvest that Paul is talking about is not grain from the field that needs to be harvested but rather the lost souls of the people that need to be brought in. Remember what Jesus tells the disciples we he comes over the ridge and sees all those people going through there difficult and pointless lives? He has compassion on them and says “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”
That friends, is the harvest that Paul is talking about, those souls that need to be redeemed by God and given hope for lives that are eternally meaningful. Jesus was the first of those to be brought home with a new perfected body, he was and is the First Fruits of the great spiritual harvest of those that have come to accept and believe in the Father’s works and we, you and I if we believe, since we believe, we are also Fruits of the Harvest!
Hear the Good News my Friends…………..
Now dear ones, resurrection is a hard concept for our rational mind to understand. How can one who was dead, again be alive? We could get into a deep theological discussion about bodily versus spiritual resurrection but the whole point Paul is making is that resurrection is the crux of our Christian faith. Do we really need to completely understand something in order for it to be true? We accept but do not truly understand the creation of the Universe and yet we cannot deny it, here it is, we can see it, touch it, experience it. We can interact with it and with each other, God’s creations each and every one. We accept creation because it is all around us, it is perceptible to us. (Bonnie)
Maybe, just maybe, the reality of resurrection is visible and tangible right before our very eyes as well. Maybe Paul was so able to understand and accept the concept of resurrection, a transformed and renewed soul, because he witnessed a preview in his own life, he witnessed the transformation of his old life as persecutor to becoming apostle during his trip to Damascus. He transforms from jailer and killer of members of The Way to the last of the Apostles and being willing to give his life for the cause of salvation for all.
Friends maybe we should come to see the reality and importance of the Resurrection through the experience of our own salvation. When we ask Jesus Christ into our lives, we ask that we can die to our old selves and put on Christ, the only perfect human being. Spiritually our old self dies, and a new self is born, born again as a new perfected soul. We see that reality not only in one-time moments of conversion, but also in the ongoing growth and transformation that flows out of the ongoing grace of God. (Crouch)
Dear ones we must come to believe what Paul is telling the Corinthians, that Resurrection lies at the heart of our faith because we have seen resurrection at work in our lives and in the lives of others around us. Old lives have died away and a new perfected lives have taken their place
It’s not possible to proclaim that “there is no resurrection of the dead” once we have seen resurrection foreshadowed in ourselves and in the people whose actions bear witness to God’s life-giving, transformational power. We don’t have to make ourselves believe it. It speaks for itself all around us and among us. Jesus was the First fruits of God’s plan to save, redeem and transform sinful mankind into eternally perfected souls spending an eternity with Him. Joyously I can proclaim that if we believe and accept the resurrection of Jesus Christ, that our preaching is not flawed and your faith is not empty, and that we are, each of us, because Jesus lives today that we are also Fruits of the Harvest!