Christ is Risen

I Corinthians 15:12-26, Matthew 28:1-10

August 31, 2008

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

Christ is risen! Christ is risen, indeed! Alleluia!

That acclamation brings forth two questions in many people. First, really? And second, so what? Those two questions frame what I want to talk about with you today as we celebrate Easter in August.

First, did Jesus really rise from the dead? Theologians have argued for two millennia about whether or not it is important that Jesus’ body physically rose from the dead. The reading from Paul today takes us to the city of Corinth where, less than 100 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, there was already dissension about this matter. The good Greeks of Corinth could not imagine a dead corpse re-animated as anything but a horror story, and were sure this was meant only in some vague spiritual sense. That belief has come in and out of fashion in Christian theology more than once over the ensuing 2000 years. For Paul, however, it was very important that he get across to this group of believers that there was actually a physical resurrection of Jesus. Two reasons were paramount for Paul.

First, if Jesus’ body were not raised, then the evil of his death would not be defeated and good, and God, would not be triumphant. In that case, all Paul’s preaching would be a lie, for God would be shown not to be more powerful than evil. Richard Hays, in his commentary on First Corinthians, says that Paul believes that if Jesus was not raised from death, then Christian preachers would be offering for the world’s ills “a pious lie that veils from ourselves the terrifying truth that we are powerless and alone.” (262). Clearly, Paul did not believe we are powerless or alone, and the growth of the early church also belied that. God did defeat evil and injustice and sin, Paul says, and Christ’s resurrection shows us that victory, as well as the infinite grace of God’s forgiveness.

Paul’s second reason for insisting on physical resurrection begins to get at the “so what?” question. The early Christian community believed that Christ’s resurrection was not a unique historical event, something that could only happen to Jesus. They believed that Jesus’ resurrection was God’s affirmation of the importance of embodied life, our physicality is as important to God as our minds, souls or spirits. From Jesus’ teachings, both before and after death, Paul and others concluded that Jesus was, as he put it, “the first fruits of those who have died.” Jesus’ resurrection began a new chapter in the relationship of God and humankind, a promise of eternal life in community with God and others. That eternal life, for Paul, had to be lived in some kind of embodied form, for God had always related to the chosen people as created, embodied beings, not just disembodied spirits. If Christ were not raised, we were lost with this life as all we had. Paul clearly believed there was more to come, as Jesus had taught.

This concept of some sort of corporeal resurrection not just for Jesus but for them, too, was as hard for the Greeks to wrap their heads around as it is for us. Think about how popular culture portrays re-animated bodies. Zombies, right, or vampires? Even among Christian believers, think about how we usually speak of what happens post-death. We talk of spirits in heaven, and those among us who believe in ghosts, think of them as mostly disembodied, a presence that is able to make itself known but is not really fleshy.

Paul does not look at death this way. If you read on in chapter 15, he explains that, just as Jesus’ body had been transformed in resurrection (remember, Mary did not recognize him until he spoke to her and she knew his voice), so would our bodies be transformed. Paul is not talking about the reanimation of dead tissue, and that’s very important to understand for folk who are afraid that cremation might somehow impede resurrection. We are not going to be zombies in heaven. Paul says that our spirits, what is essentially who we are, will be re-embodied somehow by God. He compares this process to the sowing of seeds. What grows from a seed does not look like the seed and, indeed, part of the seed disintegrates in the process of growth. But the plant contains the life that was in the seed and is, itself, physical like the seed, though different in form. The butterfly symbolism for resurrection grows out of Paul’s theology; the caterpillar changing into something that looks very different as it becomes butterfly.

So, according to Paul, we do not become either Caspar the friendly ghost or Dracula, but rather something embodied but new, and in that form we continue to be in community with both God and each other, and that community comes to full life as Christ finally defeats the powers of the world and God creates a new heaven and a new earth, places which we all will inhabit in new form.

That’s the first answer to the “so what?” question. Resurrection is important because it assures us that death, which we all must go through alone, does not finally separate us from each other or from an ongoing relationship with God. But “pie in the sky by and by when we die” is not the only answer to the “so what?” question. Believing the reality of not only Jesus’ resurrection but our own has another very important impact on our lives as we live them today.

Jesus has called all of us as Christians to live lives in which we risk suffering and death in selfless service to others. That’s what taking up the cross means. Richard Hays writes that if there is no resurrection, this makes no sense, and those “who follow the example of Jesus and Paul are chumps missing out on their fair share of life’s rewards.” I might put it another way. If there is no resurrection, then it really is true that those who die with the most toys win. If there is no resurrection, no continuity in life with others and God, then it would only make sense for each human being to get all they can out of what they have in this body’s life. If that is true, then a Christian, or anyone who serves others selflessly, really is a fool. Why waste what little time I have on earth in any pursuit that does not make my life better? If there is resurrection, then I am liberated in this life to focus not only on myself, but on Jesus’ invitation to a life of giving, serving, loving with exuberant abandon, not being afraid of death as an end. And the kicker here is that we discover when we are liberated from fear of death and fear of the shortness of life, that we are empowered to discover the depths of what it means to love, and in loving we find much more joy than all the toys could ever give us.

The piece of chapter 15 we heard today ends with Paul’s affirmation that the last enemy to be destroyed is death. That verse ended up in a very odd place a year ago. In the final Harry Potter novel, Harry finds the graves of his parents, who were killed trying to keep him safe and alive, a selfless act if there ever was one. Written on their tombstone were these words from Paul. “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” Harry’s nemesis throughout the Potter books, Lord Voldemort, has sought to keep his body from dying by many means over many years. For Voldemort, death was an enemy to be defeated by him and for him, no matter what the cost to other people, and that cost was very great. The worst thing that could happen to him, he felt, was to die, a final defeat. His selfish battle to defeat his own death cut him off from any possibility of loving relationships with anyone else.

What Harry came to understand, through the example of his parents and teachers, was that death was not the worst thing that could happen. Death was an enemy, Harry learned, when fear of it kept people from selfless service to others and caused the kind of selfish living that made one’s own life more important than anything else in the world, a way of living that in the end did not bring joy and precluded the possibility of love. Death was an enemy, Harry learned, if one believed that death meant eternal separation from those one loved. The author of the Potter books, J.K. Rowling, never revealed to reporters what her religious beliefs were until the last book had been published, and she did that, she said, because if she had revealed her deep Christian beliefs, people would have figured out the end of the story!

The defeat of the last enemy, Death, began in a real story, not a fairy tale, one morning in an earthquake and the rolling away of a stone outside the city of Jerusalem. The defeat of Death began as more people came to believe that they could give deeply, sacrificially, of themselves in this life and that would not be the end, and as more people came to believe that the destruction of these bodies did not mean the end of communion with God and other people. Believing in resurrection and the defeat of the enemy of death is what really empowers us to be fully Christian, fully human, fully alive in this life.

Paul ends this discourse on resurrection with these words, far better than any I might write. “Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord [the risen Lord] your labor is not in vain.” (15:58).

Christ is Risen! Christ is Risen, indeed, Alleluia!