The Resurrection means its death now and life later (1 Corinthians 15:1-28)

Yesterday I got to preach my last sermon at St Matthew's Anglican Church, as I am now moving further south to Lanyon Valley Anglican Church. Below is the sermon that I gave, which as I said in the beginning is some variations of some previously talks. There were some "original" content on rationalism and the eyewitteness, but that was mostly taken from (my memory) of a previous talk by Con Campbell, that I listened to a few times when I was much younger. As this talk is a hog poge of other talks, the citations have all been lost, but I should say Rory Shiner has also greatly influenced the shape and ideas in this.

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1 Corinthians 15 is my favourite chapter in the Bible. I have given a variation of this sermon in 2018 and then again in 2022. In my first year of being the Youth guy, I also spent a term on this chapter. So some of this you may have heard before, and today I might be telling more personal stories than normal, but I think you will all be ok with that.

So after we had spent a term on this at youth, one time Hannah was checking in the teens in on a Friday night and a Facebook message popped up in her lower corner. The message was “Can you help me, I promise to read any chapter of the Bible you tell me to”. That is kinda the relationship Hannah has with this friend of hers. There was a senior boy who was helping with check-in and he saw the message come up. Hannah asked him, “So what chapter would you tell your non-Christian friend to read?” 

What chapter of the Bible would you get your non-Christian friend to read? What would you want to tell them? A Psalm? Something from the Gospels? John 3? Romans 8?

Without skipping a beat this senior boy said, “1 Corinthians 15 - if you don’t have the resurrection, you’ve got nothing”. I think he was right on the money.

I remember when I was working at ANU, I used to meet with another Christian guy every fortnight after work for mutual encouragement in the faith. One time we were talking about what we do, where do we go when we have doubts about Christianity? He was from Latin America, quite an emotional guy, and he said he looked to the cross, for there he sees the great extent God went through for him. That on the cross he sees how much God loves him, for Jesus died in his place - and that is a fine answer. There is nothing wrong with that.

He then turns to me and asks me the same question. I said it was the resurrection. It is of first importance. I think it is an objectively true historical event that changes everything. Regardless of my feelings or doubts, it happened in the past and I can’t change that, and this gives me hope.

We live in the real world where Jesus rose from the grave. We are on the same timeline, or in the same Marvel Universe, where Jesus rose from the dead.

Paul starts this chapter by saying

Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. (1 Corinthians 15:1 NIV)

Paul wants to remind the Corinthians of the Gospel which he has already preached to them. Paul wants to repeat himself here. He knows they have heard the Gospel preached; he was the one who told them in the first place, but he wants to tell them this again.

It is an important point; it means the Gospel is for everyone. When I first started as the youth guy and I had some teens come up to me asking when the bring-a-friend night was. They wanted to bring their friends along so they could hear the Gospel. I hadn’t put this on the schedule. And in the leadership team, there was a little discussion on how and why we might change a night when we have an evangelistic push for others to hear the Gospel. But I thought that was a little off.

Paul here wants to tell Christians the gospel again. We need to remember that every cool verse you have in the Bible about what the Gospel is, was originally written to Christians. What Christians need to hear is the Gospel. What those who don’t follow Jesus need to hear is the Gospel. It is a message for everyone. One method we call discipleship, the other we call evangelism, but the message is the same. So every week at Youth, we made sure we told the Gospel, for everyone needed to hear it and be reminded of it.

In Karl Bath’s farewell speech to his students, he said:

And now the end has come. So listen to my piece of advice: exegesis, exegesis, and yet more exegesis! Keep to the word, to the scriptures that has been given to us. (cited in Evangelical Theology, Michael Bird)

And so today I would like to say:

And now the end has come for me here. So listen to my piece of advice: the gospel, the gospel and yet more of the gospel. Keep to the word, to the scriptures that has been given to us.

We don’t move on from the Gospel; we only go deeper in it.

And it is of first importance. There are lots of things in Christianity, lots of ideas and debates over many topics, but here we are told what is of first importance. When we hear something like this, it should prick our ears. What is of most importance? It is the Gospel.

The Gospel

So, what is the Gospel? Now, this isn’t the only place in the Bible that talks about the Gospel, the word is mentioned around 100 times, and so there are many nuances and fascets to what the Gospel is, but here we are only going to stick to the pasaage, to see how Paul reminds them of the Gospel that he preached to them.

So here is a tip for you: for some roles at St Matt’s, if you want to sign up you have to have a serve chat, and in this you are asked what the Gospel is, here is one answer you could give.

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. (1 Corinthians 15:3–5 NIV)

The Gospel is that Jesus died for our sins, he was buried and was raised again. This was according to the plan that God disclosed in the scriptures. And in this chapter, the accent on the Gospel is on the importance of the resurrection.

So, at this point, we should address the elephant in the room. Dead people don’t come back to life. It’s not rational to think this. In the last 5 or so weeks, I have been to two funerals and no one was expecting the deceased to come back alive. That is reality right? That is what our observable world and personal experience is telling us.

But I want to say, in this instance, don’t be a rationalist. Rationalism isn’t a great epistemology. Don’t appeal to your limited reason and experience. That doesn’t work in a whole bunch is situations. You need to be open to allowing new evidence in to your thinking. For example

On July 20, 1969 people walked on the moon. This was televised around the world, and yet some think it didn’t happen. They think it’s not logical, they don’t know anyone who has walked on the moon, it doesn’t make sense that someone would, so therefore, in their minds it didn’t happen, it couldn’t have happened.

When the English landed in Australia, they found this animal with a duck-shaped bill, with webbed feet and fur. It laid eggs but was a mammal. They wrote back to the British Museum about this strang animal, but they didn’t believe it. They sent a dead one back and George Shaw, a respected zoologist, and so he examined it for stitching to see if those in the penal colony were pulling his leg. He couldn’t believe it. He had never encountered something like this, so it didn’t make any sense. But upon examination, he accepted the platypus, he stopped being a rationalist and accepted the evidence.

You see, when it comes to the resurrection, instead of being a rationalist, we are to be empiricalists. We need to look at the evidence and factor this new information into our thinking. Some say an extraordinary claim like this needs extraordinary evidence, but that's not true.

Extraordionary claims don’t need extraordionary evidence. Marxist claims don’t need Marxist evidence, feminist claims don’t need feminist evidence, they just need evidence. We don’t need to add a modifier or explainer on what evidence we need; we just need evidence, and here Paul points to eyewitnesses, in the same way our court of law leans on eyewitness accounts.

Eyewitnesses

When Jesus rose again, He appeared to a bunch of people. Paul names Cephas or Peter, then the disciples and then to more than 500 people, most of whom were still alive at the time of this writing, maybe 20 years after the event. Then Jesus appeared to James and to Paul himself.

It’s interesting that Peter, James and Paul get called out from the bunch who saw Jesus’ resurrection. And we can see, historically, how this resurrection event changed them, by looking at a before and after of their lives.

On the morning of Jesus’ execution in Jerusalem, Peter denied three times he even knew who Jesus was, but then, after the Resurrection, he was the first to preach fearlessly to multitudes in Jerusalem about Jesus and his resurrection (Acts 2:14-41).

James and his family all thought Jesus was insane for claiming to be the Messiah (Mark 3:21), but history tells us that after Jesus’ resurrection, he became a prominent Christian leader in Jerusalem - the very town where Jesus was killed.

And Paul was no fan of Christians; in fact, he was looking for Christians for all the wrong reasons. He wanted to put them in prison and even kill them. But then Jesus turned up, knocked him off his horse, blinded him for three days, and then Paul could not not believe. He has seen and heard the risen Jesus. He couldn’t deny it. This changed his life forever. And this was the message he had passed on to the Corinthians.

And Paul reminds the Corinthians, like I am reminding you, that the message of Jesus dying and rising again is true. It is not made up. It is not some myth that has evolved or been embellished over time, well after the event and all the eyewitnesses were gone.

Jesus said He was going to suffer, die and rise again, and that is exactly what happened. The Christian religion started not in some far-off area, a long time after Jesus had died, but it grew to 3,000 almost overnight in the same town where Jesus was crucified in. The empty tomb was in their neighbourhood, where this movement started.

If Christ didn’t die...

Now, Paul then goes on and stresses how important the resurrection is. He is responding to some people - maybe the rationalists of the day - who said resurrection isn’t a thing, that it didn’t happen. So Paul traces what this means if Jesus didn’t die.

From verses 12-19 Paul says that if there was no resurrection, then preaching is useless, your faith is in vain, Christians would be lying about God, we would all still be in our sins and we as Christians who believe this stuff should be pitied by others. If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead then Christianity is false, we are all misguided and I don’t want a part of that.

However, we read in verse 20,

But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. (1 Corinthians 15:20 NIV)

Jesus did rise from the dead. There is such a thing as resurrection; Jesus is no longer dead but alive. There is far too much historical evidence from eyewitnesses to deny it. This means we can flip the script, this means preaching isn’t futile, your faith is not in vain, we are telling the truth about God, our sins have been forgiven and we should have compassion for those who do not believe this message.

Because Jesus rose from the dead on Easter Sunday, we can have confidence that we too will rise from the dead. On that first Easter morning, Jesus had a real physical, material body, and we too will have a real physical, material body built for a new earth, a new creation which is going last forever.

Jesus' resurrection is the nail in the wall in which the painting of Christianity hangs. You take out that nail and it all falls and smashes to the ground.

Firstfruits

We are told in our passage that Jesus is the firstfruits. Some people get tied up in the nuances of what it means for Jesus to be the firstfruits. Is it an Old Testament reference to Jesus being an offering to the Lord? or is it kinda like with olives when the first batch was meant to be the ripest and tastiest? All this could be true, but what I think really stands out with Jesus being the firstfruits is that he is first. There is an order and Jesus is first.

When Hannah and I got married, someone gave us a lemon tree for our wedding. We looked after this tree, I put netting up when the frost came, but after a few years it never produced fruit, so I gave up caring for it and it still continued to grow and not give us any lemons. When we moved houses, we didn’t notice till we had moved in, but this land also had a lemon tree. In the first year we were there, it also didn’t produce lemons. But the next year, after Hannah hit it with a mallet to shake it up (because that is why the Bunnings guy said to do), it started to bud. I remember showing one of our parents this working lemon tree with the first sign of fruit on it.

It would have been ridiculous for them to then say, “I wonder what fruit is going to come next”. The lemon tree will only produce lemons. The next fruit after the first one, will also be a lemon, and here Paul is saying the same thing. Jesus rose again from the dead and so will we. There is an order. Things happen in their own turn.

First Christ, the firstfruits, has already risen, then we will rise and then, in verse 26 we are told lastly the great enemy to be destroyed is death.

The end of our passage says that when Jesus has finished dealing with our last enemy, death, He will give it all back to God the Father. Like a builder upon finishing his work in building a house, hands over the keys to the homeowner who designed the place. The builders' work is finished, the plan has been executed, and so the keys are going back to the rightful owner of the plans.

When death is defeated, this is when Jesus finally completes His work, His ultimate salvation task will be complete and so that everything will be restored back to God the Father. This is where we were meant to be from the very beginning. These verses show us that this isn’t only all about us and our bodies, but it is about all things, about God’s massive plan for the restoration of the whole world, the whole universe, with God at the centre. He will be all in all.

Having this belief about the order of things should affect our behaviour today. We need to know where we are in the schedule. For what we believe about the future affects our behaviour now.

Death now...

We all know death is still around today. Our world sees this and says we should eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die. It is enjoyment now and then death later. The world says there is nothing after death. Remember YOLO: You Only Live Once?

But if Jesus is the firstfruits, we are part of a harvest that is going to come. This changes things. It means once death has been defeated, we will be immortal. This is the stuff of fairy tales, and some science fiction stories, too. We yearn for this story, and because of Jesus and His resurrection, it is true.

I love this. In 2013 Google said they are going to solve death for us. It’s a little hard, so give them a little time. As one children’s author said, the company that has read all your email hasn’t read a story. They have just cast themselves as the villain. Anytime someone in a story grasps for immortality, it never works out well for them. They are smart people in Google, but they don't get it.

And there 16 people who have had their bodies cryonically frozen in the hope of coming back in the same body one day. These smart people don’t get it. If their plan even works out, at best, they will come back mortal, ready to die again. They are essentially defrosting a seed and not letting it grow into a plant. This is foolishness, but death does that to otherwise smart people.

When we lost our baby at 20 weeks the nurse in the hospital told us that he had gone to be a star in the sky. No one believes that. A star is a massive ball of gas millions of light-years away, burning at millions of degrees. No one believes a baby turns into that, the nurse didn’t, and I definitely don’t because I am not three years old.

I was at a funeral for a close colleague of mine in 2018. I worked with her for about 12 years, I drove her to and from work for many of those years. She came to my wedding, I went to hers. We were the same age. She went to bed on a Friday night and never woke up. Her sister was 38 weeks pregnant gave one of the eulogies. She spoke of the plans she had with her sister after her baby would be born, and then in anger, she said, “It’s just not fair”. And she is right. Death is not fair.

** [I said the strike out line in both the 8am and 10am services until someone correctly pointed out that death is our just punishment for sin, so at the 4pm service I said instead:]

And it can feel like that - that death isn't fair, but it is the penalty for sin. It is the just punishment for our rebellion against God, but we were not originally made for it.

No matter what David Attenborough or The Lion King told you about the circle of life, death is unnatural. We were not made for death. It is only because we share in the image of Adam that we die, but there will come a day when we will share in the image of Jesus.

When my daughter was younger, she wrote to the Queen; she had been doing this since she was about five. In her last letter to her, she said, “It is truly amazing how long you have been queen. I think you will make it to 100, but you never know”. The next week, while the letter was still in transit, the Queen died at 96.

And between the 10am and 4pm service, that afternoon, in the rain I had to dig a hole in the garden to bury the pet rabbit, for Cookie died the previous day.

Death is an enemy. Death doesn’t care about your social standing, your wealth or your influence. Death comes for us all. Death is not after a ransom or money. Death has a particular set of skills that he has acquired over a very long career that makes him a nightmare for people like us. He will look for us. He will find us. And he will kill us.

I know it is not popular to talk about death because there is Netflix to watch, and muffins to eat and never enough time to spend with little children with big eyes, but death and our own mortality is certain. If you are not prepared to die today, can I urge you to think long and hard on your eternity... You can’t beat death -- but as Christians, we know a guy who did, who gives us His victory.

As Christians, we aren’t strangers with death. Our God came down into the human predicament and experienced it first-hand and then rose again.

It’s winter now, and if you had never ever had a winter, you might start to worry about the nature of things. As over the last few months, it has been getting colder and darker. The leaves are falling. It looks like this place is going to death, if this trend keeps up this place is not suitable for life. You can see all around you that death is winning, and this is the world we see today. There are diseases and sickness, and death is on the side ready to take us.

And we live under death every day. We look both ways before crossing the road, we put a seatbelt on in the car, we mourn when yet another species is going extinct, we sometimes see doctors when we are sick, we hear news stories of people dying all the time.

But the resurrection says death doesn’t win; God wins. We all know that after winter comes springtime. We just have to wait a little bit longer. When springtime comes, that is when the firstfruits arrive and then a massive harvest to follow.

As Christians, we need to have this mindset. The sun always rises after the darkness. Springtime always follows Winter.

The world says it is life now and death later. You have to grasp and experience and try because it is death later. You only live once, there is a fear of missing out so you have to experiment now, and don’t worry about the cost. You need to write your bucket list because when you're dead, you can’t do anything afterwards. But this passage is saying “no”. There is death now and life later.

Death now and life later

Christians now may mourn, but we do not mourn as those without hope. Jesus felt the full sting of death and came out the other end. Jesus clothed Himself in death so we can be clothed in life. Death may hurt, but it is not fatal. We have hope. It may be Winter but Spring is coming.

Jesus’ resurrection means that you can live today knowing that you will not miss out on anything, because in the future it will not be death. In the future, you will have a new resurrected body to live with God forever. You will have life.

I’ll end with this story, another one about death. Around 2014 a guy in my Life Group died. He had cancer. He was given two years to live, but didn’t make half that. During this time his body deteriorated and he lost the ability to walk. He was a Christian and in this time he sent a few emails to our group. In one of them, he said, at the heart of God’s promises is God Himself. He said, this can give us courage and a sense of purpose in building up His church until He returns again. He was saying we can trust in God’s promises because we can trust God and live for Him now and His plans.

When he died, he was not given a write-up in the paper, but I do know that his name was in the only book that mattered, the Book of Life. I have rock-solid confidence that on the Last Day he and I will rise in glorious bodies and walk.