We continue today in Chapter 15 of the First Letter to the Corinthians. You may remember from last week that Paul is trying to remind the church of the “good news”, the core belief of their faith: That Jesus was raised from the dead. Today, he wants to draw the important consequence of this core belief: the members of the church should believe as well that they will be raised from the dead. In Paul’s mind, it is impossible to separate the Resurrection of Christ from the Resurrection of those who believe in Him. To demonstrate that, Paul uses an argument that may seem a bit difficult to follow, but in the end what’s highlighted is that it would be illogical, and even irrational, to believe that Christ could have been raised from the dead if the dead cannot be raised at all, Jesus sharing in all the ways our mortal condition and our mortal bodies.
If this passage seems a bit complicated, what I think is important to notice is this fact that Jesus’s “destiny” is bound with people’s destiny: Jesus shared our condition to the end and in the end we will share in his glory: “Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died” (v 20).
his resurrection is a sign that is given to us that God will restore God’s creation.
I found it very interesting that Paul preached about that in a pagan context: You may probably know that the idea of an after life is as old as humanity itself, you may also know that Christianity didn’t come up with the idea of Resurrection – there are actually a great number of what scholars call “rising and dying divinities” in pagan myths (Think Osiris in Egypt). Yet what God shows in raising Jesus from the dead is that Resurrection is for all. Resurrection isn’t just a sign that the divine one is divine, his resurrection isn’t just for his own benefit, or for the benefit of a few lucky human beings, or to assure the continuation of the cycle of life. In Jesus’s resurrection God gives a sign of hope for all of us and all the earth that there is a future beyond death, and this future is not the continuation of what was before, it is a glorious future where sin, suffering and death have been “swallowed up in victory” (v 54) (we’ll talk more about that next week).
1. What is important for us today to have in mind (and in our hearts!) is to realize the depths of the love God has shown to us in raising Jesus from the dead. In Jesus, God came to meet us where we are – I think we see that throughout the whole Gospel: Last week, we heard in the Gospel how Jesus was actively seeking out disciples, instead of waiting for people to find out about him. Today, Luke tells us that Jesus preached to everybody in the valley, “on a level place” (not just “on the mount” as Matthew assumed). Yet the Gospel is not complete if we don’t believe that God does not only want to be where we are but, more deeply, God wants us to be where God is. Jesus came to visit us, yes, but he also came to take us with him – and it’s a very important belief that the first Christians practiced much more than we do – although we see that even the Corinthians had already started to forget about it.
2. The second thing we learn about God’s love in Jesus’s Resurrection, and the consequences of Jesus’s resurrection on our own future, is that God wants us to be as perfect as we can be. God loves us as sinners but God also wants for us to be the best person we can be, and even more, to be completely purified and renewed. Paul sees the Resurrection of Christ as the sign of reconciliation between God and God’s people: In his death, Jesus has taken on our sins; in his Resurrection Jesus, manifests God’s forgiveness. Jesus is the “first fruits of those who have died” not only because indeed he was raised from the dead, but moreover because he is a sign of our humanity restored – what humans will look like being purified from their sins.
3. The third thing we can read about God’s love for us in this connection between Christ’s Resurrection and our own is that God does not want us to despair. On the other way around, we should live with the hope that the best is yet to come. Life after death isn’t just a form of “survival”, a lingering of an ethereal form of whom we used to be, “resting” in a quiet place – which was probably the way Corinthians thought about after life and it’s still the way we often think about it. Rather, Paul wants believers to know resurrection is the fullness of life Jesus brought to the people and that God wants us to enjoy. This is what we express in Christian faith in saying that we believe in the “resurrection of the bodies”. We don’t believe just in the soul lingering somewhere, or in the reanimation of a corpse, we believe in a glorious, fully human life of which this very life is just a shadow – or as Paul will develop later – just the “seed.”
Now, Paul says several time, if we believe all that our faith isn’t “in vain” (v2 and v14) or “futile” (v17). It isn’t “vain” or “futile” because if we understand God’s love and the future God promises us, we can lead a life full of joy and hope – or at least a life where joy and hope prevail on the hardships we have to go through. By shifting our perspective, it will not only change the way we feel but it will also change the way we behave, and this is where we meet Jesus’s teaching in the Gospel today. If you remember from last week, Paul showed us that an encounter with the risen Christ is always transformative, and we hear today in Jesus’s own words how Jesus shifts our perspective.
So let’s have a look at it now.
The passage from the Gospel we have heard today is known as the “Beatitudes” – we generally know better Matthew’s version but here we have Luke’s, and it’s interesting because Luke here shows us something Matthew does not: Luke mentions Jesus’s words not only about those who are “blessed”(as Matthew did) but Luke also reports Jesus’s words about those who are “cursed” (or “unhappy”) and, in doing so, Luke shows us a complete reversal of what we usually value in this world. Blessedness, says Jesus, isn’t about being rich, full, careless or admired. Blessedness, says Jesus addressing the crowd of those who come to him for forgiveness and healing, is for those who seek God and God’s kingdom and seek the way God provides for them, and this can be truly understood in the light of Resurrection. If we really believe in resurrection, that this life is only the seed of what is to come, we are blessed because we are freed from the instinct of self preservation and the desire to always prove ourselves that lead us to judge, reject or compete with others. We are freed from our self centeredness where we feel that we have never enough, whether material goods or acknowledgment or accomplishments. It isn’t that this life on earth does not matter, this is hardly the case, but it matters in a completely different way. It matters in the sense that it prepares for what Jesus calls “Our reward in heaven”.
Now just a word about this expression before we finish: “Reward in heaven”.
This expression is not to be understood in the sense that it does not matter if we suffer a lot in this life because God will compensate later. First of all, God does not “compensate” by giving us more things or more fame in the world to come. Seeking for the “reward in heaven” means that if we long to know God, as did the crowd on that day, if we prepare our hearts and open our hearts in this life, our joy will be even more complete and our life will be even happier in the kingdom of God that is a kingdom of love. And then in this life, the belief in resurrection will cast a light of hope that cannot be shut out even in our darkest times, in the same way that, in the light of Resurrection, we don’t see Jesus’s cross as a defeat but we understand it as Jesus’s victory. This is, indeed, how Jesus’s Resurrection and ours are forever bound and how our faith will never be in vain.