This is our last Sunday with the First Letter to the Corinthians and the passage we have is a very important one as it presents Paul’s understanding of the Resurrection – by the way, it is also the official doctrine of the church on Resurrection, which we don’t know that well. Actually, it is strange to realize that, although we are people of faith, we speak so little of the Resurrection and how heaven will look like – as if it was impossible for us to know. Well, it is certainly difficult to grasp, yet if we pay attention, there are many passages in the Bible describing heaven and how life will look like after death – this passage of Paul’s letter is certainly one of them.
So what is Paul’s understanding? The main point is that his description of life after death is based on Jesus’s bodily resurrection and we saw last week that, for him, Jesus’s bodily resurrection is a prefiguration of the resurrection of the people. The fact that Christ has been raised from the dead is “the first fruits of those who have died” (v.20). And so to this day, this is what the Church confesses as well (and we affirm that every Sunday in our creed): We (officially) believe that we will be resurrected in our bodies.
Now, if you find that hard to believe (in your heart), you are in good company! Today, I guess everybody would agree that one thing is sure is that bodies certainly die (once for all) and even if we believe in a life after death, most of us, not unlike the Corinthians, believe in a survival of the soul, or in the survival a form of consciousness, whether in a spiritual realm or in the reincarnation, but we don’t believe that we will survive in our bodies. How could it be?
Well, this is actually where Paul starts today and we are going to spend a little time on that. I think I haven’t mentioned it yet, but the First Letter to the Corinthians is believed to be a response to a Letter sent to Paul by the Corinthians themselves, and therefore in his own letter Paul addresses different questions he’s been asked by the church – and it looks like this is exactly what he does at the beginning of our passage: “But someone will ask ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’’
To explain that, Paul makes use of a wonderful metaphor for the resurrection of the body: The metaphor of the seed. In a nutshell, Paul says that the body we have now is a seed – it will, indeed die, and like a seed be “buried”, planted in the ground. The seed itself will decompose to never come back to its former shape, but it will give birth to the plant – which Paul compares to our resurrected body. This can reminds us of a saying of Jesus that is often read at funerals: “(…) unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed.” (John 12:24)
From this, we first understand that the belief in the Resurrection of the body is not the belief that our corpses will be reanimated – this would actually not really look like heaven, but rather like a horror story! Paul tells us that God gives to all creatures its own body: a perishable body which is like a seed that will eventually give birth to the imperishable body. Our lectionary skips a certain number of verses in this passage where Paul describes the different types of bodies in Creation: animals, birds, and even sun, moon and stars – leading us to believe that it’s not only people who will be raised from the dead but all that participate in our mortal world. Paul teaches that this world “perishable” and “weak” will be made a glorious, “spiritual” one. I would say that the difference between our present body and our resurrected one is a little bit like the difference between the body we had in our mother’s womb and the body we have on earth. We had a body adapted to the life in the womb, now we have a body adapted to our life on earth, later we will have a body adapted to the life in a spiritual (and yet not immaterial) realm. In the same way that we still have the same body than we had when we were four years old, although not a single cell we had then hasn’t died, we will still be in Resurrection the same person than we are today – but completely purified and renewed. In Paul’s words, from being a human “of dust” to becoming a human “of heaven”, we only have to look at the natural to understand the supernatural, which is what Paul invites us to do in this passage.
Now how does it matter to understand and believe this?
It mattered to Paul that the Corinthians would believe this because, as we have seen before, they had a tendency to downplay the importance of their life on earth and especially to downplay the importance of what they did with their bodies. Since their bodies were to be “discarded”, they didn’t treat them as sacred which led them to commit a certain number of sins against their bodies (gluttony, sexual immorality…). It’s the same kind of thinking that some Christians have today when they don’t respect the environment. They likely think: “It does not matter if we pollute the earth because soon it will be gone and we will live in heavens”. Yet if we understand Paul correctly, we should take extra care of what we do with our own bodies and the bodies around us: They are the seeds of the glorious ones. They may be “perishable”, “dishonorable” or “weak”, and we know how embarrassing our bodies can be, yet it is from this dirt, when flesh and blood have disappeared, that God will raise the spiritual bodies. In today’s language, I would say that spirituality isn’t in our heads, it is in this concrete life we live as fully humans, in the way we treat ourselves and in the way we treat each other.
This is on this topic of “how we treat each other” that the Gospel is all about today. As for Paul, even if in less theoretical words, spirituality for Jesus is very concrete, even “down to earth” (It shouldn’t be surprising that for Luke this sermon is given “on a level place”!): “Do not judge”, “Do not condemn”, “Forgive”, “Love”, “Do good”, “Bless”, “Give”, “Do to others as you would have them do to you” says Jesus. He invites his disciples, and us, to grow in eternal life right now, in the middle of our everyday life to expand the ability of the heart, “being merciful as our Father is merciful”! (probably not as “as much”, rather “in the same way”). And if we do that, “our reward in heaven will be great”. Once again, when Jesus speaks about our “reward in heavens”, I don’t think he means that God will give us a special treatment in heavens, rather I think Jesus means that the more loving, forgiving and generous we are now, the more we will be able to receive “a good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over in our lap” of the joys of the life to come in a kingdom of love, a kingdom that will be so close to what we have known in this life, yet without sin, suffering and without death. We are given today the possibility to choose the seed we are, so we can also choose the plant we will grow to be.