“OUR RESURRECTION"
A SERMON BY NOEL ANDERSON PREACHED AT FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF UPLAND ON NOV. 1 2020
TEXT: 1 corinthians 15: 35-57
GNOSTIC CORINTH
“How are the dead raised?” asked someone in Corinth, “With what kind of body to they come?” For the Corinthians, the idea of bringing a body back from death was unthinkable, like digging food out of the garbage disposal and putting it back on your plate. The Greeks had a tough time with the whole idea of resurrection. They held a low view of the body. For them, the spiritual was far more real than the physical. The Corinthians were very spiritual people. So spiritual, that the bodies were almost an embarrassment—they were certainly an indignity—and they sought to transcend mere matter in order to become pure spirit.
They would have said “We are essentially spirits presently trapped in bodies of flesh.”
Their idea of the afterlife was one of blissful disembodiment, where they could live free in the ether of Heaven, like happy ghosts or otherwise being dissolved into the divine realms.
The idea of a resurrected body was hard for them to understand.
MATERIALIST JUDEA
Contrast Corinth with Judea. For the Jews, bodies were essential. God made Adam from the dust with God’s own hands. God made the Earth and all of creation, so the material world was good and central. The Jews affirmed the world as good because it was created by God who is good.
Because creation is a good gift, we are responsible for what we do with our bodies and our land. Justice is required in the here and now, because the here and now is all we know about. Yes, they believed in Heaven as the realm of God, but they also believed that God made Earth to be the realm of Man, so our responsibilities begin here and end here.
As the Greeks said “We are souls but have bodies,” the Jews would have said, “We are bodies with soul and they are unified.” It was close to materialism. Materialism today is what we call the scientific worldview (though many scientists are not so limited!). Materialism expects to see, touch, taste, feel, or smell something in order for it to be real or true. They wanted spirituality they could see; they demanded signs from God and the prophets of God. Signs they could see.
Even so, many of them—especially the Pharisees—believed in a general resurrection, even prior to Christ and Easter.
Follow me on this thinking: they expected justice in the here and now. God would vindicate the righteous and punish the wicked. However, sometimes the wicked prospered and the righteous died unjust deaths. How then can God be called righteous? Well God has to be righteous, so His righteousness must work in spite of death.
General resurrection said that on Judgment Day, all bodies would be raised back to life by God and then God would judge the nations—judge everyone—and do perfect justice. Judgment Day meant Justice Day. God would reward the righteous—especially them who suffered unjustly in life—and punish the wicked who prospered at others’ expense.
ANABIOSIS
So both Jews and Greeks had a hereafter. For the Greeks, it was just a continuation of the soul, but now an existence unhindered by flesh. For the Jews, death was real death, but new life could be given by God after death.
The Greeks had a hard time with resurrection because they already believed that souls were immortal. Mortality was part of having a body—once the body is gone, so is death and mortality.
The Jews—such as the Sadducees, Jerusalem’s aristocratic class—believed neither in the soul nor a hereafter of any kind. But they wouldn’t put it past God to be able to do anything.
Still, we need to make clear that there is a difference between resurrection and resuscitation. Jesus’ friend Lazarus was dead for three days, and Jesus raised him from the dead. Was this resurrection? No, it was resuscitation. Lazarus came back to life, but lived a normal, mortal life, dying a normal death later on, as far as we know.
In the Jewish idea of resurrection, once all the dead are raised for judgment, how long were they supposed to live? The short answer is: “long enough for justice to be completed.” Was it eternal life? We don’t know, and the Jewish literature never says “forever.”
With Christ, Jesus body is raised, but not resuscitated—it is transformed. Not like the ghostly immortality of souls of the Greeks. But with a real, physical body in addition to immortality:
Luke 24:39—“See, a ghost doesn’t have flesh and bones as you see I have.” They knew what ghosts were, but Jesus makes clear that a “ghostly immortality” was not the plan.
Here we hear Paul in our text, v. 44: “It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.”
CHRISTIAN VIEWS
This difference between resurrection and a “ghostly immortality” has played itself out in Christianity to the present day.
The Greek view, I would say, is the dominant one—the one most people hold. I think of it as the basic, Sylvester the Cat model. I’ve read that Sylvester dies more than any other cartoon character. What happens? Well, he hits the pavement after trying to eat Tweety Bird, and out come the cat ghosts with white robes and angel wings. The immortal soul floats up to the clouds of Heaven and he’s given a harp to play. This picture is not the biblical picture of resurrection, but the Greek worldview of the immortality of souls.
Strictly speaking, the bulk of Christian orthodoxy holds to something like the Jewish idea—complete death until resurrection. This seems to respect the integrity of body/soul unity. The idea is that death is really death—just dead—until the final trumpet sounds and the dead are raised. Paul even uses this same language. It is in the wording of our Presbyterian funeral services.
But there are texts which work against this body/soul union as well:
In Luke 23, as Jesus speaks from the cross to one of the thieves he says: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.” How does that happen without bodies?
Elsewhere Jesus indicates a body/soul division. In Matthew 10, He says, 28” Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” So it seems we do have souls beyond and separate from our bodies.
When we die, our souls, without bodies, go to be with God, awaiting bodily resurrection.
You might wonder, “Why not go full Greek? Why a resurrection at all? Can’t God just make whatever kind of new bodies we would need?” The answer to that is yes, but we can’t discount the fact that Jesus’ body was not left in the grave. His body was resurrected and this is our pattern of expectation as well. We are not expecting a Sylvester the Cat kind of Heaven.
What I think: I believe we have a spirit or soul that can live apart from the body. I believe that when we die, our souls leaves our bodies and go to be with Christ.
Those of us who have Christ in us cannot fully die, though the body may die.
As it says in Acts 2:24 “But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power.”
United with Christ, we are also united to eternal life that death cannot touch.
I believe that people see departed relatives and angels to guide them—most often very near to death—and I believe that although others in the room can’t see them, they are not visions or illusions, but really and truly there.
When our time comes, we will be met by angels to escort us where we belong.
Paul isn’t far off from this as he talks about two bodies: one of dust and the other of Heaven.
OUR RESURRECTION
We too, after whatever time God sees fit, shall have our bodies reunited with our souls.
If you ask “Why? Why bother? Why not just live in the eternal spiritual realm?” you understand the Corinthians very well.
Our bodies are good creations. God will not allow decay and death to have the good thing he created forever. Our bodies will be resurrected in their transformed nature, just as Christ’s body was raised but not resuscitated.
It’s a wild, strange thought to consider that these hands you and I look at will one day be the hands of a corpse, and then one day again raised and transformed to the imperishable nature of Heaven. Look at your hand. You will again look at that hand in the year 61 trillion. Yes, the hand will look better then than now.
Our personal-ness is preserved. It’s not like the God of classical, pagan philosophers—a great, undefinable source like the Force in Star Wars—nor like the Buddhist/Hindu idea of all things being one and only one, into which all other things are dissolved and undifferentiated—a kind of great God Soup—but God is revealed as a lover of persons—of personhood and personalities.
It’s not that God is like us but that we have been created like God’s image. God has a heart as we have (figurative heart, of course), He feels, He suffers pain, He rejoices. God means to preserve that part of us as well.
PAROUSIA
Paul’s teaching of a coming transformation of the world by God is the good news of Jesus’ return, and with it, the transformation of all flesh and the whole comos. The dead are resurrected and those who are walking the Earth when it happens will suddenly experience the total transformation in the twinkling of an eye.
BANG! Just like that, we could be transformed and this world of decay, entropy, and death will be transformed beyond our dimensions—the mortal literally putting on immortality.
This is what Paul calls “the Blessed Hope” and it is central to the Christian Faith. God has a plan unfolding for all reality, and we are part of it. In every day, we make choices—very real choices—that participate in how God will complete the world.
God can see all the possible options of all human actions, and he wants us to do what is right and good with our choices in order that we also share in the final victory.
We must love God with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength.
We must love others as ourselves.
We must love ourselves.
As we come to the table, we are fed in body AND soul for the eternal journey we already walk.