1 Corinthians 15:1-11
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. 2 By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.
3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. 6 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8 and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.
9 For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. 10 But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. 11 Whether, then, it is I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.
Hello friends! We are on the homestretch of or sermon series, which I am calling Johnny Cash Theology. This series is about the things that we can agree about as a church, and the things that the church has consistently believed throughout the last 2,000 years. Just like everyone agrees that Johnny Cash is awesome, we too can all agree on these central teachings of Christianity. Without a doubt, the more we get into these issues, the more divided we become. And I’m not afraid to go there, to explore the things that we disagree on. But I like to start with or shared convictions and then explore what others have said.
As our guide to this sermon series we are using the Apostle’s Creed, one of the first statements of faith produced by the church, and recited in many churches on a regular basis to this day. The Apostle’s Creed doesn’t go into details about doctrine, but states what has been central to the faith for the last 2,000 years. Let’s begin this morning by reciting the creed, which can be found in our blue hymnals, number 712:
I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again; he ascended into heaven, he is seated at the right hand of the Father, and will come again to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.
We will be looking at the Apostles’ Creed for the rest of August, but I want to jump to the end of the creed for today’s message. I’ve got my reasons. 🙂 Today we are going to look at the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.
When I started working on this sermon, I quickly realized that I didn’t know what the Apostle’s Creed was referring to when it spoke of the resurrection of the body. I didn’t know if it was speaking of Jesus’s resurrection following his crucifixion, or the bodily resurrection of those who put their faith in Jesus. I thought I knew, but the more I read that line, I less confident I was.
So I started searching online to see what the people of the internet had to say on the matter. And they were not clear, either. But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to say that it isn’t an either/or question, but a both/and.
Though the scriptures aren’t as clear as I would like them to be, there is reason to believe that our resurrected bodies will be similar to Jesus’s resurrected body. 2 Corinthians 4:14a says, “Because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus…” And Philippians 3:20-21, “But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.”
When the Apostle’s Creed speaks of the resurrection of the body, is it speaking of our bodies, or of Jesus’s bodies? The answer is yes.
Throughout its history, the church has taught a bodily resurrection for the believers. This isn’t some disembodied reality, where we float around as spirits, like we see in the cartoons. This is your body, but made right again. Your body, but without the aches and pains. Your body, but made as God intended for it to be.
Romans 8:22-23 is a helpful reminder: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies.”
We await the redemption of our bodies.
Many years ago, I sat with a dear old gentleman in the nursing home. He was nearing the end of his life, and he was asking the kinds of questions that are important at that end of the journey. He believed in a bodily resurrection, but he had a few concerns. Mostly, he was worried about those who were cremated. “What will happen to them at the resurrection?” he asked me.
I assured him that the bodies of the earliest Christians probably weren’t in much better condition after a couple thousand years underground. I told him God would be able to work it out.
A more unique question was once asked of the 3rd-century church father, Tertullian. Someone reportedly asked Tertullian what would happen if a Christian was eaten by a cannibal. That man’s molecules, elements, and proteins would be utilized by the cannibal to make his own muscles, sinews, and so forth. So what if that cannibal converted to Christianity. Who would get which molecules?
I think Tertullian’s answer was similar to the one I gave my friend in the nursing home. God will figure it out. Actually, I think Tertullian was less pastoral. He said something like, “Stop wasting my time with this!”
Our Johnny Cash Theology for today is simply this: Jesus lives, and so can we.
And that’s where the agreement ends.
I’m going to try to address a couple of disagreements this morning, and as always, I am going to try to be fair. But I can’t promise to be neutral.
The first disagreement that I hear often today is a question of the nature of the resurrections. This has been a question that has been brought to our attention by a group that calls their self The Jesus Seminar. The Jesus Seminar is a group of New Testament Scholars who get together to discuss various issues of faith, vote on their findings, and then share what they have learned. Let me be clear, the Jesus Seminar is made up of a lot of brilliant and diverse scholars, and I agree with much of their work. Some of the members may even be familiar to you, names like Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. But that doesn’t mean that I always agree with them. Heck, they don’t even always agree with one another!
The story is told that the Jesus Seminar gathered to debate the resurrection of Jesus. And after many months of deliberation, they presented their findings to news media and other scholars. The Jesus Seminar, however, did more than just arrive with their findings in hand. They brought with them an employee from the local morgue. This person was there as an expert witness, someone who deals with death every day. And what was he there to confirm?
That people don’t come back from the dead.
The Jesus Seminar doesn’t deny that Jesus rose from the dead. They deny that he rose bodily from the grave and instead arose in some altered state. They tend to say things like Jesus went through death and came out on the others side, kind of like going through the tunnels on 64 when you are going through the beach. Those things will change you.
Again, I don’t agree with this perspective, but I do want to be fair to what they have taught. The Jesus Seminar is simply trying to rely on modernist sensibilities to understand the resurrection. And since they have never seen someone come back from the dead physically, they are led to believe that this was a spiritual resurrection.
When I think about such things, I wonder how this belief might affect a person’s life as a Christian. I thought of passages like Romans 10:9, “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
But notice, it doesn’t say you have to believe that God raised Jesus bodily. Just that God raised him from the dead. The Jesus Seminar believes that God raised Jesus from the dead, just not physically.
The other question people may have is what about the eye witnesses. Our scripture for today includes a reference to a number of eye witnesses, beginning in 5b through 8a: “He appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also.”
Paul leaves a few out, including Mary, who spoke with Jesus at the tomb. That’s important, and we will come back to that. There are over 500 eye witnesses listed here, and some of them are still living! The Jesus Seminar would say that he appeared as a vision or an apparition.
Ah, but Thomas reached out and touched Jesus’s wounds with his own hands, and we read that Jesus ate fish on the beach! Visions don’t eat fish!
But the resurrected Jesus also went through walls and magically appeared places. Furthermore, Jesus wasn’t always recognized by people who should have recognized him. When Jesus ate the fish, his disciples weren’t sure it was him. On the walk to Emmaus, the two disciples didn’t know who he was until he vanished from thin air.
So did Jesus rise from the dead physically, bodily, or did he rise spiritually. I think you can make a good argument for either side. But there are a few reasons why I believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus.
The first reason I believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus is because, in the words of New Testament scholar NT Wright, it is the best explanation for what happened.
I know very well that dead people don’t come back from the dead, but when we read the stories of the first Easter, there are a lot of details that can’t be explained in any other way. The gospels are clear that when Jesus died on the cross, his body was laid in a tomb, a stone was rolled in front of it, and the tomb was guarded by professionals. Roman soldiers stood watch over the tomb. Yet on Easter Sunday, the tomb was empty. Two options exist: either the body was taken, or Jesus walks out on his own two feet. And I don’t think a bunch of fishermen would be able to overcome professionally-trained, armed soldiers.
And who was the first person to actually see the empty tomb and the resurrected Jesus? It was a woman, Mary (each gospel tells it slightly different). Remember how I pointed out that Paul did not include Mary or the other women in his list of people in his list of eye witnesses. That’s because a woman was not considered a reliable witness in the 1st century. Their uteruses made them prone to make stories up, or something like that. No woman could serve as a witness in a court of law. If you are going to invent a story about an empty tomb, you wouldn’t have your primary witnesses be a bunch of women.
Who else sees the empty tomb? In John’s gospel we find that Peter is among the first to see the empty tomb. Peter went on to be great champions of the faith up until his death. Peter is said to have been crucified upside-down, not believing that he was worthy to die in the same way as his Lord. In fact, of the 11 disciples who remained after the death of Judas, each is said to have died a martyr’s death (except possibly John).
Would they have died for their cause if they didn’t think Jesus rose from the grave physically? Maybe. But I don’t think that the gospels would make such a big deal about the empty tomb unless those early disciples believed he really did rise physically.
Ultimately, my reason for believing is a physical resurrection has to do with my understanding of “life everlasting,” as the Apostle’s Creed calls it.
In the book of Revelation, we get a glimpse of what things will be like. In chapter 21, verse 5, the resurrected Jesus pronounces from the throne, “Behold, I make all new things!” No, that isn’t right. He says, “Behold, I make all things new!”
If you like the idea of floating around on clouds and playing harps, that’s fine. But my vision of heaven comes from places like the books of Romans and Revelation. Revelation speaks of a new heaven and new earth; not a separate place, but a renewed space, where heaven and earth combine. Romans 8:21 says, “Creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.”
My view of heaven is restoration of a world that God created and called “good.” This includes not only the coming together of heaven and earth, but the renewal of our bodies. Again, Revelation 21:4, “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain.”
I believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus, because I believe in the physical resurrection of all Christians. And I believe that our resurrected bodies will be like Jesus’s. In many ways, still identifiable. Will we be able to walk through walls like Jesus? I don’t know. If we are to take the example of Jesus’s resurrected body as normative for our resurrected bodies, perhaps we will even still bear the marks of our former pain. Regardless, I do hold out hope that, like Jesus, we will still be able to enjoy a nice picnic on the beach. What would heaven be like if we couldn’t eat?
I find comfort in the words of NT Wright when addressing the question of physical or spiritual resurrection. Wright says the New Testament, and we today, simply don’t have the words to describe our resurrected existence. Our fish-eating, wall-walking-through, pain-free, restored existence.
Our Johnny Cash Theology for today simply states that Jesus lives, and you can too. We can ask questions about the nature of Jesus’s resurrection and our own. We can ask questions about what happens to us between the time of our death and the resurrection. Do we experience “soul sleep,” or a temporary disembodied experience? Maybe time doesn’t really exist linearly at that point.
I don’t know, and I don’t plan to lose any sleep over it.
When we get right down to it, my theology sounds a lot like Marcus Borg, a member of the Jesus seminar, though we disagree on the physical/spiritual argument about the resurrection. Borg says, “I begin with the positive – with what we can say with certainty about the meaning of Easter in the gospels and the New Testament. It is twofold: Jesus lives and is Lord.”
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