The Sixth Sunday After the Epiphany

+ In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Just over one week ago, my uncle lay dying in his home in Missouri, so I’ve thought a good deal about death these past few days. If you had gone into my uncle’s room and told him, “I have irrefutable proof that there is no resurrection from the dead,” that would’ve shaken the very ground under him. My uncle was a Christian and he was dying. The truth or falsity of resurrection made all the difference in the world to him at that moment. It was, in Tillichian terms, a matter of ultimate concern.

I wonder sometimes why I’m not more like that even though I’m in reasonably good health. Honestly, most of the time I don’t hinge my life on the truth of the doctrine of the resurrection, I don’t go all in with every chip I’ve got, so proof that the resurrection is a lie wouldn’t make me an object of pity, except insofar as I would’ve had more time on Sundays to work the New York Times crossword and eat waffles. But if we could find a person whose life makes no sense without the resurrection, what would that life look like?

Saint Paul is a case study of that kind of life, and he says so in a little syllogism in 1 Cor. 15: If there is no resurrection from the dead, then Christ was not raised; and if Christ was not raised, then everything Paul believed in was empty (Gk: kenon). If the resurrection was a lie, so was Paul’s teaching, his faith and his life. Chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians is fantastic theology – it’s well-reasoned, it’s profound and it’s eminently practical. I considered getting up here this morning and just reading 1 Cor. 15 and sitting down, as no doubt many of you wish I had done. It’s also a great vantage point from which to examine Paul’s life, because it shows us that a life like his, a life grounded upon belief in the resurrection, is a converted life, a confident life, and a hopeful life.

First of all, Paul’s was a converted life: To see all of this, we have to go outside the bounds of today’s NT reading. In verse 9, Paul says “I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” Remember who Paul had been: Paul was a Jew, but not just any Jew. In Phil. 3.6, Paul said he persecuted the church with zalos, “zeal.” N. T. Wright says “whereas for the modern Christian ‘zeal’ is something you do on your knees, or in evangelism, or in works of charity, for the first-century Jew ‘zeal’ was something you did with a knife.”1 Wright says Paul was zealous “for a holy revolution in which the pagans would be defeated once and for all, and in which as well, renegade Jews would either be brought into line or be destroyed along with the pagans.”2 So Paul took part in the serial murders of people he considered enemies of that cause.

Until he met Jesus. Presented with evidence of the resurrection of Jesus, everything in Paul’s life changed. He wrote elsewhere: “Whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ . . . . I consider [everything else] skubala, that I may gain Christ.” (Phil. 3.7-8) The NIV translates skubala as “rubbish.” Sometimes it’s translated “garbage,” or “refuse”; but to convey the crudity, the earthiness and the visceral imagery of what the Greek word connotes, a better translation is “excrement.”3 Everything Paul did before he met Jesus was crap compared to knowing him. That’s conversion. For Paul, Jesus’ resurrection meant following him wasn’t just one option among many: It was the only option. Christianity either meant everything, or it meant nothing at all.

Paul’s wasn’t just a converted life, it was also a confident life – After the little exercise in deductive reasoning, Paul drives a stake in the ground with an emphatic Greek word that we translate “but now” (1 Cor. 15.20): Yeah, if Christ hadn’t been raised, Christian faith would be empty and worthless, but Christ was raised, and for Paul that meant he could take anything life threw at him and not flinch.

Why did confidence in Jesus’ resurrection make Paul so confident himself? There’s not time today to do an exhaustive study of Pauline eschatology, but in verse 20, Paul calls Jesus the “firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep, by which he meant “the first among many,” like when he described Jesus as “the firstborn among many brothers” (Rom. 8.29b). Paul had been wrong when he equated God’s kingdom with a pure Israel, and now he realized God was building for himself a whole new creation that death could not touch. The resurrection meant Jesus was destroying death, the “last enemy” of God’s people and the last impediment to God’s reign.

Donald Grey Barnhouse was a Presbyterian pastor in Philadelphia whose his wife died, leaving him with two young daughters to raise alone. Driving to his wife’s funeral, struggling to find a way to help his daughters come to grips with their mother’s death, he stopped at a traffic light and a truck pulled up next to them, casting their car into shadow. Barnhouse turned to his daughter and said: “Honey, you see that truck? You see the shadow of that truck? Would you rather be hit by the truck or by the shadow?” And his daughter said, “Of course, by the shadow.” And he said: “Jesus was hit by the truck of death so mommy would only have to be hit by the shadow of death.”4

Paul was imprisoned, he was tortured, he faced death day after day, but he was confident death was just a shadow, and it could never separate him from the love of Christ.

Last point: Paul’s was a hopeful life. The confidence Paul had made hopeful action possible, even when it looked like the world was going to hell in a handcart. Somebody who is not afraid of dying can walk into death and suffering of other people, whether it’s in first century Corinth or twenty-first century Washington, DC, and dare to hope despite the circumstances. I’ve been reading a book by Lesslie Newbigin, who was a missionary to India for forty years. He describes the church as a community of people like that, people who, because of Jesus’ resurrection, have audacious hope. He writes: “[W]e can be hopeful, acting hopefully in apparently hopeless situations, not dreaming of an absolute perfection on this side of death, but doing resolutely that relative good which is possible now, doing it as an offering to the Lord who is able to take it and keep it for the perfect kingdom which is promised. In this sense, to use a phrase of Schweitzer, our actions in the public life of the world are acted prayers for the kingdom . . . and as such they act as signs of its reality and so enable others to act in hope.” 5

Paul’s life, my uncle’s life, my own life – all of them end in physical death. But what made Paul’s life so qualitatively different? Converted. Confident. Hopeful. The resurrection was the focal point of Paul’s life, so he had hope even though, in Newbigin’s words: “The track on which we walk is one that disappears from sight before it reaches the destination . . . . It goes down into the dark valley of death, and we, with all our works, go that way. We can go forward with confidence because Jesus has gone that way before us and has come back from the deep valley. If he is himself the track, we can go forward confidently even when the future is hidden. We are not lost.” 6

Jesus knows the way.

+ In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.

1. N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997): 27.

2. Ibid., 28.

3. Bauer, W., F. W. Danker, W. F. Arndt, and F. W. Gingrich, “Skubalon” in Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. 3d ed. Chicago, 1999: 932.

4. From a sermon preached by Dr. Timothy J. Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City on April 16, 2006; see http://www.christianitytoday.com/moi/2001/001/jan/3.3.html [last visited 10 February 2007].

5. Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989): 115.

6. Ibid.