1 Corinthians 15 - Introduction

HOMILETIC ANALYSIS

The whole chapter may be reviewed as An Easter Bible Reading on 1 Corinthians 15.

I. A piece of history.

II. A piece of revelation.

III. A piece of exhortation.

1. History.—I Keen-witted Corinthians fond of speculation. Too “wise” (2 Corinthians 11:19, etc.) to take any doctrine simply on trust, even from most thoroughly accredited teacher. They must understand the Resurrection. They must get it into a form that could be understood. If that not the original form, or “orthodox,” so much the worse for the original. “Yes; we understand ‘the Resurrection.’ There is no mystery about it. In fact, in the only true sense, it is ‘past already’ (probably, as 2 Timothy 2:18). Merely a rhetorical expression for the experience of the New Birth. We all have had our Resurrection—all the Resurrection we ever shall have. There is in the literal, physical sense no resurrection of the dead.”

2. This the exaggeration of a glorious truth. The new, eternal life did begin at “conversion.” That was the event, the date, of all others in our history; the real dividing-line was there, between Old and New, between Death and Life. There is a dividing-line at death and another at the resurrection. But these are only between newer and newer stages of the new life. In death the body drops away; the full Life, in which the parting of the spiritual nature from its old companion of many years is a mere momentary incident, goes on to become fuller and larger. At the resurrection it will go on from fuller to fullest. But we did rise out of Death into Life at conversion. Corinthians so far held truth, but exaggerated it.

3. They did not do justice to the place of the body in the Man. It is as essentially part of him as the spirit or the soul. Man is not soul only, any more than he is body only. He is body, soul, spirit; these three are one man. By the Redeemer’s grace the body has its future. He died for the whole manhood; the body therefore is to have its redemption and after-life.

4. “Cannot have!” these said; “cannot be! How are the dead—the Dead!—the Dead! Look at them; think of them after a month’s interment! The DEAD! don’t you see them?—raised up? With what (sort of a) body do these dead come (forth)?” “Well,” replies Paul, “you must not say ‘Cannot be.’ It has been.” [So neither has a modern scientist or unbeliever any right to sweep away miracle with a preliminary and all-excluding flourish of denials. Have miracles been? It is not speculation or theory, but evidence and history, which come first in the discussion.] “Deny all resurrection of the dead, and you fight against History. History will win; and, meanwhile, remember that if there cannot be a resurrection of the body, then your Lord lies still in death in Joseph’s grave—or at least is only so alive as any other ordinary departed friend or teacher is. No Resurrection? Then there is no Risen Lord!”

5. Christianity is historical. Its doctrines are rooted in facts of history. The Incarnation is bound up with—stands or falls with—the historical fact that Jesus Christ was born by the Holy Ghost of a pure Virgin. If Jesus Christ did not actually, historically die on a certain day [in probably April, A.D. 30] there has been no Atonement. If He did so die, but did not actually rise again on the following Sunday morning, and a few weeks after return to heaven and take His place in that world once more, then the death was nothing to the purpose of an Atonement, and there is no living, incarnate Representative of humanity to be its Intercessor with God. If assailants can do anything, they can disprove “facts” alleged, or show the “evidence” for them valueless. If the facts are gone, or not verifiable and as good as gone, Christianity is really as good as gone—Salvation is gone. Prove that the Resurrection of Christ is not history,—that is their task; then His death is vain, “your faith vain” too.

6. But the history has all the verification possible—not to speak of the prophetic intimations of it—and that very strong. “The eleven saw Him. Peter saw Him. I saw Him. ‘Hallucination? Enthusiasm?’ Five hundred saw Him at once. A crowd does not all see visions, nor do all see the same visions. All that is subjective is eliminated by the multiplication of the witnesses. The larger half, more than two hundred and fifty at least, are alive; you can examine them. ‘Fraud?’ You do not get five hundred, or two hundred and fifty, conspirators all to keep the secret of a fraud, or not for long.” If any fact of ancient history can be established by sober testimony, this can. Christ’s resurrection is a Piece of History, the sure historical foundation of our faith and hope. “Now is Christ risen from the dead! And become the firstfruits of them that slept.” But this last truth, further, is—

II. A piece of revelation.—

1. Of this, at present, we can only say we believe it. The fact is mere revelation; unascertainable by us beforehand; and now that it is asserted, we can barely do more than tell what the words mean. We can hardly conceive what the fact may prove to be in the historical working out and fulfilment. There is to be a resurrection of All (see Critical Notes); an ordered, orderly gathering of all Christ’s then living and raised ones. Christ has already, as the firstfruits of the harvest for the heavenly garner, led the way. “At His Coming.” “The End.”

2. The relations, even of time, between these revealed facts of the future are involved in great obscurity. The interpretation of what is here said in connection with “the End” is full of mystery. But the symbolic language gives an impressive picture. We see heaven’s Crown Prince, the Colleague in the Father’s throne, to Whom has been apportioned the government of our redeemed race, and the task of bringing this rebel world into subjection by the power of His cross, or by the arm of His might. There He stands. His task is finished. He stands Victor over the last Enemy to be destroyed; His foot is upon Death! His fellow-conquerors stand with Him in triumphant array, in their risen bodies, fashioned like His. Then (may we say it?) He lowers His sword, and bends His head, and bows His knee, and gives back to the Father the kingdom—the Mediator’s kingdom—which was committed to Him long ago, in the morning of His own resurrection (Psalms 2; Romans 14:9, etc.). What a history that of redemption has been! What a history that of His kingdom! And that is “the end” of it!

3. But those bodies of His fellow-conquerors? “How are the Dead raised? How raised? How raised? Where do they get a body? [For they cannot be men without a body; a mere unclothed human spirit is not a man.] What kind of body have they found given them?” How? Revelation does not help us much. But at least

(1) “Death is per se no barrier. In nature the seed which yourselves sow must die if it is to live again. Death is, for it, the way to life. ‘God gives it a body;’ for the present that is the best answer. And so God is pledged to clothe the immaterial in man.”

(2) “With what kind of body? Do not know; and what matter? Even now, amongst these material, fleshly enwrappings of the Life-principle, animal, aviar, piscine, there is infinite variety, suggesting infinite possibilities of new kinds. There may easily be another kind of a body for a risen man. These are all “flesh,” in their infinite varieties, as his may be in its kind; and all are real bodies. All glory, again, is glory, but with differences; sun, moon, star as compared with star, varying in kind as well as degree, of glory. That we cannot conceive of so new, so novel, a condition and glory of the body does not carry us very far in the direction of disbelief, nor hinder faith very much. We do not understand, we can hardly conceive of, the real, material, angelic “bodies celestial.” If there are Jovians, or Saturnians, or Mercurials in yonder planets, what are Jovian, Saturnian, Martial “celestial bodies” like? As was said (1 Corinthians 2:14), between the “natural” and the “spiritual” is a great gulf, in fact and knowledge. The “natural” body can give very scanty suggestion as to the “spiritual” body. This will be “my own” (kind of) “body,” and “God gives it me”; a body which makes me—the “spiritual man” who used to wear a “natural” body—even in body a “spiritual” man complete, redeemed in body, soul, spirit. My life repeats the old order of history: first the “natural” Adam, the earth-born; next the “spiritual,” life-giving Adam, the Lord, heaven-born. “Flesh and blood inherit the kingdom of God?” Of course not. If that be your difficulty, we are agreed. I also say “Flesh and blood cannot.” “This corruptible?” No, no! Incorruption. “This mortal?” No! Immortality. “This weakness and frailty and liability to suffering?” Away with the thought! Thank God, No! We shall have done with these. I do not know much, but I know, “raised in power,” in all the light and strength and glory of an eternal Life. I do not know how; it has not been told me how. All is Revelation; even that does not go far.

III. Exhortation.—Does the belief in the resurrection matter so much? Cannot a man be “steadfast, unmovable,” and the rest, without it? The holding of the doctrine involves:

1. Without it the man’s creed is no longer Christian. And the connection between creed and life is close. In the discussion in this chapter it is assumed that the question is not merely one of the Resurrection and future of the Body, but of the future and immortality of the Man. And if in the man’s creed Immortality be not found, it will affect his life, sooner or later, radically. At all events, to disbelieve the doctrine is to disbelieve the resurrection of Christ, with all the serious issues connected therewith. “And why do you baptize for the dead?”

2. “Then are we of all men the most miserable!” Die like the brutes, and yet be doomed to live without their insouciance, their freedom from responsibility and from fear of the future, from the sting of conscience and the sense and shame of failure? Sacrifice the pleasure—such as it is—of the men to whom this life is all, and afterwards find that we have no more to hope for than they? “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” Why risk everything—anything at all—for Christ? Why “fight with beasts at Ephesus,” or “die daily,” if it be only “after the manner of men”—with ordinary men’s hopes and no more?

3. “Do not listen to such things, lest you come to think such things!” “Evil communications corrupt good manners.” We shall suffer hurt in even mental contact with such teaching.

4. “Do not listen; labour; abound in the work.” Work is the best antidote to [sinful desires and to] vain speculations. An idle life leaves open the door to temptation, to unbelief, or to a sensuous or sensual life—perhaps to both. A Christian may be too busy to doubt; never too busy to enjoy and love and live.

5. “You are in the Lord; your hope is that of men ‘in Him’ (1 Corinthians 15:19); your activities are His, wrought through you. Can His life and work be in vain, ending unworthily, or in a complete failure?” If He had no resurrection, His own work was in vain; if you have none, yours will be. But stand fast in your faith in His resurrection and your own. (Many of these points, and some omitted ones, fully stated in Separate Homilies.) “Take the objective facts away from Christianity,” you lose the “definiteness and outward reality,” the more “strong and definite service.” You get “endless and useless introspection upon the mysteries of our nature, the rehearsal of which comes to be regarded as the fulfilment of righteousness,”—“a very tiresome thing, and so dropped, or exchanged for … Atheism.” (See Munger, Freedom of Faith, p. 195.)