New Year Sermon on I Corinthians 15.1–11 from St Matthews Shenton Park, 3rd January 2016
My daughter subscribes to a Global Intelligence website called Stratfor (for Strategic Forum, I guess). I took a peak at what they are predicting for 2016 and they sum it up as a year of confusion. In almost every theatre of international relations – America and Russia, Europe, the Middle East, IS, economics – there is growing uncertainty. Their final conclusion is that it is all leading to an even more confusing year in 2017.
That is a better prognosis than could be, I suppose: not so many major wars or threats from totalitarian powers. However, one of the negatives that comes with confusion is a kind of paralysis of action.
Thinking of what lies before us as Christians it could also be confusion: violent Islamism vs the insistence of the media that Islam is a religion of peace, the coming plebiscite on same-sex marriage, the pressure within our churches not to regard sodomy as a sin, How we should respond to the arguments of the anti-God movement.
All of this and more is a recipe for confusion coming on top of two centuries of scholarly attacks on the integrity of the Bible, which have weakened the churches and made it difficult for Christians to take a strong line on anything. Confusion leads inevitably to inertia, while on the other side Muslim jihadists, those who rage against God, and those with visions for a new society are full of certainty and the drive that goes with it.
The words of W.B. Yeats in his poem Slouching towards Gomorrah sum it up: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” (The Second Coming)
When the ground begins to move beneath you it becomes desperately important to find a firm place to stand. It is that need I wish to address as we face this year of uncertainty. Is there firm ground beneath your feet?
More years ago than I can remember Allan Chapple and I organized a teaching camp at Jarrahdale which we called “A Place to Stand”. The idea cames from Archimedes, the ancient Greek scientist who wrote about levers. He observed that a very large weight could be moved by a very small force by means of a lever. He speculated that with a long and strong enough lever one should be able to move the earth, provided one had a stable fulcrum against which you could work the lever. He is supposed to have said, “Show me a place to stand, and I will move the earth.” There is no such place, and that is the problem we face in the breaking apart of our world culture. If I am to find truth and stability I must find some place to start, which is not going to move under my feet.
The Bible makes it clear there is such a place. I have been given 1 Corinthians 15.1-11 and it seems a very good passage to explore as we look into the new year. The church in Corinth was in a state of confusion, moral, social, spiritual and philosophical and Paul has been working through their issues one by one. Here in chapter 15 he comes to the last of them, the question of whether those who die will walk again, and the space he gives to it marks it out as a key issue. It flows directly as a consequence of the gospel, so that is the place of stability to which Paul leads them.
“I make known to you, brothers, the gospel I announced to you, which you received.”
This word gospel, which Paul uses three times in this short passage, refers to a momentous and happy announcement which has been sent in this case from the ruler of the universe to people on earth. It is the announcement of God’s appointment of a king for the world, the promised Messiah, who has now come, and whose name is Jesus. He offers peace with God and a place in his eternal kingdom for all who will believe.
The Corinthians embraced the message when it first came to them, but some failed to understand its implications and now are embracing new ideas, not realizing that they are a hopeless contradiction.
“I make known to you, brothers, the gospel I announced to you, which you received, in which you stand, by which you are saved –with what word I evangelized you – if you hold it fast, unless you believed in vain.“
Paul is afraid that some of the Corinthians are going to fall by the wayside by misunderstanding the gospel, substituting something other, and ultimately rejecting the message that can save them. Their believing, whatever it is, is going to turn out to be in vain, for nothing, pointless. But let us see what we can learn which is positive from Paul’s statement. There is a message from heaven, which, if you embrace it, take you stand on it – not in vain – will save your life. It will also provide you with that solid place to stand as you try to make sense of the confusion around you. This is what I hope we will all see as we stand on the threshold of the new year. There is a place to stand, a place of security (personal salvation) and a place of truth. And not just any old truth, but a central truth, which will allow you to gradually put together a whole lot more truth. So come with me as we ask about this gospel that saves.
“For I delivered to you as of first importance what also I received, that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day, according to the Scriptures, and that he was seen …“
The gospel, as I said, is God’s announcement to the world that he has chosen Jesus to be our king forever. All that is bound up in this one little word, Christ. But Paul wants us to understand who this Christ is and what he stands for. The way he received Christ, and what he passed on to the Corinthians, was that this Jesus, this king, died for our sins and was buried and was raised to life again.
I wonder what that does to you? Let me say it again! Let me be Paul and you the Corinthians! “I passed on to you, what I also received, that Christ died for our sins and was buried and raised on the third day.” This was a startling message to men and women in the first century. God brings his king into the world and his very first act is to face death, be well and truly killed and disposed of, but then to get up and walk again.
It was startling because it showed that God cared about people, that he came to his world, that he went as far as dying to bring about the salvation of his people, that he faced death and defeated it for us, that he has opened up a pathway into eternal life.
But we need to understand that for many Greeks, though their first response to this might have been positive, a reaction soon set in. Their culture glorified the spiritual and downgraded the material, just as ours glorifies nature and downgrades the supernatural. So it was not long before some of them turned against the idea that God’s Son might have had a real body that suffered and died on the cross. They also removed from their thinking the idea that our future destiny involves resurrection: the recreation of our physical bodies in a real material world. Paul has dealt with Jesus’ death in the early chapters of this letter. At the end he wants to straighten them out on the future resurrection, but before he deals with its meaning he wants them to see that it is true, and that takes him to Jesus’ resurrection in 30AD:
“I passed on to you what I also received, that Christ died for our sins, that he was buried, that he was raised, that he was seen…”
Paul says he himself received this message. From whom did he receive it? We know from his various writings that he received it from Jesus himself. He was a persecutor of the new faith until Jesus met him and revealed to him that he truly was the king. And that changed everything for Paul. His certainty, his place to stand, from that moment on, was the knowledge that Jesus was God’s true king.
But it didn’t stop there. The reason he was persecuting Christians was because it was blasphemy to claim that a hanged criminal could be God’s promised king. But Jesus revealed to him, that far from being a shameful defeat and a disqualifier of his claim to be Messiah, his death was according to the Scriptures, and the way God had made it possible for disqualified sinners to be forgiven and enter the kingdom of God.
This repetition of “according to the Scriptures” appears a little tedious to us, and mightn’t have meant a lot to the gentile Corinthians, but to Paul the rabbi it was sensational. It had been there all along in the Scriptures: “The arm of the Lord (God’s messianic agent): despised and rejected … a man of sorrows … pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities … the punishment that brought us peace was upon him. We all like sheep have gone astray … and the Lord has laid on him the guilt of us all … It was the Lord’s will to crush him … and although he makes him a guilt offering he will see his offspring and prolong his days …” and so on. All this was written 700 years before Jesus actually did it. (Isaiah 53) God opened Paul’s eyes to what was there in the OT Scriptures all along, that the world would be saved by the king standing in the place of his people and bearing their guilt.
This teaching has been under attack for 200 years, mostly from within the church, so there is much confusion. Some will say it is only what evangelicals believe, or that Christians only started to believe it after the Reformation. It is not so. Paul establishes it as part of the gospel he received from Jesus and passed on the the Corinthians. What else could “Christ died for our sins” mean? The atoning death of Jesus is foundational.
So if you dont think your sins matter, if you think God should ignore sin, if you think he shouldn’t need atonement, if you think it is immoral for Jesus to carry your guilt, if you think you can work out a better system … then try your luck. One thing you will never have again is certainty, and if Paul is right, you are walking away from salvation; whatever belief remains to you may be in vain. Our salvation rests squarely on two great facts, and the first of them is that Christ, our king, died for our sins, according to the OT Scriptures. Our entry into the kingdom of God has been purchased for us by Jesus, by his death. The second is that Jesus broke through death.
For Jesus did not stay dead. God raised him up as the Scriptures had said he would and he becomes the first stage of the new creation. We live in a dying world spoiled by sin. Christ’s atoning death deals with sin and his resurrection opens the way to a new sinless creation. Paul will spend the rest of this long chapter exploring the implications of this, but first he wants us to be sure that what we are talking about is a fact.
If all we had were the writings of Paul, he would be a puzzle. He makes great claims about God and Christ and the future, but are they true? They are extraordinary and affect my destiny as well as my life now, so the question is important. I can easily see that Paul was sincere, that he believed himself that these things are true. But could he have been mistaken? Surely he must have been! But, you, know, I rather think I would in the end be convinced by him, that he did see what he says he did, and it does mean what he says. As I said before, Paul’s certainty goes back to the Damascus road and Jesus’ own appearance and words to him. On its own it may not be much, but it is more than Buddhists have, or Muslims, or Hindus. So if that is all we had to go on, there would be believers today.
But we have much more than this. And Paul doesn’t ask the Corinthians to believe anything on the basis of his experience. Rather he points them to what happened after that third day. Jesus appeared and was seen, by Peter, by the Twelve apostles, then by more than five hundred people who are mostly still alive, by Jesus’ brother James who was now leading the church in Jerusalem, then to a wider group of apostles, and only then to Paul, and in a way which he admits was different.
This letter was written about AD55. This was 25 years after the death and resurrection which it describes. 25 years ago is about when Nelson Mandela was released from Robbin Island and when the Berlin Wall came down and the USSR unraveled. Those of us who were around remember these events quite clearly. Paul tells that there were upwards of 500 people you could talk to who would tell you about when they saw Jesus alive after he had been executed.
The interesting thing about this list is that it is incomplete. He makes no attempt to catalogue all the appearances of Jesus. There is no mention of the many women who saw him, no mention of the apostle Thomas, who was not there when Jesus first met with his apostles, no mention of Cleopas, nor of the meeting on the mountain top in Galilee, nor when they were fishing at the Lake. Jesus’ resurrection was a big event and the witnesses were not few.
The thing about witnesses is that you have to decide whether they are telling the truth. Each person has to make his or her own judgement. To me it all adds up: the evidence of Jesus himself (“the elephant in the room”), Paul’s certainty based on his own experience, the hundreds of other witnesses, the Old Testament Scriptures, and let us not forget the witness of the Holy Spirit himself, who leads us from thinking these things could be true to certainty.
So the gospel is true and we can know that it is true. God has given us a place to stand. We need not be swept away with all the confusion.
Later Paul will say that if it is not true, we are to be pitied more than all men. Personally, I feel that those who are wanting to believe anything but the gospel are most to be pitied. I know that they do not feel this. Even if there is no God, they say, this life is enough for them, so long as they can live as they please without restraint. But surely it is all vanity, and a chasing after the wind: a meaningless existence in a meaningless world, a brief life under the sun, declining into dementure. Of course, if that is all there is, so be it. Let us face it as bravely as we can. But we have good evidence that it is not. Jesus announced the coming of a new age, a kingdom of forgiveness and resurrection life. We can be sure because the king has already come. He has paid the penalty for sin – for us – and has broken through death – also for us. All he asks us to do is trust him and he promises he will do the rest.
God has given us a place to stand. We do not need to be confused. We do not need to be paralysed into inertia. We can face the future with confidence and fight the battles that lie ahead of us, knowing that we have a solid base.
“I make known to you brothers the gospel I announced to you, which you received, on which you have taken your stand, by which you are saved, if you hold it fast, unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day, in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared …“