1 Corinthians: Day 50
SCRIPTURE
20But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. 21For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; 22for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. 23But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. 24Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. 25For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.26The last enemy to be destroyed is death. 27For “God has put all things in subjection under his feet.” But when it says, “All things are put in subjection,” it is plain that this does not include the one who put all things in subjection under him. 28When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all. (1 Corinthians 15:20-28, NRSV)
WHAT
Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. (1 Corinthians 15:12-14, NRSV)
We saw in the last passage how Paul is capping off his letter to the disciples of Jesus in Corinth with a sweeping defense of the resurrection, a defense both of Jesus’ resurrection and that of his followers. He is defending his teaching about the resurrection against some in Corinth who find it too difficult to believe that dead things can come back to life. Paul has reminded them just how many people – himself included – had an encounter with the resurrected Jesus (over five hundred). Furthermore, if there is no resurrection, then they are making Paul out to be not just a fool but also a liar, for he proclaimed the resurrection among them. And since many in Corinth believed the teaching of the “liar,” they are fools who believe in vain if there is no resurrection.
Paul begins this passage with a dramatic statement:
But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. (1 Corinthians 15:20, NRSV)
I suspect that many of my readers are disciples of Jesus and probably accept the resurrection as a given. So Paul’s argument is not speaking to us because we are willing to concede his point. We, however, may have another problem. We tend to think of the resurrection of Jesus simply as the gateway to and validation of hope in our own resurrection and eternal life in heaven with him and our believing loved ones. We tend to read Paul’s words as confirming that belief. But friends, that is NOT what Paul is saying. He is saying so much more than that. So let’s unpack it.
For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. (1 Corinthians 15:21-22, NRSV)
Paul sees the resurrection of Jesus not simply as the gateway to my resurrection or yours, but as God’s solution to a universal problem that began thousands of years ago. And as that problem came into the world through one man – Adam -- so would the solution to that universal problem come through one man – Jesus Christ.
Genesis 1 tells us that when God began to create the world, he brought order to what was primordial chaos. Each of the six days of creation brought more and more order to that chaos. Everything had its place and its purpose. On the sixth day, God crowned his creation by making humanity, both men and women, in God’s image:
Then God said, “Let us make humankind (HEBREW: ’âḏâm) in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:26-28, NRSV)
These creatures, the man and the woman collectively known in Hebrew as ’âḏâm, were to be God’s “image” in God’s temple of heaven and earth. (Ancient temples all had “images,” usually made of stone or wood, of the god whose temple it was.) They were to bear and reflect that image of God’s ONENESS as they exercised the dominion over God’s creation, which is God’s temple, that they had been given as a stewardship.
A second story of creation in Genesis 2:4-25 focuses not on the cosmic aspect of creation – the sun, moon, stars, sky, earth, seas, etc. – but on God’s relationship with the man, specifically the male initially, he had made. Now called simply by the description “the man God had made” (he is not referred to by the name “Adam” until Genesis 4:25), this man is lonely. The God who created all that cosmic “stuff” like the sun, moon, stars, black holes, asteroids, and comets, along with atoms having protons, neutrons, and electrons, as well as quarks and neutrinos, takes notice of the loneliness of the man. After inviting him to name all the animals, hoping this would cure his loneliness as getting a pet often does, God creates for him a companion to help him. God then places the man and his “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh” wife is a beautiful garden. This garden produced all they needed. There they could live out God’s original will, purpose, and intent for them and the whole of creation.
Until…
Until they thought they could do a better job of being God than God. They didn’t trust him. They believed the conniving and convincing words of one of the creatures God had made instead of believing the Creator God. They believed the creature when he said God was holding back something from them because God didn’t want them to become like him. One of the creatures over which they were supposed to take dominion was instead taking dominion over them. The order God had brought to the creation was cracking and giving way back to chaos.
By the end of that Genesis 3 story, the relationship of the man and his wife with God was broken, along with their relationship with one another, with the creation itself, and even with themselves. The end of Genesis 2 was the last time the creation was as God intended it to be.
And it got worse. Much worse. The chaos fought back hard and deepened.
Genesis 4 introduces us to murder when Cain killed his brother Abel. Soon another murder takes place and the killer didn’t hide his evil deed, he bragged about it. Things got so bad, God sent a flood and tried to start over, rescuing one man and his family along with a mating pair of every animal, and seven pairs of what would become “clean” animals. But sin got off the ark when Noah and his family did, along with the rescued plants and animals. By the end of chapter 11, things are so bad that humankind is building a tower to storm heaven and take over, putting themselves in ultimate charge of the creation. Chaos is reigning once again. Creation seems to have been undone. The heavenly storm troopers were going to finish the job begun by the man and his wife when they first believed the conniving crawling creature in chapter 3.
In chapter 12 God intervenes again into this rapidly escalating madness. God refuses to let chaos win. He calls a man named Abram, blesses him to be the solution to this problem. God made a covenant with Abram – soon to be renamed Abraham – and his descendants. They would be called “Israel,” and God would send them as “a light to the nations” (Isaiah 49:6) calling people back to where they were at the end of Genesis 2, the last time we saw God’s will, purpose, and intent intact, and to reestablish order against the encroaching chaos of sin.
But this plan comes immediately under threat when “blessed to be a blessing” Abraham travels to Egypt during a famine and lies about his wife Sarah being his sister. This unleashed all kinds of horror rather than blessing upon Pharaoh, who genuinely didn’t know he had fallen for another man’s wife.
This was only the beginning. Abraham’s descendants, meant by God to be that “light to the nations,” grew worse and worse. Chaos sank its conniving creature’s teeth deeper and deeper into the “chosen people.” Despite God rescuing them in a great exodus from centuries of oppression and slavery in Egypt; despite travelling with them to the land of promise and meeting with them in a portable tabernacle that Moses built; despite God’s allowing them to build a permanent temple to his glory and meeting with them there in Jerusalem; despite all of it, Israel did the very things God told them NOT to do. They fell deeper and deeper into idolatry (failure to love God alone) and injustice (failure to love one another).
God wasn’t blind to all this sin and creeping chaos, of course. In fact, God sent prophet after prophet to remind Israel they were “blessed to be a blessing”. It didn’t help. God sent prophet after prophet to warn them to change course, to “repent” and walk a different way, to return to God’s way, to come home to Genesis 2. They didn’t listen. The ways of chaos are so enticing. Some of their kings – very few actually – caught this prophetic vision and tried to turn the ship. But most were as bad, if not worse, than the people they were supposed to lead. The idolatry and injustice grew worse and worse, darker and darker. Chaos expanded as Israel wandered further and further away from Genesis 2.
Finally, God had to intervene yet again. He did so by sending Assyria to capture and plunder the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C., and Babylon to capture and plunder the southern kingdom of Judah in 587 B.C. (These two Israelite kingdoms had resulted from a civil war following the death of King Solomon.) Both nations carried the descendants of Abraham into captivity, into exile from their land. Assyria carried away ten of the twelve tribes, and they are lost to history forever (thus the expression, “the ten lost tribes”). Babylon carried away the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin, the only descendants of Abraham to survive this period.
One of these captured exiles was a priest named Ezekiel. While sitting in Babylon, he cried out to God, asking why. “Why God did you let this happen? How could you let Babylon and its chief god Marduk destroy Jerusalem? How could you allow your own temple to be destroyed? How could you let your own people be carried away in defeat into exile?” In response, God sent the priest/prophet a vision. He saw the temple in Jerusalem before its destruction. It was filled with images of idols of all kinds. In the midst of this vision of the polluted temple, Ezekiel would see a vision of what turns out to be the most important event in the Old Testament that most people today probably never heard of:
Then the glory of the LORD went out from the threshold of the house… (Ezekiel 10:18a, NRSV)
The glory of the LORD, the same glory that had taken up residence in the portable temple Moses had built for the journey to the Promised Land (Exodus 40:34-38), the same glory which filled the temple that Solomon had built in Jerusalem (1 Kings 8:10) that glory of the LORD now left the building (Ezekiel 10:18-19)! Ezekiel had got his answer. The temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed because God had left the building due to all the unrepented idolatry and injustice (i.e. the failure to love God with your whole heart, mind, soul, and strength; and the failure to love your neighbor as yourself).
So by 587 B.C. Jerusalem and the temple lay in ruins, the people of Israel were in exile in foreign lands. God allowed the Babylonian exile to be mercifully short, and soon some of the people returned to the land of promise, led by Ezra and Nehemiah. They even rebuilt their temple. However, it was nothing like the one that had been destroyed. It was much smaller and far less ornate. And they never experienced the return of God’s glory such as they had experienced with Moses’ tabernacle and Solomon’s temple. In fact, the priests at this temple just sort of went through the motions of their job, not sensing the presence of God (Malachi 1:6-14) or the ethics that result. And the problem with sin continued.
The people longed for God’s glory to return to Israel, to establish his presence once again in the temple. They longed for Israel’s sovereignty as a nation to be restored so they would no longer be under the thumb of another nation and people. And they longed for God to fulfill a promise he had made to King David, that David would have a descendant on the throne of Israel forever.
Israel had always anointed their kings with oil as a symbol of the power and presence of God’s Spirit with their king. He was “God’s son” in this way. God adopted the king when he ascended to the throne and was anointed. Their word for this “anointed one” was mashiach, or “messiah.” They longed for a new “messiah” to rule over them with righteousness and justice. They longed for a new Son of David to protect them from foreign enemies. They longed for the day when God would rule Israel through this righteous messiah and defeat the sin – and its evil twin, death – which had plagued Israel, and in fact all humanity, since the end of Genesis 2.
Furthermore, the prophets said it would happen. The prophet Isaiah had described it this way:
A voice cries out:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.” (Isaiah 40:3-5, NRSV)
“Make everything ready,” Isaiah had said. “God’s glory is coming back! And when he does, ALL people – not just Israel – will see it. For the LORD has spoken.”
Sure enough, those who came to follow Jesus believed that he was that prophesied return of God’s glory! He was God’s adopted Son. He was that longed for Son of David, the Messiah – capital M, not little m -- who would protect them from their enemies. The problem was that they had longed for a messiah who would save them FROM suffering at the hands of other nations, like Rome. But Jesus came as the Messiah who saved them THROUGH suffering. It took them a long time to realize the significance of the difference. Some never got it. Some today do not get it still.
Rather than take on the Romans with force, as Judas Maccabeus (i.e. Judas “the Hammer”) had done with the Seleucid Syrians led by King Antiochus Epiphanes, IV, two centuries prior, Jesus attacked Satan, not the Romans. Rather than dramatically purify the temple from foreign corruption, as Judas the Hammer had done (in the event celebrated as Hannukah by Jews today), Jesus purified it of Jewish corruption when he overturned the tables of the money changers.
Jesus taught as no one had ever taught before. He taught with his own authority, feeling no need to cite previous respected teachers as other Jewish rabbis did. He performed miracles over nature and sickness. He drove out demons. He went toe-to-toe with the Jewish authorities -- the Sadducees, and Pharisees. His followers were sure he was “the one.” They even waved palm branches and shouted, “Hosanna to the one who comes in the name of the Lord,” just as some had done when Judas the Hammer defeated Antiochus Epiphanes, IV, two centuries before.
But all their hopes ended when Jesus breathed his last on a Roman cross. It seemed he was just another would be messiah, just another radical with good ideas but subject to the ageless and undefeatable curse of human mortality. Jesus had been swimming upstream against a powerful and unbeatable current all along. There had been others before him. There would be more after him. All those dreams – dreams for a righteous Messiah to rule God’s kingdom, dreams to bring new life to Israel, dreams of one who would undo what Adam had unleashed, to tame the chaos again, dreams of God taking us all back to Genesis 2 again, dreams of a new creation which restored God’s original will, purpose, and intent – it all ended when they rolled that stone to seal off the tomb with the dead, mangled, and lifeless body of Jesus inside.
Or did it?
All that was on a Friday. By Sunday, that stone had been rolled aside, revealing an empty tomb. Not only empty, but with the various grave clothes folded neatly and stacked to the side. No grave robber would ever do that! Angels said to the women who discovered this empty tomb, “He is not here. He is risen. Just as he said.”
Sure enough, Jesus was resurrected! Not resuscitated, like Lazarus and the son of the widow of Nain or Jairus’ daughter. Those people had died again. They are not still walking around. Jesus was resurrected. Later, he ascended into heaven and lives eternally at the right hand of God as part of the Trinity.
Paul sees Jesus’ resurrection as God’s validation that Jesus was who he said he was and the fulfilment of that Jewish history and longing. Thus, it was much more than my ticket and yours to eternal life in heaven. Jesus’ resurrection is the fulfilment of “the Big Story,” the story of God that began in Genesis 1.
Can you see now why the resurrection was a non-negotiable for Paul? The resurrection of Jesus is the inauguration of the longed for reign of God. Jesus is the one who undid the curse of the sin of Adam (and Eve). Jesus is the one who has been sent as David’s Son to protect us from our enemy, not Rome or any other human kingdom, but from the Great Enemy behind them all – the Satan, the Adversary (ha satan in Hebrew means “the adversary”). He is the one whose arrival was longed for to sozo, i.e., to “save,” a creation descended once again into chaos, to establish once and for all God’s sovereignty, God’s kingdom. As I like to say with The Genesis Project, Jesus’ resurrection, by “rescuing and rebooting” creation, fulfills what has been God’s will, purpose, and intent ever since “in the beginning.”
Order has been re-established in creation. Chaos has been forced to take a back seat once again:
But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For “God has put all things in subjection under his feet.” (1 Corinthians 15:23-27a, NRSV)
Christ Jesus’ resurrection is the first fruits, the first of many to come. It’s a sign that order is back once again.
But here’s more background necessary to understand Paul. First, as William Barclay points out, the feast of Passover – when Jesus’ death and resurrection occurred – had more than one reason for celebration:
“The feast of the Passover had more than one significance. It commemorated the deliverance of the children of Israel from Egypt. But it was also a great harvest festival. It fell just at the time when the barley harvest was due to be gathered in. The law laid it down: ‘You shall bring the sheaf of the first fruits of your harvest to the priest. He shall raise the sheaf before the Lord, so that you may find acceptance; on the day after the sabbath the priest shall raise it’ (Leviticus 23:10-11). …When the barley was cut, it was brought to the temple. There it was threshed with soft canes so as not to bruise it. It was then dried over the fire in a perforated pan so that every grain was touched by the fire. It was then exposed to the wind so that the chaff was blown away, and finally ground in a barley mill, and the flour was offered to God. That was what was meant by the first fruits. It is significant to note that not until after that was done could the new barley be bought and sold in the shops and bread be made from the new flour. The first fruits were a sign of the harvest to come; and the resurrection of Jesus was a sign of the resurrection of all believers which was to come. Just as the new barley could not be used until the first fruits had been duly offered, so the new harvest of life could not come until Jesus had been raised from the dead.” (Emphasis mine)
Second, understand that Jews (then and now) who believed in resurrection (Sadducees did not) looked for the arrival of messiah to inaugurate God’s kingdom. The arrival of messiah would signal a dividing line in time. The present age’s evil, sin, and death would be judged by God and would disappear from the scene of life on earth (note, not life as a disembodied soul in heaven). When this happened, when the age of God’s kingdom truly began, the dead would all rise together to live with those already alive on earth in a kingdom of righteousness and justice. Sin would be no more. Death would be no more. It would be a Genesis 2 creation once again.
But Jesus rose from the dead alone. It was not a general resurrection of all the righteous dead, as Jews expected. Jesus rose, as Paul says, as first fruits of the coming harvest. Matthew alone does talk about graves breaking open when Jesus died on the cross:
Then Jesus cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. The earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. (Matthew 27:50-52, NRSV)
To be honest, this has and still does puzzle me. I do not fully understand Matthew’s point. I suspect he saw it also as a sort of first fruits of what was yet to come.
You might wonder why Jews today do not accept Jesus as Messiah. Primarily, their theological problem revolves around this issue – a threshold in time has not seemingly been crossed because evil clearly still has not been totally defeated and a general resurrection of the dead has not happened. Therefore, Jesus must not be the Messiah. In fact, Messiah must not have come yet. So they continue to hope with their Passover celebration, keeping an empty chair for Messiah and saying, “Next year in Jerusalem!”
But Paul does see God bringing a renewed “ordering” to the chaos in a form of new creation, or as I like to describe it, a “rebooted” creation. In this restored order, the “Son” has been placed under the “Father.” The Son has been sent out by God (the Father) with the commission to bring all things back to order under God.
N. T. Wright says:
“Paul never used the word ‘Trinity', but at several points in his writing he says things which point towards what later theologians would say. Jesus remains the Son, intimately related to the Father but subordinated to him. The Father shares his unique glory with him (Philippians 2:1-11). If the Father is the one from whom everything comes, the Son is the one through whom it comes (1 Corinthians 8:6). And so on. Paul envisages the entire cosmos sorted out at last, put into the shape the creator intended; and part of that shaping is the status of Jesus himself, revealed as the father’s true and only Son.”
Bishop Wright points out that in today’s passage, Paul quotes Psalm 110 in verse 25, about the king whom God will place at his right hand until all his enemies are brought into subjection. This, Paul declares, is now being fulfilled in Jesus. (Psalm 110, by the way, is THE most quoted Old Testament passage in the New Testament.) And he quotes Psalm 8 in verse 27 where he speaks of God “putting all things into order under his feet”.
But Bishop Wright notes:
“But instead of talking about the Messiah, as Psalm 110 does, Psalm 8 talks about the human being. This role, of being under God and over the world, is not just the task of the Messiah; it’s what God had in mind from the very start when he created humans in his own image. This is how Paul ties the passage tightly together: the achievement of the Messiah, and his present reign in which he is bringing the world back to order, is the fulfilment of what God intended humans to do (see verse 21). The story told in Genesis is completed by the story told in the Psalms.” (Emphasis mine)
Professor Barclay notes how strange it is for us, being trained in the equality and ONENESS of the three persons of the Trinity, to read of the subjection of the Son to the Father. He sees Paul using pictorial language:
“The Son will return to the Father like a victor coming home, and the triumph of God will be complete. It is not a case of the Son being subject to the Father as a slave or even a servant is to a master. It is a case of one who, having accomplished the work that was given him to do, returns with the glory of complete obedience as his crown. As God sent his Son to redeem the world, so in the end he will receive back a world redeemed, and then there will be nothing in heaven or in earth outside his love and power.”
Back to our Jewish friends who do not accept Jesus as Messiah. Because they expect God’s people to be raised all at once at the end of history – a belief Paul would one time have shared – they do not see a fulfillment in Jesus. In Jesus’ resurrection, one person has been raised in the middle of history, not all God’s people at the end of history. That was and is the shocking, totally unexpected thing, even for Paul. He came to see that – perhaps during his time in Arabia (see Galatians 1:17) -- that this meant that the coming of God’s kingdom was happening in two phases, not in one as expected. There is an “already and not yet” quality about this new creation, this kingdom of God. When Paul talks about things happening in their own proper order in verse 23, he has two things in mind according to Bishop Wright: 1) the “order” of events, and 2) the eventual “order”, the putting-back-into-shape, that God intends to bring to the rebooted world of God’s kingdom. This two-phase process addresses the Jews’ concern about Messiah.
So Paul’s belief is not that Christians are “resurrected” when they die in the sense that their souls leave their bodies to go to heaven to live with Jesus forever (that’s more an idea of Greek philosophy than Hebrew or early Christian theology). Christians are “resurrected” to share in Jesus’ first fruits when the second phase of the restoration project is completed at Jesus’ return. Then, the dead in Christ will rise with new bodies to live on earth with those who are still alive at his coming (see 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18).
It is natural to wonder, what happens to us and our loved ones who die in the meantime, while we wait for Christ to return? While this is a mystery hidden until God reveals it, we can take comfort in what Jesus said to the thief on the cross:
“Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:43, NRSV)
Whatever happens, we are safe with Jesus.
So Jesus’ resurrection is far more than simply the gateway to and validation of hope in our own resurrection and eternal life in heaven. It is about, as we have just seen, so much more. Jesus’ resurrection was the validation that he was indeed the Messiah, and one who sozo’s us THROUGH suffering, not FROM suffering. It was the validation of Jesus’ universal Lordship, when ALL would see the return of God’s glory, a point Paul was never willing to compromise on. And it was the first of many more to come.
APPLY
Jesus’ resurrection is about more than just me and my eternal life. It is about the “rebooting” of all creation and the fulfillment of The Genesis Project.
PRAYER
Thank you, God, for never giving up on The Genesis Project. Thank you for suffering through the long centuries of idolatry and injustice. Thank you for Jesus and his resurrection, the first fruits, to “reboot” creation to be what you intended all along, ever since “in the beginning.” In Christ. Amen.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. What is the significance of Jesus’ resurrection? How is it so much more than just the gateway to your eternal life? Try to include some of the points Bob made in this long commentary.
2. How does Paul see Jesus’ resurrection as more than just one event, but as the culmination of God’s “big story,” a story unfolding ever since Genesis 1?
3. In what sense does Paul see Jesus’ resurrection as first fruit? How does the Old Testament background of the barley harvest help us understand Paul on this point?
4. How does this passage and commentary add to, change, or reinforce your own understanding of the significance of Jesus’ resurrection?
How can you apply these insights in your life?