God is Roomy

1 Corinthians 15.50-56

Perhaps you have seen the serialized version of the stories on television or streamed them on BritBox, the Father Brown Mysteries. In one of G.K. Chesterton’s novels, The Incredulity of Father Brown, the detective priest rebukes a young secularist friend. According to the reverend sleuth, a modern western culture that runs its secular commitments out to their logical end condemns itself, above all, to proliferating superstitions.

Once again— the logical conclusion to secularism is not unalloyed reason (e.g., “Follow the science”) but sentimentality and superstition. In other words, the future of secularism is the past, a return to paganism, to its vision and values. In the novel, Father Brown scolds his young secularist friend:

“It’s drowning all your…rationalism and skepticism, it’s coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition…it’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense and can’t see things as they are. Anything that anybody talks about, and says there’s a good deal in it, extends itself indefinitely like a vista in a nightmare. Thus a dog is an omen, and a cat is a mystery…All the menagerie of polytheism returns: dog Anubis and great green-eyed Pasht and all the holy howling bulls of Bashan, reeling back to the bestial gods of the beginning…[superstition extends itself  indefinitely like a vista] all because you are frightened of four words, “He was made man.”

Or, we might add, all because you are frightened of three words, “Jesus is risen.”

The Father Brown Mysteries are fiction obviously; nevertheless, the protagonist priest’s rebuke foreshadows our present reality.

As an example of the sentimental inanity that inexorably follows secular orthodoxy, consider that four years ago Serene Jones, president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, sat for an interview with the New York Times in which she chided those who continue to profess the faith’s dogma.

“Those who claim to know whether or not the physical resurrection of Christ happened are kidding themselves,” she said, “But that empty tomb symbolizes that the ultimate love in our lives cannot be crucified and killed.”

The empty tomb symbolizes that the ultimate love in our lives cannot be crucified or killed.

Thus, the resurrection is not an event in God’s life. It’s an orientation for our lives.

It’s not news; it’s a symbol.

It’s not history. It’s an allegory.

Only a superstitious commitment to secular ideology could produce such a nonsensical, self-refuting assertion. After all, not only is it straightforwardly in scripture (“If Christ be not raised, we are of all people the most to be pitied.”), it is brute logic. As much as a skeptic might like to say that the message of Christ’s death and resurrection is a story about unconquered love, the logic is inescapable that if Christ is not raised, then love is, in fact, conquered.

Brass tacks time—

None of us is getting out of life alive.

All those who love and all those who are loved will die, and if Christ is not risen, then death—not love, not life— death has the final word.

And every word you’ve spoken to a lover and every word ever uttered about you will be forgotten.

It is only if God raised Jesus that love can have the final word, because only then will life have the final word. And only then will God have the final word.

The empty tomb symbolizes that the ultimate love in our lives cannot be crucified or killed. It’s a preposterous statement on its face— Jesus was crucified and killed! That such a secular piety could come from a seminary president is extraordinary indeed; however, the conviction itself is not an outlier. A BBC poll found that only 31% of Christians in Great Britain believe in the resurrection. For the two-thirds majority, the resurrection’s ethos is more important than its actuality.

I can only speak anecdotally, but, having been a pastor for twenty-two years now, I believe the resurrection is so broadly disbelieved because it is so widely misunderstood.

Many dismiss the dogma and others disaffiliate entirely from the faith without having grasped what they deny. And it’s all the more critical you understand the resurrection tidings because if you look again at the creeds you will notice that it’s not one resurrection the faith invites you to believe but two.

The creeds mandate that you believe in two resurrections, Jesus’s resurrection and your own.

To have faith in Jesus Christ is necessarily to have faith that his Father will raise you from the dead. And if you doubt the latter, you disavow the former. As the theologian Karl Rahner writes, faith in the resurrection of Jesus is only fully realized— that is, you don’t really believe it— as faith in the believer’s own resurrection into life everlasting. For Paul, there is a vital and unbreakable connection between Christ’s past and your future. Notice his surprising turn of logic in 1 Corinthians 15, “If there is no resurrection of the dead,” Paul argues, “then Christ has not been raised.” It is an odd assertion. It’s a non-sequitur. Why couldn’t God raise Jesus apart from raising all of us?

Paul’s logic is sound only if the exclusive purpose of God raising Jesus from the dead is so that you will, with death behind you, join him where he lives.

The logic only holds if God resurrects Jesus in order to bring you with him.

The faith invites and requires you to believe in more than one resurrection. And so it’s essential that you grasp the good news announced with that word, resurrection.

Perhaps the simplest place to begin is with verse fifty of our text where Paul distills the whole gospel into a single claim of just nine words, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.” That’s it, the whole gospel, in nuce.

First, look at the the second clause of the statement.

Your destiny— the Kingdom of God, life everlasting, the life that is God’s own life— is an inheritance.

That is—

It’s not a wage that you earn. It’s not a reward that you do or do not deserve. It’s an inheritance. It’s an unconditional gift gifted to you, simply by way of another’s death.

Your destiny— it is all grace.

That’s one half of the gospel tidings.

Next, look to the first clause of Paul’s short statement, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.”

Paul puts it in the negative, but flip it over and you’ll see it’s the other side of the gospel, and this is the side that many do not but you must understand. The life everlasting that will come to you as a free gift on account of Christ’s death will not come to you as you are presently constituted, flesh and blood.

The Kingdom of God will come to you, by grace, not as you are but as you will be, transformed into a spiritual body.

That’s the whole gospel!

• The future is gift.

• And in it, you will be surpassingly beyond your flesh and blood body.

I mean—

My flesh and blood body— it may look sexy but it has cancer coursing through its marrow. Some of you have depression. Many of you are alcoholics.

The announcement that this flesh and blood body will live again, and will do so forever, is not good news.

In fact, I think for a good many us such a message is indistinguishable from a nightmare.

It’s not a promise but a threat.

Many walk away from the faith or never venture near it because they believe resurrection means that Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim came back to life, as though, at some moment the air in his corpse became breath again and the still silence of the empty tomb echoed with a now beating heart.

And if this is what resurrection means for Jesus, this must be what it entails for all of us.

And of course, if this is what the church taught we should all refuse to believe it.

Because we know, a corpse’s cells do not rehabilitate neither do their amino acids rekindle. From dust you came, and it doesn’t matter how much money you throw down for a casket to dust you will return. It’s no wonder so many think the only choice is between a polarity like a literal, physical resurrection versus a metaphorical, spiritual one. It’s a false choice. They’re both wrong. Resurrection is no spiritual metaphor. And flesh can only ever belong to this body of death. It’s strange so many should think that resurrection simply refers to the dead coming back to life because this is plainly not what the scriptures teach. The resurrection is not one more event in Jesus’s life.

Scripture says the resurrection is the first fruit of a new creation, and in scripture God creates ex nihilo, out of nothing, without using any pre-existing material, like a dead body.

St. Paul states explicitly what the Gospels clearly show. The first Adam, Paul says, was a living being, a mortal, material body. The second Adam, Paul writes, became a life-giving spirit. In other words, the resurrected body of Jesus is a new reality altogether, an entirely spiritual body beyond composition or dissolution. The contrast Paul sets up in 1 Corinthians 15 is not between a natural body and a supernatural one. The contrast is between two planes of existence, the terrestrial and the celestial. In other words, God has given you a body for this life and, from nothing, God will create for you a celestial body— like Christ’s—  for your new home.

Your new home with him.

There are two resurrections you’ve got to believe. God resurrects Jesus in order to raise you with him into God. God descends to humanity so that we might ascend into him.

The church father, Maximus the Confessor, says that the resurrection of Jesus is a divine and divinizing event.

That is, the resurrection is both a work of God upon the humanity of Jesus and also a work which brings Jesus’s humanity into God’s divinity.

Likewise— and this is the mystery, and it’s a whole hell of lot more mysterious than amino acids rekindling— your resurrection will be a divine and divinizing event. Your resurrection will be both a work of God upon your humanity and also a work which brings your humanity into God’s divinity— that’s life everlasting. As the church father Irenaeus wrote in the second century:

“The Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ did, through his transcendent love, become what we are, that he might bring us [through the resurrection] to be even what he is himself.”

Irenaeus isn’t alone.

Perhaps the important figure in Western Christianity, St. Augustine wrote in the fourth century:

"But he himself that justifies sinners also deifies them.”

Resurrection is a divine, divinizing event.

This divination of humanity, says Irenaeus, is what it means for death to be swallowed up in immortality.

And this is not merely the tradition of the church fathers, this is the clear teaching of scripture. According to 2 Peter, the aim of the Father’s work in the Son is for you and me “to become partakers of the divine nature.” Salvation is not some sort of transaction between God and humanity whereby a debt is cancelled and you are issued entry into an afterlife. No, to be saved is nothing less than to be joined to God himself in Christ. To be saved is simply to see and to enjoy what can now only be known by faith; namely, as Paul says, “Your life is now hidden with Christ (where?) in God.”

Jesus straightforwardly says this in John 14, “I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again [in the power of the resurrection] and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”

You will be where Jesus is.

Where is Jesus?

John told us in the very beginning of his Gospel.

Jesus is in the bosom of the eternally present Father. 

You will be in the bosom of the eternally present Father.

Heaven is not a place. Heaven is a person.

And the grace and the mystery of resurrection is that somehow— without diluting his divinity, without distorting his own life— the three-person’d God can accommodate an infinite number of others into himself.

You and you and you and you and you and you and you.

And me.

As Robert Jenson says, "God is roomy.” 

There are two resurrections you get to believe.

The Father raises the Son from death. And together in their Spirit, one day, they will raise you, not to some billowy Palm Beach but into their triune life. That’s the mystery. That’s the hope.

And this is the conviction that transformed the pagan world.

After all, your future resurrection into God’s own life demands I esteem you accordingly in this life and you me.

Resurrection requires that I see you— view you and value you— not just as a sinner for whom Christ died but as an inextricable part of the three-person’d God. Sounding an awful lot like the fictional Father Brown, my teacher, David Bentley Hart writes about the revolution the gospel of resurrection brought to the pagan world:

“[The modern secular world spins] a simple but thoroughly enchanting tale. Once upon a time, it goes, Western humanity was the cosseted and incurious ward of Mother Church; during this, the age of faith, culture stagnated, science languished, wars of religion were routinely waged, witches were burned by inquisitors, and Western humanity labored in brutish subjugation to dogma, superstition, and the unholy alliance of church and state…All was darkness. Then came the full flowering of the Enlightenment and with it the reign of reason and progress, the riches of scientific achievement and political liberty, and a new and revolutionary sense of human dignity. This is, as I say, a simple and enchanting tale, easily followed and utterly captivating in its explanatory tidiness; its sole defect is that it happens to be false in every identifiable detail.”

The title of the book is Atheist Delusions. Hart then continues by showing how those who today wish to walk away from Christianity nevertheless carry with them values that would not exist apart from the Easter faith injecting them into the pagan world. He writes:

“In the light of Christianity’s message of the resurrection of all things into God’s own life, we came to see what formerly we could not: the autistic or Down syndrome or otherwise disabled child, for instance, for whom the world can remain a perpetual perplexity; the derelict or wretched or broken man or woman who has wasted his or her life away; the homeless, the utterly impoverished, the diseased, the mentally ill, the physically disabled; exiles, refugees, fugitives; even criminals and reprobates. To reject, turn away from, or kill any or all of them would be, in a very real sense, the most purely practical of impulses. To be able, however, to see in him or her instead a person worthy of all affection—resplendent with divine glory, evoking our love and our reverence—is to be set free from those natural limitations that pre-Christian persons took to be the very definition of reality. And only someone profoundly ignorant of history and of native human inclinations could doubt that it is only as a consequence of the revolutionary force of Christianity within our history that any of us can so regard the least among us as divine.”

The theologian Stanley Hauerwas makes the very same point when he suggests succinctly if angrily:

Christians in America will only know that they have been faithful to the gospel if in one hundred years we are identified as the people who refuse to abort their children and euthanize their elderly.

There is much at risk in a world where fewer and fewer people are sufficiently bold to say those three words, “He is risen.”

By the reverse of that logic, our charity on behalf of the least, our compassion for the lost, our grace to the lousy— it is not natural or innate.

Rather, it all begins here, with a people gathered around the gospel.

So for their sake—

In the name of the Risen Christ, who is not the only the host of this table but is the speaker of every sermon, I summon you to faith in Christ.

Repent of your unfaith.

Trust and believe.

Jesus lives with death behind him.

And so shall you live.

With him.

In the God who is roomy.

For the sake of the lost, for the sake of the least, for the sake of the lousy and the unloveable—

In the name of the Risen Christ and on his authority, I summon you to faith in him. Because the Father has raised Jesus from the dead, your sins are forgiven.

Because the Father has raised Jesus from the dead, you are righteous in his sight.

Because the Father has raised Jesus from the dead, you are destined to partake in God’s own triune life.

Trust and believe.

Others are counting on it.