He Can Be Now No Other

1 Corinthians 15.29-49

There is a passage in Israel’s scriptures which reports the suffering of seven brothers. The story’s horrific brutality and grisly details recall the atrocities committed by the Russian army in Bucha only a year ago. The events narrated by the Second Book of Maccabees transpire nearly two hundred years before Mary of Nazareth gives birth to the God-who-is-human. Before Rome occupied and oppressed Israel, Greece did so under a caesar named Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Like every empire who has ever attempted to solve their self-imposed “Jewish problem,” the invading Greek regime attempted to pacify the Jews by stamping out what makes them Jews; that is, Israel’s fidelity to the Torah bequeathed to them by the true God.

In chapter seven of 2 Maccabees, Antiochus attempts to compel seven Israelites brothers, along with their mother, to violate the Jewish law. By means of torture, Antiochus presses the Jewish family to eat the most pagan of proteins, pork.

The first brother refuses.

And Antiochus immediately orders the brother’s tongue cut out, his head scalped, and his hands and feet chopped off.

Meanwhile his mom and his younger brothers look on.

Then— brace yourself—  the president’s goons fry the elder brother in a human-sized cast-iron skillet.

The Greeks do likewise to the second brother, who, as his elder brother, refuses to forsake his faith. No sooner has Antiochus seared brother number two in a very large dab of butter than the third brother sticks out his tongue, freely offering it to his tormentors. Even bolder, the third brother stretches out his hands before his tormentors and he defiantly declares to them, “I got these hands from the Lord, and because of his Torah I forsake them, and from the Lord I will get them back again.”

In other words: “The God in whom I’ve kept faith gave me this body, and God, keeping faith with me, will give it back again.”

God will vindicate me.

God will deliver us.

Sin will not win.

Death will be undone.

God will give me my body back.

Because the story told in 2 Maccabees takes place in the world as we have made it, the third brother’s defiant hope was just so, only hope. Brothers four, five, six, and seven, along with their faith-instilling mother, all meet the same violent and evidently incontrovertible end.

Death has the last word.

Nevertheless—

There in Israel’s scriptures stands a full-throated hope for Resurrection.

Back before I was the wise and mature man you see in front of you today, I told that story of the seven brothers (and their Mom) in a children’s sermon.

On Easter Sunday.

As you might expect, the story riveted the children as I acted it out with them. Every kid loves a story with a thoroughly wicked villain in it. I even brought along a slab of bacon, a cast-iron skillet, and a stick of butter as props. As you might also expect, some of the parents of those children responded with less enthusiasm.

I wouldn’t again tell that story to children— I’m a parent now. But I have told the story to you. I’ve done so because I want you to see what we so often omit or obscure: Resurrection is not a Christian hope.

Resurrection is not a Christian hope.

Resurrection is a Jewish hope.

Resurrection is a belief that belongs to Israel’s faith.

And you do not need to go digging in minor, apocryphal books like 2 Maccabees to find Israel’s Resurrection hope. It’s pledged by all of Israel’s major apocalyptic prophets.

And so the prophet Isaiah proclaims that one day, when the Lord finally undoes the present scheme of things and enthrones himself as King:

“The Lord will destroy…the shroud that is cast over all peoples…he will swallow up death forever.”

In the Book of Ezekiel, the Lord surveys a valley of dry bones— the whole house of Israel, dead— and the Lord considers his promise to Abraham, asking the prophet, “Mortal, can these bones live?” Because if those bones cannot once again live, then the Lord’s foundational promise to his people is broken, for Israel has not yet been a blessing to the whole world nor have they gathered the whole world to worship with them the one, true God.

Death, therefore, is the enemy of God’s original promise to his people.

“Mortal, can these bones live?” the Lord asks Ezekiel before answering his own question with a promise:

“I am going to open your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel.”

The hope of resurrection appears again on the lips of the prophet Daniel:

“Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life..But you, go your way and rest, you shall rise for your reward at the end of days.”

God will give us our bodies back.

Resurrection is a Jewish hope.

The Gospels make this explicit when they report Jesus getting dragged into a dispute between Sadducees, who did not believe in the Resurrection, and the  Pharisees— like Saul— who absolutely did believe it.  As Mark writes in his Gospel:

“Some Sadducees, who say there is no Resurrection, came to Jesus and asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no child, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. There were seven brothers; the first married and, when he died, left no children; and the second married her and died, leaving no children; and the third likewise; none of the seven left children. Last of all the woman herself died. In the Resurrection whose wife will she be? For the seven had married her.”

And Jesus said to them, “Is not this the reason you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are spiritual bodies. And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the story about the bush, how God said to him, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”?

The Lord is God not of the dead but of the living.”

It’s critical you catch the claim hiding in that last cryptic comment from Christ. God is the God of the living not the dead because God will undo death; so that, the dead will live again, now with death behind them.

God is the God of the living not the dead because eventually, one day, in the fullness of time, there will be none but the living for God to be their God.

Resurrection is a Jewish hope.

And it’s not a dead hope.

Right now, at the foot of the Mount of Olives, in the Kidron Valley, where Jesus prayed, “Father, if it be your will, remove this cup of wrath from me,” even today— so much so that Israeli municipal officials are worried about space issues—  thousands of Jews are buried in graves facing the walls of the old city of Jerusalem. Why are they so buried? Because that is the place Israel anticipates God will initiate the Resurrection. Ironically, that is the place God initiated the Resurrection.

Resurrection is a Jewish hope.

The women do not venture to the tomb on the third day expecting Resurrection.

But they could have.

They could have expected it. Possibly, a part of them should have expected it— guessed at it, surmised it— because Easter is Israel’s hope long before it’s the church’s hope.

Easter is Israel’s hope.

Thus—

Nothing of what Paul argues here in 1 Corinthians 15 is distinctively Christian. How Paul describes the Resurrection body is how Jesus— the Jew— describes the Resurrection body in the Gospel of Mark. Nothing of what Paul argues here is uniquely Christian.

Or rather, the substance of what Paul insists upon in these verses is exactly what Saul would have believed already, back before the Lord Jesus changed his name to Paul.

Therein lies the question.

If Resurrection belonged to the “assured substance of the Jewish faith,” then why did the gospel tidings of the Resurrection meet with such stubborn doubt and striking hostility?

The women who run from the tomb to tell the news— they’re the church’s first preachers. They’re also the church’s first unsuccessful preachers, convincing no one. Peter peers into the empty tomb and spies Jesus’s grave clothes, neatly folded and no longer on a dead Jesus, and Peter concludes nothing. Thomas cannot even take his friends’s word for it. The two disciples on the way to Emmaus acknowledge to the stranger they meet in the street that they have heard that God resurrected Jesus. “Some women of his disciples astounded us,” they say, “They were at the tomb early this morning, and when they did not find his body there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive.” They’ve heard the Easter news, yet they respond just like Peter. They simply head back home.

Why?

Even in the church at Corinth—

Paul’s made it plain that he believes the cause of the deep dysfunction and rampant immorality in their congregation is their disbelief in the Resurrection. It’s true the Corinthians were pagans before they were Christians— Gentiles not Jews— but Paul’s description here in chapter fifteen of the Resurrection body is not a new or alien claim to those formerly shaped by the religion of Plato.

To the Corinthians, there should be nothing offensive or odd about Paul’s description of the Resurrection body as being no longer hindered by carnal frame.

That Jesus, freed from the finitude of the flesh, had been given a spiritual body, beyond composition or dissolution, appropriate for the celestial realm, should not have been to the Corinthians so strange a story that they remained stubbornly resistant to it. Yet their lack of faith in the Resurrection was the fissure that fractured their community. Resurrection is a Jewish hope, yes. But the Corinthians should not have had such a problem receiving it.

So why?

If the promise of Resurrection was the hope at the hub of Israel’s faith, why was the proclamation of the Resurrection such a problem? They all already believed that God had promised Resurrection. They all already believed that God’s ultimate promise to Abraham hung on the promise that God would undo death. So why did the news of Resurrection, even among the pagans in places like Corinth, meet persistent resistance?

From the start!

Matthew reports that the disciples beheld the risen Jesus on the mountain in Galilee and worshipped him, but, Matthew adds, even as Jesus stood there in front of them, “some doubted.” What did they doubt? They already believed God will give us our bodies back. “I know that my brother will rise again in the Resurrection,” Martha says of Lazarus. But when it actually happens, they want their money back.

They all already believe the promise of Resurrection.

But they balk at the prospect that God resurrected Jesus.

Jesus is the problematic part of the claim, “God has resurrected Jesus from the dead.”

All those Easters ago, after I’d told the children the story of the seven brothers, just a beat after I’d delivered the benediction, a mother, a first-time guest, came up to about three centimeters from my face, glaring all the way.

“What in the world kind of Easter story was that?” she inquired.

“Bless your heart,” I thought.

And remember, I was not then the wise and mature spiritual leader you see before you today. So I replied, in love, ““Look, lady, I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie Donnie Darko, but the Easter Bunny is creepy as all get out— he doesn’t even have  story— and besides, I’ll tell you what—that story I told the kids, that’s the only Easter story worth dragging our butts out of bed on a Sunday morning.”

Speaking of butts, she looked as though I’d just given her an enema. And as she dragged her two children away, I heard her say, “Yes, honey, we’ll hunt for Easter eggs when we get home.”

Admittedly, it wasn’t the most pastoral response imaginable.

But what I told her— it’s true.

That God the Father has responded to that third Maccabean brother’s unjust suffering and the sins sinned against him and his family, that God has responded to the world we have made by raising Jesus of all people from the dead— Paul said so at the top of this chapter, if that’s not true, we’re all wasting our time.

From the very beginning, even for the disciples, the difficult part of the gospel message, “God has resurrected Jesus from the dead,” was not Resurrection. It was Jesus.

The trouble with the Resurrection is the same trouble that led to the Crucifixion.

It’s Jesus.

Resurrection is a Jewish hope. But what the Jews found difficult to believe is that the God of Israel would raise the crucified Jesus, not merely from the dead but to the Father’s right hand, and, in so doing, once and for all identify himself with the Man for Others.

The Resurrection body is not an alien idea for the Corinthians. But what was anathema to the pagans was the notion not only that the Eternal One would enter into time but that God would identity himself— all the way down— by a particular history, the life lived from Mary’s womb to Friday’s tomb.

This is Paul’s argument here in 1 Corinthians 15. Those who deny the Resurrection, Paul asserts, have no knowledge of God.

In other words:

To misunderstand the Resurrection is to misunderstand the gospel.

To misunderstand the gospel is to misunderstand God.

Because— pay attention— the Resurrection settles who God is.

This is what’s at stake in 1 Corinthians 15. Just as the death of Jesus forever settles Jesus’s identity, the Resurrection of Jesus forever settles God’s identity. He can be no other now. Correlatively, this means you can never now be otherwise. By raising the Man for Others to his right hand, the Father is now forever for you.

As Robert Jenson writes:

“The Crucifixion put [the question] up to the Father: Would he stand to this alleged Son? To this candidate to be his own self-identifying Word? Would he be a God who, for example, dines with scoundrels and parties with sinners, who justifies the ungodly? The Resurrection was the Father’s Yes.

We may say: the Resurrection settled that the Crucifixion’s sort of God is indeed the one God…

Or, the Crucifixion settled who and what God is; the Resurrection settled that this God is.

And just so the Resurrection settled also who and what we are, if we are anything determinate.”

Author Marilynne Robinson’s quartet of novels take place in the fictional Midwest town, Gilead. The first novel, Gilead, is in the form of a long letter a father writes to his young son. Married late in life, the father, a pastor, knows he’s dying of cancer and so will not live to know his boy. The second novel, Home, centers around that pastor’s best friend, who is also a pastor, and his troubled family. The pastor in the second novel names his son after the pastor in the first novel, Jack.

Jack is a prodigal son. A mystery even to himself, Jack wanders and struggles and self-sabotages. Jack is perpetually restless and cannot find his place in the world. Nor can Jack muster up any mercy or forgiveness for himself.

There’s a scene in the story where, after a long and painful absence, Jack returns home from his own far country. While his son was gone from home, his father had vowed to himself that if his son ever returned home he would not lose his patience or lash out in anger.

But he does.

  Jack’s father, the retired minister, says to his son:

“I promised myself a thousand times that if you ever came home you would never hear a word of rebuke from me, no matter what.”

And the prodigal son responds to his father:

“I don’t mind. I deserve rebuke.”

And the old man replies to his child:

“You ought to let the Lord decide what you deserve. You think about that too much— what you deserve. I believe that is part of the problem.”

Jack smiles and says:

“I believe you may have a point.”

Jack’s father says to him:

“Nobody deserves anything good or bad. It’s all grace. If you accepted that, you might be able to relax a little.”

You ought to let the Lord decide what you deserve.

The Lord has so decided.

For you. For me. For all of us. For every last sinner among us.

Because the Father has resurrected Jesus from the dead to sit at his right hand; that is, the Lord has decided to identity himself forever as the Friend of Sinners.

When you think about it, we shouldn’t be too hard on all those in scripture who struggled to believe the news of the Resurrection. After all, on its face, it’s too good to be true.

If the Resurrection settles once and forever who God is, then God’s Kingdom really will be one where the poor will be blessed and the last will be first. If the Resurrection settles once and forever who God is, then there really will be many mansions in the Father’s house for all sorts of us who do not deserve them.

No wonder they didn’t believe what they’d always previously believed.

It’s too good to be true.

If the Resurrection settles once and forever who God is, then that means God’s love does not depend on what you do or what you’re like. That means there’s nothing you can do to make God love you more and there’s nothing you can do to make God love you less. That means God will never give you what you deserve and will always give you more than you deserve— it’s all grace.

If the Father identifies himself with this Son, then that means God really is like an old lady who’ll turn her house upside-down for something that no one else would find valuable, a shepherd who never gives up the search for the single sheep, a dad on the porch who never stops looking down the road and is always ready to say “we have no choice but to celebrate.”

Christ is risen.

And indeed:

God can be now no other God but the God who is for you.

No matter what you do, no matter where you go, no matter which direction you run in your life— there’s no escape.

You are always headed into the arms of his loving embrace.

So come to the table.

God has resurrected Jesus from the dead.

Therefore, Jesus’s promise is trustworthy and true.

The loaf and the cup are him.

His mercy is now.

And here.

For the taking.