Scripture: 1 Corinthians 15:1-11, 51-58
I want to make three simple points in today’s sermon about the resurrection of Jesus Christ: Point Number One: It really happened. Point Number Two: It worked. And Point Number Three: It changes everything.
It happened, it worked, it changes everything…
Point Number One…
Lisa is one-half Italian… on her father’s side. Her maiden name is “Blancato.” When I started dating her, her Italian grandparents—she knew them as “Nonno” and “Nonna”—were still alive. They welcomed me into the family and loved me. And I loved listening to stories that Nonno told about his young life in the “old country,” in southern Italy, where he grew up and where he spent at least part of his young adulthood before coming to America.
And one of my favorite stories that “Francesco”—otherwise known as Frank, otherwise known as Nonno—told was the following: When he was in college in Italy, Mussolini had only recently risen to power. Frank was from Sicily, which is the island located below the “toe” of the Italian boot, if you can picture it. And Frank told me that all of Sicily was opposed to this Fascist dictator. They hated him, he said!
Well… Frank was a soccer player back then—the team captain. And one time he and his team traveled to a faraway city to take on that city’s big soccer team in a championship match. So they arrived in the city. And Frank gathered his players on a street corner and began talking to them about strategy for tomorrow’s big game.
But just then the police came. It turns out, Mussolini had recently passed a law prohibiting “freedom of assembly.” Groups of three or more could no longer gather in a public space. Why? Because Mussolini was worried that groups that size might be conspiring against him. So the police came around to break them up.
But Frank protested. “We’re not doing anything wrong! We’re talking about our soccer match tomorrow.” And he refused to heed the police warnings, so the cops arrested Frank. Took him down to police headquarters, where they questioned him. They were about to throw him in the slammer. But before they did, Frank said, “Excuse me… Before you put me in that jail cell, I need to make a phone call.” “Who do you need to call?” “I need to call the American consulate.” “The American consulate? Your name’s Blancato. You speak Italian. You’re Italian! What business do you have calling the American consulate?” He said, “No! I am an American citizen.”
Oh… Did I not tell you?… Francesco Blancato was born in Omaha, Nebraska, of all places. Surprise, surprise. His parents emigrated to America—went through Staten Island like so many southern Europeans—and moved to Omaha, where Frank was born. Except… the economy went south… jobs were hard to come by… so his family moved back to Italy when he was very young.
But he was born in America. He was an American!
Membership has its privileges, I guess… because, as surprised as the authorities were—as unlikely as it seemed at the time—they had no choice; they had to let Francesco Blancato go free.
In today’s scripture, Paul says something similar not about his citizenship, but his apostleship: He says, in so many words, that he is an apostle every bit as much as the other apostles. As with Frank Blancato, his path to his apostleship was unlikely and surprising, but he was an apostle nonetheless. Because he saw and experienced and was commissioned by the Risen Lord Jesus. He saw Jesus in the flesh, just like Peter and members of Jesus’ Twelve disciples, just like Jesus’ brother James, just like the larger, unnamed group of apostles.
But Paul understands that the circumstances of his encounter were very different from the others. For one thing it happened about three years after Jesus’ resurrection. Paul was the last person that the resurrected Jesus appeared to—not to mention the last person anyone would think that Christ would appear to! This is precisely why he says in verse 8, “Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.” When Paul says he was “untimely born,” I’m afraid our ESV translates it euphemistically—in Greek it’s a rude word that means abortion. So Paul says he was “untimely born” as in, snatched from his mother’s womb! As if it were against his will!
Which makes sense because we recall that when the risen Lord appeared to Paul on that Damascus Road in Acts chapter 9, becoming a Christian was the last thing on his mind… In fact, he was headed to Syria to persecute, and arrest, and threaten, and intimidate fellow Jews who belonged to this strange new Jewish cult known as “The Way,” which would soon be known as Christianity. Paul wasn’t some vigilante leading an angry mob against Christians. He had been authorized by religious leaders in Jerusalem to do what he was doing. There was no church-state separation, of course. And the Romans let the Jewish population govern their own affairs if it involved strictly religious questions. So Paul was persecuting Christians under the law. He was engaging in perfectly legal activities.
And that’s what Paul was doing in Acts chapter 9, when the Lord appeared to him, asked him why he was persecuting Christ, and Christ commissioned him to be an apostle.
But this is interesting because Paul is what today might be regarded as a “hostile witness,” if he were in a courtroom at least. It was not in his interest to become a Christian. He had every incentive to notbecome a Christian. By doing so, he threw away his career, his reputation, his means of supporting himself. If he was married at that point—we don’t know for sure, scholars are divided on the question—but if he was married at that point, his wife dumped him.
Paul risked everything to become a Christian… and he lost everything becausehe was a Christian…
Why would Paul do it, when he had so much to lose?
For one reason only: He was absolutely convinced that Jesus had been resurrected… that in fact he had encountered the resurrected Lord!
Notice in verse 7, Paul also tells us that the risen Lord appeared to Jesus’ half-brother James. And James, in addition to writing the New Testament letter that bears his name, became a leader in the Jerusalem church.
And you may say, “Well, that makes sense. They were brothers, after all.” But not so fast…
The gospels tell us two things about James. First, at one point during Jesus’ ministry James thought his brother had gone crazy—and attempted to take Jesus back home to Nazareth. Mark 3:21 tells us, “When his family heard what was happening, they tried to take him away. ‘He’s out of his mind,’ they said.” 1
Then, John 7, verses 3 through 5, report:
[A]nd Jesus’ brothers said to him, “Leave here and go to Judea, where your followers can see your miracles! You can’t become famous if you hide like this! If you can do such wonderful things, show yourself to the world!” For even his brothers didn’t believe in him.
Yet in Acts chapter 1, Luke reports that James and his other brothers and sisters, along with Mary, are right there with those first disciples in the Upper Room in Jerusalem, awaiting the coming of the Holy Spirit…
But my point is, during Jesus’ three-year ministry, James did not believe that his older brother was the Messiah or the Son of God. And, good heavens, don’t we know enough about sibling rivalries to sympathize with James!
It would take a miracle for my two older sisters to think that I was anything special!
My point is, James, just like Paul, would be considered a “hostile witness” today. Yet we know even from historical records outside of the Bible that James was executed because of his faith in Christ.
So what turned James around and caused this complete change of thinking? Only this: He met the resurrected Lord.
Finally, let me draw your attention to verse 6: “Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers [and sisters] at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.”
We don’t even know when this resurrection appearance happened… Over the course of 40 days, we’re told that Jesus appeared to many. But notice Paul says, “most of whom are still alive.” Why does he say that? As a way of saying, “You don’t have to take my word that Jesus was resurrected… or even take the words of a handful of Jesus’ disciples and family members whom you’ll never meet anyway. No… go find one of this group of more than 500 and ask them.
Paul is so confident in the resurrection of Christ that he’s inviting people, even skeptical people, to check it out for themselves!
So… Point Number One… The resurrection really happened! It rests on a solid historical foundation. Of course none of us can prove it… anymore than we can “prove” any event in history—did Julius Caesar really cross the Rubicon? There are nine sources reporting that event within the 300 years after it occurred; there are only four sources reporting it within the first 100 years after it happened. And the resurrection is much better attested than that! My only point is, there’s good historical evidence for the resurrection, too.
Because it really happened!
But Point Number Two… The resurrection worked. That is… Not only did the resurrection happen, it accomplished what Jesus, along with the prophets of the Old Testament, said it was going to accomplish!
Paul himself implies that the resurrection worked in 1 Corinthians 15… Verses 16 and 17.
Let me give you some context… Paul is arguing with the church not about the resurrection of Jesus—the Corinthians believe that already. Rather, he’s arguing about the future resurrection of the dead… That heaven isn’t simply leaving our bodies behind to go and live with the Lord. Yes, that happens when we die right now… “to be away from the body is to be at home with the Lord.”2 But in the future, after the Second Coming of Christ into this world… all of us will be resurrected—into a newly redeemed, restored, re-created world, where heaven and earth become one… And we will have new physical bodies, except they’ll be more than physical as we know it today, because Paul says our new bodies will be like Jesus’ own resurrected body.
And we see Jesus’ resurrected body do some interesting things: He’s able to walk through locked doors; disappear and reappear at will. Yet he is still able to do things like eat fish. And let his disciples embrace him. He offers to let Thomas feel the scars in his hands and side.
Best of all, perhaps, these resurrected bodies won’t be capable of suffering death and disease; they will last forever.
I’ve had more than few people ask me over the years, “Will we recognize one another when we are resurrected?” And I always say, “Did the people who knew Jesus recognize him after his resurrection. Of course they did!
There’s a lot of mystery here; the Bible doesn’t give us a lot of information. We wouldn’t be able to understand it if it tried. But I’ve heard it said that, in the future resurrection, we’ll look like “the best version of ourselves,” only more so. I hope. But whatever we look like, we will be more glorious than we can imagine now.
Anyway… that’s some context of Paul’s words in the rest of Chapter 15. And I share it to help us make sense of what he says in verses 16 and 17. He argues that Jesus’ bodily resurrection implies the future resurrection of all believers. And in verses 16 and 17, he tells us a lot about what the resurrection of Jesus accomplishes when he writes: “For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and…”
And what? “And you are still in your sins.”
“You are still in your sins”? Who said anything about sins?
After all, if we interviewed the average “man on the street” at this moment and asked him what the resurrection of Jesus Christ proves, what would he say? He would say, “It proves that there’s an afterlife. It proves that there’s a heaven when we die.”
Well, there is an afterlife, of course, and there is heaven when we die… but questions about the afterlife are more of a modern concern. Paul already believes there’s an afterlife and a heaven. But the biggest question facing Paul—which should still be the biggest question facing humanity today—has nothing to do with the questions that so often preoccupy us in our world. The biggest question has nothing to do, for instance, withthe upcoming presidential election, or what’s happening in Russia, Ukraine, China or North Korea; it has nothing to do with climate change, or the “culture wars,” or our job prospects, or our health, or the economy—not to mention who’s going to win the Final Four…
The biggest question facing every single human being in our world today ought to be this: Has God done everything necessary to bring sinful human beings like us into a right relationship with God—so that we can have eternal life in the first place, and not spend eternity separated from God in hell!
And Paul’s answer is a resounding “Yes”… and the resurrection of God’s Son Jesus, as far as Paul is concerned, proves it!
Paul says in verse 17, “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins,” which is another way of saying that if Christ has been raised—and he has—then we can be confident that through faith in Christ our sins are forgiven!
We can be confident that Jesus’ words from the cross are true: “It is finished.”3 Christ has won… The debt has been paid…
We can be confident that Christ has “suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.” 4
We can be confident that God has “cancel[ed] the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.” 5
We can be confident that “God declared an end to sin’s control over us by giving his Son as a sacrifice for our sins. He did this so that the just requirement of the law would be fully satisfied for us…” 6
We can be confident that God has “disarmed the spiritual rulers and authorities. He shamed them publicly by his victory over them on the cross.”7
We can be confident that there is “now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” 8
And we can say, along with Paul,
“Death is swallowed up in victory.”
“O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. 9
And if all that has happened, well… to say the least… nothing can ever be the same!
And this is Point Number Three… The resurrection changes everything.
It certainly did for Paul. See verse 10: “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.”
So what did Paul get in return for all his hard work? I told you earlier, after all, that Paul seemingly gave up everything for the sake of Christ. But what did he get in return?
In 2 Corinthians chapter 11, Paul shares some of the things that he got…
For instance, he got several all-expenses-paid stays in some of the Roman world’s finest prisons. He got more beatings than he could count. On five occasions he got “Forty lashes minus one.” Once he got stoned and left for dead. He got shipwrecked three times—even spending a day and night on the open sea. He got cold from lack of clothing. He got hungry and thirsty from a lack of food and water. And he got a lot of trouble from a lot of people for a lot of reasons—both outside the church and in the church as well.
Remember I started this sermon talking about Francesco Blancato… and the secret and surprising hope and confidence that came by way of his American citizenship? He could face down those fascists without fear. Because he could always pull out of his pocket a passport that said, This place is not my ultimate home. I’ve got a much better home waiting for me.
Well, brothers and sisters… Because Christ was resurrected, we have something infinitely better than that waiting for us…
And that changes everything!