1 Corinthians 15:35-38, 42-50 Commentary

The Scriptures’ “perspicuity” is for some Christians a familiar but sometimes misunderstood concept. By it Jesus’ followers basically mean that the Holy Spirit makes clear what God wants to communicate through the Scriptures to God’s people and world. So we sometimes say the Spirit makes perspicuous the Scriptures’ central truths like God’s creation of everything that is created, the saving life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit and the return of Jesus Christ at the end of measured time.

But neither the Spirit nor perspicuity guarantee the crystal clarity of every biblical concept. The Spirit leaves plenty of room for wonder and mystery in our understanding of the Scriptures. In fact, even when the Spirit inspired writers try to explain some of the Bible’s mysterious concepts, Christians sometimes struggle to understand those explanations.

That’s the case with this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson. Paul as much as admits that in when he writes in verse 35, “Someone [tis] will ask, ‘How [Pos] are the dead [nekroi*] raised [egerontai]? With what kind of body [somati] will they come [erchontai]’?” It is, candidly, hard to evaluate the motivation of the tis (“some”) to whom the apostle refers. Are they expressing a legitimate concern about how the resurrection will occur? Or are these questions outgrowths of the kind of skepticism about the resurrection Paul addresses earlier in 1 Corinthians 15?

In some ways we don’t have to choose between those options. Verse 35 quotes the kinds of questions that Christians and some non-Christians pose. The Message paraphrases Paul as writing there, “Some skeptic is sure to ask, ‘Show me how resurrection works. Give me a diagram, draw me a picture. What does this “resurrection body” look like’?”

When Jesus’ 21^st century faithful friends think about the resurrection, some of us have similar questions.  We may wonder, “What will our resurrected bodies look like and be able to do? Will we recognize our loved ones in the new creation? Will we be able to do things like play basketball and the piano, as well as hang out with our grandchildren and friends?”

For reasons somewhat mysterious, in verse 36 the apostle refers to similar questions as “foolish [aphron].” The Greek word can literally mean “stupid” or “ignorant.” While pastors want to let the Spirit help us sort out what Paul means here, it may be enough to say that Paul isn’t condemning those questions, but only those that arise out of rejection of the truth of the resurrection – the kind of rejection he so roundly challenges earlier in 1 Corinthians 15.

In fact, we might even sense such dismissal in the way this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s apostle responds to questions about the resurrection body’s nature. His answers to verse 35’s questions are, candidly, almost as mysterious as the resurrection itself.

Part of the mystery stems from the apostle’s extensive use of analogies and metaphors. He compares our resurrection bodies to things like wheat [sitou] (37), flesh [sarx] (39), planets and stars [epourania somata] (40), and spiritual bodies [soma pneumatikon] (44). Paul also notes that just as differences exist between planted and harvested wheat, human and animal flesh, heavenly and earthly bodies, as well as natural and spiritual bodies, so there are also differences between resurrection and earthly bodies.

Yet while all of those comparisons and differentiations are true as well as interesting, they’re not necessarily very helpful in our understanding of resurrection bodies. The Spirit inspired the apostle to make those comparisons. But that still leaves plenty of room for God’s adopted children to wonder about the nature of our resurrection bodies.

Can preachers admit that in our sermons on this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson? Preachers might admit to our listeners that Paul doesn’t answer all or even most of our questions about the nature of our resurrected bodies. After all, as The Message so lyrically paraphrases verse 36, “There are no diagrams for this kind of thing.”

Perhaps the closest the apostle comes to offering a concrete example of the nature of our resurrected bodies is in verses 45ff’s admittedly somewhat mysterious comparison of “the first man Adam” [protos anthropos Adam] with the “last [eschatos] Adam” whom we generally assume is Jesus Christ. In verse 49 he promises, “Just as [kathos] we have borne [ephoresamen] the image [eikona] of the earthly [choiku] man, so we shall bear the image of the heavenly [epouraniou] man.”

Verse 49a is Genesis 1 creational imagery. But it turns our attention from earth-bound people created in God – and Adam’s — image to resurrected people who will “bear” the risen Christ’s image. Paul basically insists that Jesus’ friends’ resurrected bodies will more closely resemble Christ’s risen one than our current ones.

So preachers might invite hearers to look for hints about the nature of our resurrection bodies in some of the Scriptures that describe Jesus’ resurrected body. There were certainly some unique characteristics about that body. Among other things, Luke 24:15-16 suggests that the resurrected Jesus wasn’t immediately recognizable to his closest friends. Verse 24, in fact, reports that it’s only when he breaks and blesses bread that his friends recognize him.

John 20’s account of Mary’s encounter with the risen Jesus also hints at both continuity and discontinuity between Christ’s pre- and post-resurrection body. Verse 14 reports when the risen Christ appears to Mary, she doesn’t realize that it’s him. It’s only when he speaks her name that she recognizes him.

John 20 goes on to allude to some of the further discontinuity and continuity between Jesus’ earthly and resurrected body. The risen Jesus is somehow able to enter the room whose doors are locked (19). When John reports that those friends are overjoyed when Jesus shows them his hands and side (20), he implies those body parts are somehow still scarred. John seems to confirm this with the resurrected Jesus’ invitation to Thomas to touch his hands and side (27).

So how might preachers invite hearers to think about our resurrection? We might admit that much about the resurrection and our resurrection bodies is deeply mysterious. It’s certainly okay to wonder about it. But Jesus’ followers always remember that we won’t get completely satisfactory answers to our questions until Jesus returns at the end of measured time to give us resurrection bodies.

In connection with this, I think of something I once read by Jonathan Sacks, London’s former chief rabbi, that might help preachers address this as well. He admitted that the Scriptures’ descriptions of the afterlife are largely poetic and, as a result, resistant to easy interpretations of them. But Sacks went on to point out the divine wisdom of this “reticence.” After all, were we to fully know the new creation’s glories, we’d easily refuse to engage in living in and caring for this creation.

Might preachers say something similar about our resurrection bodies? Much is deeply mysterious about the resurrection bodies with which God will grace us when Christ comes again. But perhaps that’s because God knows that if we knew too much about those glorious bodies, we might be tempted to too hastily shed our earthly ones in favor of our resurrected ones.

*I have here and elsewhere added in brackets the Greek words for the English words the NIV translation uses.

Illustration

The old Greek myth of Odysseus returning largely unrecognized from the Trojan War bears some similarities to the story of the risen Jesus’ appearance to his disciples. The only person to recognize Odysseus is his long-time nurse Eurycleia. But she recognizes him only when she bathes him and sees an old scar on his leg. In a similar way, skeptical Thomas seems to recognize the risen Jesus only when he sees the scars of his crucifixion.

The similarity to Jesus’ resurrected body breaks down, however, when Odysseus swears Eurycleia, on threat of death, to secrecy. Jesus, by contrast, sends his friends into the world with the gospel’s great news, including his crucifixion by which God rescues us. In fact, our own scars may help bear witness to God’s faithfulness in the face of the pain that causes our wounds.