1 Corinthians 15:19-26 Commentary

It’s a juxtaposition I’ll not forget as long as I have any memory. God graciously but quite suddenly brought my dad from life through death to Life on Easter Sunday, 2021. He died, as we reported in his obituary, “in the sure hope of the resurrection.” My dad’s death was for Jesus’ followers who loved him, among other things, an example of this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s hope and reality.

As I have noted in previous commentaries on I Corinthians 15:19-26, few preachers will likely choose it as a “stand-alone” Easter text. However, the Spirit can graciously use it to help inform what God’s dearly beloved people understand about the ramifications of the more commonly used Gospel reading. This Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson can offer a good doorway into a consideration of the implications of the angels’ Jesus “is not here; he has risen!” (Luke 24:6).

In 1 Corinthians 15:14-18 Paul makes a serious of statements that begin with something like, “If Christ has not been raised, then …” So, for example, if Christ is nothing but a corpse then both our preaching and faith are “useless” (14). If Christ is still dead, we are liars about God (15). If Christ has not been raised, our faith is worthless, and his adopted siblings are still slaves to sin (17). If Christ is little more than heap of Palestinian dust, even Christians who have died are completely destroyed (18). If Christ is not raised, our hope will die with us (18). If Christ is not raised, God’s adopted children are the most pathetic, miserable people imaginable (18).

“But [Nyni de],” it’s as if Paul shouts at the top of his lungs in verse 20, “Christ has indeed been raised [egegertai] from the dead [ek nekron], the firstfruits [aparche] of those who have fallen asleep [kekoimemenon].” Christ is no tortured, crucified corpse. God has raised him from death to life. Christ’s home isn’t in some dark, dank Palestinian cave. It’s in the heavenly realm. Christ is alive. In fact, he’s in some ways more alive than any earthly creature.

This has profound implications for all of Jesus’ friends. Christ isn’t, after all, just alive. He’s also what verses 20 and 23 call the “firstfruits” [aparche]. This almost certainly alludes to God’s Israelite people’s offering to God part of the first crops they harvested both when they entered the land of promise and yearly (i.e. Exodus 23:19). So it’s as if Paul is saying Christ was in some ways the first dead person God “harvested.”

But, as the apostle continues in this Sunday’ Epistolary Lesson, he was not the last person God will raise from death to life. Christ was just “the firstfruit” of God’s wonderful upcoming harvest. When Christ returns, God’s dearly beloved people will, by God’s amazing grace, be the “rest” of God’s “harvest.”

This is a particularly stunning profession when we consider its stark contrast to what’s naturally both our current reality the future we deserve. “Death [thanatos],” grieves Paul in verse 21, “came through a man [di’ anthropou].” “In Adam [en Adam],” he continues in verse 22, “all die [pantes apothneskousin].”

These verses have, of course, been subject to at least two interpretations. Christians agree that some kind of death was the result of our first parents’ disobedience of God. Some people believe that Adam and Eve’s hearts eventually stopped beating because they’d failed to completely love God. Others suggest that Adam and Eve experienced a deathly separation from God because of their failure to obey God.

Preachers want the Spirit to equip us to proclaim this truth through the lense of our own theological tradition. But we can agree that separation from God is a fate we naturally share with our disobedient first parents. Humans’ existence is naturally characterized and shadowed by death.

However, while we naturally share Adam and Eve’s deathly fate, God graciously changed everything by raising Christ Jesus from the dead. Just as some kind of death somehow came to all people because of people, life comes to people through one person. In verse 21 Paul professes “the resurrection [anastasis] of the dead [nekron] comes also through a man.” What’s more, he adds in verse 22, “as in Adam all die, so in Christ [en to Christo] all [pantes] will be made alive [zoopoiethesontai].”

I sometimes wonder if the difficulty of fully understanding these verses stems in part from their sheer lack of precedence. In fact, verse 22 is, like verse 21, also subject to at least two interpretations. Some Christians assert that because of Christ’s resurrection all people will be made alive. Others assert that because God raised Jesus from the dead, God will also someday raise Jesus’ adopted siblings from the dead. But again we might note general Christian agreement that Christ’s resurrection has startling life-giving and -changing power. While our lives are naturally marked by death, Paul insists that because of Jesus Christ they’re infused with life.

However, in Christ God has not yet killed death. Death still wreaks great physical, emotional and even spiritual havoc. I still carry some of the scars that were caused by my beloved parents’ death. I have a chronic disease that cannot be cured but only controlled, by God’s grace, by medicine.

Death’s persistence is perhaps part of the force of what Paul refers in verse 24 as “all dominion [archen], all authority [exousian] and power [dynamin].” Death and its henchmen, Satan and sin, still wield immense power. While it’s limited power, it’s, nonetheless, real power. Satan and his thugs may know they’re defeated powers. But they’re going down to defeat “kicking and screaming” as it were.

That’s, in some ways, part of the implication of Paul’s lament in verse 26: “The last [eschatos] enemy [ecthros] to be destroyed [katargeitai] is death [thanatos].” While God defeated death by raising Jesus from the dead, God hasn’t yet destroyed death. Death remains a virulent enemy, whether in the hospital bed in the next room or in a Ukrainian or Palestinian war zone.

So God’s dearly beloved people must still, in The Message’s paraphrase of verse 23, “wait our turn.” Christ was “the firstfruits.” Yet “when he comes [parousia]” he will also raise “those who belong to [hoi tou] him.” At the resurrected and ascended Christ’s second coming, God will graciously raise from death to Life the bodies of those who have received God’s grace with our faith.

Death remains a thug that causes untold misery and pain. But Death is also a condemned thug. Death may seem to get the last word. But because God raised Jesus from the dead, Life gets the last word for all who have faithfully received God’s amazing grace. As Reformed Christians profess in Lord’s Day 22 of the Heidelberg Catechism, when Christ comes again, “not only my soul will be taken immediately after this life to Christ its head, but even my very flesh, raised by the power of Christ, will be reunited with my soul and made like Christ’s glorious body.”

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

Illustration

Richard Price’s Lazarus Man is, in part, about Anthony. He’s rescued after being trapped for three days under the rubble of a collapsed building. Anthony later tells audiences, “’I’m not one to talk about religion but it’s like God buried me under that earth, wiped my slate clean, then brought me back up to be who I never thought I could be before … And all I want now is to be worthy of that gift …

“’Sometimes I have this joy in my heart,’ palming his chest, ‘I have so much in me to offer, and all I want is to be of service … I feel like …’ And then he paused, allowing this yearning to do good continue to rise in him. ‘I feel like I have so much to say to people now. Things I’d never known or felt before and it’s all good news’.”

Ironically Anthony’s “resurrection” story later collapses under the weight of its fraudulence. It turns out he actually was just standing nearby where dust covered him when the building collapsed. But people found Anthony’s hopeful message to be so compelling that he also realized that he couldn’t stop preaching it.

Not all people find hope in Christ’s resurrection. But in a world and culture that despair shadows and haunts, all of us are desperately searching for hope. This offers God’s dearly beloved children countless opportunities to both live and speak of the hope we have within us (cf. 1 Peter 3:15).