Father Stephen De Young: And then St. Paul goes on in verse nine:

For I am the least of the apostles, who am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.

So, he doubles down, he says, “Look, that’s right. I’m the least of all of them. Least of all of them. Not just less than the eleven, not just less than the 70, put me at the bottom of the list”, because of what he had done. And he had actively been going in and persecuting Christ and his church, had been imprisoning and killing Christians, and so he would never place anything that he had preached to them on his own authority.

But by the grace of God I am what I am. And His grace toward me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me. Therefore, whether it was I or they, so we preached and so you believed.

So he says, “Listen, I was doing evil. I was a murderer, I was a persecutor of Christ and His Church.” The only reason St. Paul is who he is on that day, writing to them that he’s in the position he’s in, that he was there preaching to them and living with them, that they’re listening to anything he has to say, is because of the grace of God, meaning the action of God. God came and made him an apostle. That’s why he is who he is. Christ came and appeared to him rather forcefully, knocking him off that horse, and called out to him and sent him. That’s what “apostle”, of course, means, it means “one who [is] sent” and sent him on this mission. And so he says that because he’s the last of all and the least of all, he’s had to work harder than anyone traveling, suffering, going through everything he’s gone through that we read about again and again in the Acts of the Apostles.

But even that St. Paul won’t take credit for, St. Paul is not here saying like, “Oh yeah, they all got the silver spoon. They all got to know Jesus while he was alive. I came in late. But I’m Charlie Hustle, right? I’m in there working hard to make up for it.” That’s not what St. Paul is saying at all. He attributes even that, even everything he’s accomplished, everything he’s done in traveling the world, the fact that he survived all those stonings, but the fact that they have come to know Christ, he’s attributing all of that to the grace of God, meaning all of that is God’s doing, not St. Paul’s doing, that he would take credit for.

And so he sort of concludes this part by saying, “Therefore, whether it was me coming and preaching to you, whether it was Apollos, whether it was one of the other apostles, whether it was someone else, this is what you came to believe, this is what you’re living your life faithfully following. This is what it’s about. And whether you heard it from me, whether you came to know Christ through me or you came to know Christ through one of the others, it’s the same Christ who accomplished the same things for you and for us.”

So this is sort of his introduction, St. Paul’s introduction into his topic for the rest for the rest of this chapter. So we can go on here a little bit more. So now he’s going to address the topic at hand. He says, “Remember, this is the Gospel that you heard from me. This is what I taught; this is who Christ is. This is what he did.” So now here’s the problem he has to address in verse 12:

Now if Christ is preached that He has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?

So this seems like a sort of bizarre comment. Why would there be a bunch of Christians who don’t believe in the resurrection of the dead? That seems like a gimme. And in fact, St Paul’s question seems kind of obvious, right? If you believe what I taught you about who Christ is and what he did, one of the key elements we just talked about is that Christ rose from the dead, according to the Scriptures. So if you believe that Christ rose from the dead, how could you not believe in the resurrection of the dead?

Well, we have to remember that these are former pagans. No pagans believed in the resurrection of the dead. In fact, in Acts chapter 17, when St Paul goes and is preaching in Athens, he kind of gets some of the philosophers to go with him, right? He’s discussing with them, he’s arguing with them, they’re kind of following him. And as soon as he brings up people rising from the dead bodily, he loses all of them. They’re done. They think that’s laughable. That’s the breaking point. So that idea from a pagan perspective is sort of irrational. Why would you want to come back to life in a physical body and live in what, this world again? That makes no sense.

They had a firm concept, of course, of the underworld where souls would go after death. It was generally a pretty bad and sorry place, Hades in this case, where you didn’t really want to go. People there, for the most part, lived a sort of shadowy existence and sort of faded away as their memory faded away on earth. It was a pretty dark and frightening place. There were worse parts of it, there were somewhat better parts of it. But the better parts of it weren’t sort of paradise. It wasn’t like “the good place” on the TV show. They didn’t even get frozen yogurt. It was not sort of this, “Oh, I get everything I want and I’m reunited with all my friends and everything’s happy.” The people who went to, for example, the Elysian Fields were sort of the people who weren’t that bad or who did something truly heroic.

The concept of someone going up into the heavens and becoming a god or a demigod is a concept that existed. But that was not an opportunity extended to the average person living in the Roman Empire. This is something that probably Caesar would do. Before that in the ancient Near East, well, yeah, Pharaoh would do that, the King would do that. Maybe some very high-ranking priest might do that. But your average person was not going to do that. They were going to go into the underworld, into Sheol or Hades, hopefully to a more bearable form of shadow existence for however long it lasted, until they just sort of faded away.

So that is the world that these pagan converts were coming from. So you can understand how even if they accepted—and St. Paul’s going to continue to elaborate here, of course, on this proclamation of Christ’s resurrection—but even if they accepted the idea that this person, Jesus the Messiah, who’s God himself had died, had risen again, they wouldn’t necessarily make the connection to or understand how that meant that they also were going to rise again bodily on the last day at the time when Christ returns. So remember, the whole concept of the gospel here is that the people need to be preparing themselves for that time when Christ returns, when Christ comes, this is then critically important in terms of what is it they’re preparing for.

This is what St. Paul meant when he said, “Lest all your faithfulness might be in vain.” All of this preparing you’re doing of yourself and of your community to receive Christ when he comes. If you don’t understand what’s going to happen when he comes, if you don’t understand that you’re going to be raised bodily and then that is what you’re preparing for. You’re preparing for the resurrection of the dead. That is the goal of everything you’re doing as a community of Christians in Corinth. If you don’t understand that that’s the purpose, then what are you doing this for? If you think that basically, “Well, okay, we’re going to be part of this Christian community, and it’s good because there’s love and there’s fellowship,” and there are these good things in this world, in the Christian community. Christ does give us benefits and blessings in this world.

But if you think when that ends, you’re just going to go off into the netherworld and fade away when people forget you, then all of these things that St. Paul has been calling on them to do are sort of pointless because they’re not going to end up seeing the return of Christ. They’re going to fade away off somewhere. We also have to remember that not just at this point in history, to this very day, there are substantial Jewish communities that do not believe in the resurrection of the dead. There are substantial elements of the Jewish community, now, who don’t believe in an afterlife at all. So famously, this was this disagreement about the resurrection existed between the Pharisees and the Sadducees. St. Paul, of course, is from a Pharisaic background, so they were already anticipating the resurrection of the dead in general. For them, this was part and parcel of the idea of God’s justice.

So, in this world there were all kinds of people who died without receiving justice. There were wicked people who prospered in this world and died without receiving justice. There were righteous people who suffered horrible sufferings in this world despite their righteousness and their faithfulness to God sometimes because of it. This becomes especially pointed when we read, for example, in First and Second Maccabees about the Jewish people who resisted to the very death, the breaking of the Torah. They died rather than sin against God. And so, there was a need for there to be some kind of justice for them. And so, for the Pharisees, this was part of their understanding that at first the Pharisaic position seems to have been that, well, the righteous will come to life again and everybody else will just sort of stay in the underworld. But it later developed further.

And when I say that it developed, I’m talking about in the understanding of Jewish people from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D. Because you find references to these ideas of the bodily resurrection. I mean, they’re entailed in the promises made to Abraham, but you find them in, for example, the Book of Job, in which, especially in the Hebrew, very clearly, Job says, “Even though my body goes into the ground and rots away, I will stand on this earth and see my redeemer with my own eyes.” So, if you don’t see the bodily resurrection there, I don’t know what it would take to tip you off to it.

So, this is a truth that is generally in the Scriptures, but in terms of the understanding of it, especially in the period after the exile, it takes a while to sort of solidify. And the Sadducees rejected the idea entirely. So, they would have been on basically the same page, not that they didn’t believe in an afterlife, they would have been on basically the same page as the pagans. They would believe that people died and went to Sheol and sort of disappeared eventually. And that’s reflected in the way they lived their lives in any number of ways.

This is why, for example, in St. John’s gospel, when Christ comes to raise Lazarus and he asks Martha, “Do you believe in the resurrection?” She says she believes that the resurrection will happen on the last day. So she has that belief. And then Christ says that Christ is the resurrection. But so that was sort of the common belief. But my point here being the fact that there are some significant number of people in the church, in the Christian community at Corinth, who don’t have this understanding and this belief that what they’re preparing for when Christ returns is their own resurrection and their life in the world to come is not as weird as it sounds to us, because for us that’s sort of Christianity 101. But it’s not so weird in the ancient world that they wouldn’t really fully understand that. And so St. Paul now for the rest of this chapter, is going to be sort of explaining it to them in no small amount of detail.

So he begins, of course, by making this point: If you believe Christ is raised from the dead, then the resurrection of the rest of humanity in Christ is entailed in that idea. So he continues:

But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not risen. And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty. Yes, and we are found false witnesses of God, because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ, whom he did not raise up—if in fact the dead do not rise. For if the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! Then also those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable.

So he continues the argument. He says, “So let’s say you’re right. So let’s say for a minute that there is no resurrection of the dead, that humanity is not raised from the dead on the last day. This isn’t part of what we’re preparing for, that people just die.” He says, “Well, if that’s true, then Christ isn’t risen. Because if you say that simply doesn’t happen or wouldn’t be good or isn’t something we would want to happen, then why or how would it have happened to Christ? If Christ has not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is empty, right?” Because if that didn’t actually happen, then St. Paul is just coming around telling stories. They might be fictional stories, they might be true in some sense of emotional resonance or something. They may be beautiful stories that are inspiring, but they’re ultimately empty. And if the stories he’s telling are empty, then the people who have come to accept those stories, who are living their lives out of those stories and in sync with those stories, and as part of those stories, then that’s empty and vain and pointless too.

By the same token, he says, “Yes, and we are found false witnesses of God, because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ, whom he did not raise up if in fact the dead do not rise.” So he says, I just gave you a list of all those witnesses, that’s why he’s saying we here. But I gave you a list of all those witnesses who all say the same thing. So if Christ isn’t raised, then we’re all lying. We’re all bearing false witness about God because we’re saying God did something that apparently, according to you, he didn’t do. “For if the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen.” That’s a logical syllogism. Dead people don’t rise. Therefore, if someone comes to you and says “Christ is risen”, you would have to say, well, “No, because that doesn’t happen.”

“And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile. You are still in your sins.” So their faithfulness, everything they’re doing, everything they believe, the way they walk through this life, everything they do, it’s all futile and pointless. Why bother? Why bother assembling for the Eucharist in Corinth at all? Why bother adhering to the sexual morality that St. Paul was talking to them about? What’s the point of any of this, if either way you’re going to die and your shade will drift off to Hades, and that’s it?

Notice also he says that if Christ is not raised, they are still in their sins. Referring back to what I was saying about Christ having died for our sins here, this forgiveness of sin or freedom from sin that St. Paul is talking about, he’s going to continue to develop it. But here it’s connected not to Christ dying, but to Christ rising again. And that’s important, because again, I was stressing this Western view we’ve picked up, where people who sin receive the death penalty and sort of Christ receives the death penalty instead of us. And so, very clearly, if it’s Christ’s resurrection, if it’s his rising from the dead which frees us from our sins, that can’t be as a result of a penalty, but rather it’s a result of something that Christ does. And as I said, St Paul will expand on that more.

He says then, “Also, those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.” So he says, “So all those members of your community who have passed away already, they’re gone. We claim this gospel you’ve been preparing for Christ’s return, that’s been your whole sort of modus operandi, that’s been the whole purpose of your community, the whole purpose of your way of life. And oops, they missed it because they died too soon. That’s the consequence of not believing in the resurrection.”

So he concludes in summary, “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable.” Because he says, it’s not again that St. Paul denies that we have some hope in Christ in this life that there are blessings of Christ in this life. There are blessings that come from being part of the Church, part of the Christian community, and of worshiping Christ. He’s not denying that. But if that’s all there is, all there is, whatever blessings we get through our participation in the Church in this life, then the “we” there is not them, right? Not the Corinthians, not you, right? But we—the same “we” who St Paul was saying would be liars, which is who? Him and the other apostles. If this is true, why is St Paul going around getting stoned and beaten and thrown in prison? Why is he getting shipwrecked? Why is he being rejected by all these people? Why is he going through all these sufferings? That’s why he would be most to be pitied. Because their faith, their belief, their faithfulness, all of their striving would be pointless. But everything St. Paul is doing for the Gospel would be downright pathetic, be downright pitiful and pitiable if none of it’s true, if it’s all sort of pointless.

So, this is probably a good place to end for this evening because we’re about to start a big new section. But so, St. Paul is now going to transition, it’s not a very hopeful note we’re leaving off on. St. Paul has been going through all the natural consequences that would be true if, not to be overly shocking about it, but this is basically what St. Paul is saying. St. Paul is saying that some of the Corinthians are essentially saying that Christ is dead. That’s essentially what they’re saying. They’re saying that he—and there are of course many people in our day who say this, even people who would call themselves Christians, who basically say this, that Christ was a good person, this important moral teacher, that he taught us moral truths, he taught us how to live life. He taught us these good and valuable things and he helped us form these Christian communities where we seek to follow his teachings together and love one another and take care of each other. Not that those are bad things, right? Not that those are bad things. But if that’s it, if that’s it, if you come and say, “Yeah, Christ was great but he died and he’s dead”, this is the result. This is where that kind of quasi- Christian faith ends up.

And so, the hopeful note is when we come back next week and we pick up, St. Paul is now going to turn around and say, “But in actuality Christ is risen. And so here’s what that means.” And it’s going to explain to them now in detail what it means that Christ is risen. And then he’s going to go from there, from what it means that Christ is risen, to what the resurrection in general means, because Christ being risen means that our resurrection will be a reality. And he’s going to describe exactly what that means. He’s going to give us the most detailed description we have of that in the Scriptures, I’ll put it that way. It’s not detailed enough for most of us because we have all these questions and curiosities about what our bodies will be like and what life will be like in the world to come. And he doesn’t answer all those questions or give us all those details, but he gives us the most full description, including of what our bodies will be like that we’re going to get. So that’s a teaser for what’s coming up.

And since I didn’t have actual humans here with me to ask questions, the one question I have outstanding is about the idea of Christ’s victory that’s contained in the gospel. That the gospel is the report of his victory is related to death as the enemy of humanity. And good connection to draw, you’re getting a little ahead of me, but you’re getting a little ahead of St. Paul. St. Paul, when we pick up next time and the first section of the chapter, we get into is going to talk about who the enemies of humanity are. There are actually three of them, death is one of them and he’s going to describe Christ’s victory over them and how all of that is tied up within Christ’s resurrection and the Gospel proclamation that includes Christ’s resurrection. So I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to end the audio recording for Ancient Faith here and then if anybody wants to post questions in the stream, I will answer them for at least a little bit here.