Our Hope in Christ
1 Corinthians 15:12-26[1]
Hope is a crucial aspect of human life. We
cannot thrive without a sense of hope. While I think many would agree that hope
is a mindset we can learn, it doesn’t just come automatically. And when we lack
a healthy sense of hope about our lives we can find it hard to believe that they
have meaning and purpose. That puts us at risk for sliding into depression,
anxiety, or even suicidal thoughts. A lack of hope can affect us in more
“physical” ways, like diminishing our ability to cope with the stress we all
face as a part of life. Hope gives us confidence to persevere in hard times,
because we believe that there is indeed meaning and purpose to our lives, each
and every one of our lives. That kind of resilience enables us to move forward
with our goals in life and with our commitments to family and work and service.
Hope keeps us going when everything in life
seems to conspire against us. But hope can be risky as well. We can put our
hope in all the wrong things. We may be hoping for a nicer car, a bigger home,
a better job, a more fulfilling relationship. Hoping for those things isn’t in
and of itself wrong. There is a forward-looking aspect to all hope. But when we
stake too much of our well-being on hoping for the wrong things, if those hopes
come crashing down, so do we. That’s when false hope can hurt us deeply. It can
shake our faith in others, in the meaning of life, even in the goodness of God.
Our lesson from Paul’s letter to the
Corinthians for today addresses hope from the perspective of Christian faith.
Specifically, Paul was addressing the hope of the resurrection. I dare say
that’s not something that’s high on our list of hopes these days. As
Christians, we hope to “go to heaven” when we die, to be with Jesus and to be
reunited with our loved ones. But that’s not the focus of hope in the New
Testament. The focus of Christian hope is that we will share Jesus’
resurrection, in bodily form, and that in that new body we will enjoy new life
in God’s (re)new(ed) creation.[2] In
fact, for Paul the hope of sharing in Jesus’ resurrection is so foundational
for Christian faith that he could say, “if there is no resurrection of the
dead, then Christ has not been raised. And if Christ has not been raised,
then your faith is useless” and “we are more to be pitied than anyone in the
world” (1 Cor 15:16-17, 19, NLT).
It may be hard for us to understand how
Christians who lived only 30 years after the first Easter Sunday could somehow
doubt the resurrection of Jesus. Part of the problem in Corinth may have been
that in the Greek world, the idea of a future “resurrection” in which the dead
live again in physical form was thought to be crude and disgusting. In the
Greek world, people looked forward to being set free from the “prison house” of
the body. They believed that death was a transition from physical life in a
body to living among the stars in the heavens as an immortal soul.
“Resurrection” just didn’t compute to them. They would have been much more
comfortable with our notions of “going to heaven” when you die. In fact, it was
the influence of this line of thinking about three hundred years after Paul’s day
that shifted Christian hope from sharing Jesus’ life in God’s (re)new(ed)
creation to eternal life in heaven.
Some of the believers at Corinth went to the
opposite extreme. They heard some of the wonderful promises of new life in the
Gospel message Paul and others had preached. And because they heard in that
message that they already had eternal life fully and completely because of what
Jesus did, they believed that they had all they were ever going to receive of
salvation. They bypassed the promise of God’s future as resurrected people
living on a recreated earth in the way God had intended in the first place—without
sadness or pain, suffering or injustice, violence or even death. They believed
that all they were ever going to get from their faith was what they had right
then and right there.
But St. Paul wouldn’t accept either of these
options. For him, the inevitable consequence of Jesus’ resurrection on that
first Easter Sunday morning was that we would all share in the new life Jesus
now enjoys. He says it this way: “Christ has been raised from the dead” as “the
first of a great harvest of all who have died” (1 Cor 15:20, NLT). For
Paul, Jesus’ resurrection meant more than God had intervened to vindicate Jesus
and his message. For Paul, Jesus’ resurrection meant the beginning of the
transformation of all things and all people! It meant the beginning of God’s
whole new creation that would eventually “make all things new” (Rev. 21:5).[3] It’s
hard to wrap your head around that big of an idea. But for Paul tampering with
that hope meant tampering with the Gospel message. And that was something he
never allowed!
The promise of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is
that he died on the cross so that we could know without a shadow of a doubt
that God loves us—he always has and always will. The promise of the Gospel of
Jesus Christ is that his death broke the power of everything that could
separate us from God or harm us in any way. The promise of the Gospel of Jesus
Christ is that his resurrection overcame even death itself and brought new life
to everyone. Paul said it this way, “In Adam all of us die. In the same way, in
Christ all of us will be made alive again. (1 Cor 15:22, NCV). And that
means that what God has done through Jesus is nothing less than to set in motion
the process of restoring everything in all creation to the way that he intended
in the first place. Just as Jesus enjoys that resurrected life now, so we too
can look forward to enjoying the same life in God’s (re)new(ed) creation.
We need all kinds of hopes to keep us going.
Hope in the form of looking forward to doing something fun. Hope in the form of
knowing that there are friends and family who will always love us no matter
what. Hope in the form of trusting that all our needs will be supplied by our
God. But more than that, we need a hope that can motivate us to do as our affirmation
of faith for today puts it: “to take up
our cross, risking the consequences of faithful discipleship; to walk by faith,
not by sight.” It takes serious hope to give us the courage and the
strength to “plunge … into the present struggle.”[4] The
reason for that is that we can see injustice and violence and even death at
work all around us to this day.
Yes, we already have a taste of the amazing
grace of God at work in our lives here and now. But I think our experience with
the bitterness of death can help us truly appreciate the hope Jesus gives us by
rising from the grave.[5] Those of us who have looked into the eyes of a loved who was there a few
moments ago, but is gone now, those of us who know the bitterness of death, must
know that we cannot accomplish God’s work in this world on our own. It’s just
too big! Because what God is doing is nothing short of restoring of all things
and everyone to the life that God intended for us in the first place. And that’s
what he is doing even now through the power of Jesus’ death and the power of
Jesus’ resurrection to new life. Our hope is that power is already working to
change our lives now. But our hope is also the recognition that we have not yet
tasted it fully and finally as we will when we all share in Jesus’ life in
God’s (re)new(ed) creation. Sharing that life, the life that Jesus now enjoys,
in God’s (re)new(ed) creation: that is our hope in Christ. And that hope gives
us courage and strength to press on, come what may.
[1] ©
2025 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 2/16/2025 for
Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2] Cf. Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: a commentary
on the Greek text, 1229: “the resurrection of Jesus was not to restore life
in the conditions of continuing earthly existence (and eventual death) but to
initiate a transformed mode of existence as the firstfruits (v. 20) of the
eschatological new creation.”
[3] Cf.
Jürgen Moltmann, Ethics of Hope, 55, where he says that in the death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ “the eschatological turn of the world begins,
from transience to non-transience, from the night of the world to the morning
of God’s new day and to the new creation of all things” (emphasis original).
[4] Cf. “A Declaration of Faith,” 9.5, 10.1, 5 (Presbyterian Church in the United
States, 117th General Assembly 1977, reissued by Presbyterian Church [U.S.A.],
1991).
[5] Cf.
Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 171-72, 210-11. He holds in tension
the “deadliness of death” which still persists in our experience of life with
the “promise and hope of a still outstanding, real eschaton,” that is, a future
that is defined not by death but by life.
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