1 Corinthians 15:25-28, 35-58[1]
I mentioned
last week that hope is something we all need to thrive in this life. But hope
can be tricky, because it can be hard to know what to place your hope in.
Especially in times when it feels like everything you thought you could count
on in life has dropped out from under you. Those of us who practice faith in
Jesus Christ have a hope for something more, beyond this life. But that hope
has resulted all too often in an attitude that what happens now doesn’t really
matter. That was why Karl Marx criticized religion as a kind of drug that made
people passive in the face of the wrongs that were being perpetrated against
them. I think that’s why we need the full version of the Christian hope: not
just that we’ll go to heaven when we die, but also that God is working to
restore all our lives and everything he created in the same way that Jesus was
raised to new life. The miracle of the resurrection on that first Easter Sunday
points us to the promise that God is working to change this world, and
everyone and everything in it.
Even with
that hope, there are still some pitfalls to avoid.[2] For some
of us, it becomes all too easy to take an overly optimistic view. Because we
have the hope of being with Jesus at our death, we can treat death like it’s no
“big deal.” It’s just “passing on” to another stage of our journey. That’s not
the biblical view. As Paul puts it in our lesson for today, death is an “enemy”
(1 Cor 15:26). Death has a “sting” that is real and harmful (1 Cor 15:55). Paul’s
not just talking about physical death, although as many of us have experienced,
that can be truly harmful to those of us who have lost loved ones. Paul is also
talking about the destructive power that “death” exerts in our lives and in our
world to this day through the powers and persons who align themselves with
evil.[3] Our hope is not that somehow death is no “big deal.” Our hope is that in Jesus’
very real death on the cross, and especially by raising Jesus to new life, God
has overcome the power of death.
The other pitfall goes to the opposite
extreme. For some of us, it becomes all too easy to take an overly pessimistic
view. Because of the harm that death continues to inflict in our lives and in
our world, we can decide that God must not be able to do anything about it.[4] But that’s also not a biblical view! Not by a long stretch! The God to whom the
Apostle Paul points us is the God who not only worked in the lives of the
people of Israel and in the lives of believers in the early church all those
centuries ago. This God is the God who continues to work in and through us to
bring life out of all the harm that death can inflict on us. We have this
faith, this confidence, this hope, because Jesus died a very real death on the
cross. But we also have this faith, this confidence, this hope, because God
raised Jesus to a new life that is just as real. That means death will not have
the last word for anyone.
The hope of the Gospel is the promise of Jesus’
resurrection. It’s the promise that the life God revealed in Jesus’
resurrection is a new kind of life that is stronger than the worst that death
and all its powers and those who align themselves with them can throw at us. Paul
points to this hope when he insists that “Death is swallowed up in victory” (1
Cor 15:54), the victory Jesus won when God raised him from death. Paul can go
so far as to “taunt” death like one might do to a defeated and humiliated bully:
“O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” (1 Cor 15:55, NLT).
The reason he can act so confidently in the face of the harm that death still
can and does inflict on us is because he knows that God has given us “victory”
over all of it “through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 15:57). The life that God
has injected into this world through Jesus’ resurrection has already defeated
death and all the powers and persons aligned with it. And the promise of our
faith is that this new life will finally and fully define all creation. For
everyone and everything!
Our faith and our hope exist in a balance. We
don’t naively water down the power of death or the very real harm those who
align themselves with evil can do in our world. Rather, with Paul we take all
of that seriously as an “enemy.” But on the other hand, we don’t just give up
in the face of the sometimes overwhelming discouragement we feel over the
influence of those powers and persons. That’s because we’ve seen the light of
new life that dawned on that first Easter morning, and with Paul and the hosts
of believers throughout the ages we put our faith and our hope in the power of
that new life.[5] We hold our faith and our hope in the power of God to overcome evil in this
world in a balance. But the scale is tipped in favor of hope, because Jesus’
resurrection points us to the day when the final victory will come.
We don’t place our hope in some idealistic
vision that attributes to humanity a goodness that can prevail against all evil.
There is much goodness to be found in the human family, to be sure. But it’s
not equal to the task of overcoming the powers of evil and those who align
themselves with it. Neither do we place our hope in sheer determination and willpower
to resist in the face of all the wrongs that are so blatantly perpetrated in
our day, every day. Human willpower isn’t sufficient to the task either. We
place our hope in the confidence that, as the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth
said, “God is not God in vain.”[6] Or as Paul puts it in our lesson for today, ultimately God will be “utterly
supreme over everything everywhere” (1 Cor 15:28, NLT).[7] And so we place our hope in God, and in the victory he has won in Jesus Christ.
And that hope leads us to the confidence that God will fulfill all that he has
promised to do. One day, we will share in the new life that Jesus now enjoys.
So how then shall we live in these times of
turmoil? Do we retreat behind the walls of our homes and churches and sit back,
waiting for God to work a miracle? Or do we “plunge into the present struggle”
as our affirmation of faith last week called us to do, putting the courage and
energy our faith and hope give us to good use here and now?[8] I think St. Paul would have us do the latter. After all that he had to say
about the reality of Jesus’ resurrection and the hope it gives us, Paul
concluded this chapter by saying, “So, my dear brothers and sisters, be strong
and immovable. Always work enthusiastically for the Lord, for you know that
nothing you do for the Lord is ever useless” (1 Cor 15:58, NLT). That
last phrase is often translated more literally “in the Lord your labor is not
in vain.” We may or may not see tangible results from our work. But I believe
that every act of integrity, every act of kindness, every act motivated by
faith and hope and love can and does make a difference.[9] Not just because of our sincerity, or our determination, but because the new
life of our resurrected lord Jesus means that what we do here and now is “not
in vain”!
[1] © Alan Brehm 2025. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 2/23/2025 for
Hickman Presbyterian Church.
[2] Cf. Shirley C. Guthrie, Christian Doctrine, rev. ed, 378.
[3] Paul speaks of this especially in Romans 5, where he contrasts the effects of
death’s “reign” with the effects of God’s grace that lead to the “victory” that
we have through Jesus Christ (cf. esp. Rom 5:17). See especially The Message
translation: “If death got the upper hand through one man’s wrongdoing, can you
imagine the breathtaking recovery life makes, absolute life, in those who grasp
with both hands this wildly extravagant life-gift, this grand
setting-everything-right, that the one man Jesus Christ provides?” Cf. also
Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: a commentary on
the Greek text, p.1302.
[4] This was Harold Kushner’s view in Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. He
and his wife had experienced the loss of a child, so while I may disagree with
his view, I would not want to criticize him personally.
[5] Cf. Guthrie, Christian Doctrine, 283. See also ibid., 285, where he says
that Christians “know of a power at work here and now greater than the power of
evil, a power that keeps breaking into our godless and godforsaken world to
heal old wounds, make new beginnings, and (if only now and then, here and there)
give us a glimpse of the final victory of God’s compassion and justice that are
on the way.” See further, ibid., 375: “The God in whom we hope is a God who not
only will be but is the powerful and compassionate Creator and
Ruler of the world. The crucified and risen Christ who will come to
overthrow all the powers of darkness and evil that spoil God’s good creation
and human life in it has already triumphed over them and even now is at
work to complete the work he has begun.”
[6] Cf. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 3.4.1:196. While he concedes that work
of reconciliation that Jesus has accomplished through the cross and resurrection
(elsewhere he calls it “the accomplished alteration of the whole world
situation”; ibid., p. 191) still faces opposition in this world, he
insists that we must see this “battle” as resulting in the victory of God.
[7] Cf. Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 163, where he points to the final
victory of Jesus’ resurrection as serving “the sole and all-embracing lordship
of God.”
[8] Cf. “A Declaration of Faith,” 10.5 (Presbyterian Church in the United States, 117th
General Assembly 1977, reissued by Presbyterian Church [U.S.A.], 1991).
[9] Cf. Guthrie, Christian Doctrine, 280-81: “we can and must confidently
throw ourselves into the fight against evil in our own lives and in the world
around us, knowing that we do not fight alone but with the one who is stronger
than all the forces of evil.”
