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The Problem of Death

Feast of the Assumption : 17 August 2014  : 1 Corinthians 15: 20-27

The first generation of Christian believers was mightily impressed with the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the vital starting point of their religion. Here was the spring board of the new faith that they had committed themselves to. As a follow on assumption they thought that it was highly likely that Jesus would return in glory soon. Their lifetime was the pocket of time in which all the significant action would take place.

St Paul is writing out of the issues and the experience of that first generation of believers, about 30 years after the Christ event. His letters are the earliest part of the New Testament, written well before the gospels. There is a pastoral issue that he has to grapple with at various points in these letters. Members of that first generation of believers are beginning to die, and their believing friends and family members are perplexed, and are trying to make sense of this unexpected situation, not to mention the congregations they came from. They ask Paul for an authoritative opinion on the matter.

Mary is highly likely to have been one of the earliest departures, and her honoured place in the Jerusalem Church - remember according to the book of Acts she was there with the core group on the day of Pentecost - would have raised the issue in a particularly acute form. What had happened to her? Where had she gone? Was her status in the what comes next stakes different to other believers?

Paul was not part of the Jerusalem Church. He is focused on the life and issues of the new gentile churches, several of which he helped to bring into existence. So it is not surprising that he doesn’t address the issues raised by this particular individual. Besides which, he shows little interest in the details of the earthly life of Jesus. What matters about him is his saving death and his being raised from death by the Father in the power of the Spirit. So the biographical details of the early life of Jesus, and the significant personalities involved in his origins, don’t register with Paul.

The feast of the Assumption, only promulgated much later by the Church, is the way in which the Church sorts this issue out. Its doctrine develops in faithful continuity with the orthodox foundations of the Christian faith as proclaimed in the creeds we say every Sunday. The eternal destiny of Mary came to matter more and more to the Church as her significance became clearer to later generations of the believers. The feast of the Assumption is about the application of what we believe about the resurrection as it applies to one individual in particular, and by extension to all believers in general. I take it to be a feast of the resurrection, and this is the way I approach it this morning, focussing especially on what Paul writes to the Corinthians.

The Church at Thessalonika had been the first to voice its worries about what had happened to recently departed congregation members, particularly as they had died under the stressful circumstances of a Church under persecution. Now the issue has cropped up in the Corinthian Church, though in a rather different way. We are not sure exactly what off beam, weird beliefs about resurrection this divided and conflicted Church had. It seems likely that the self proclaimed spiritual aristocracy of this Church were prepared to concede that Jesus had risen from the dead, but did not think that the resurrection of the body happened in a follow on way to believers. The good things of the Christian religion happened in the exalted religious feelings and glamorous supernatural experiences of the in group. Ecstasy was all for them, and since feeling groovy was what the Christian faith was all about, in their misguided opinion, they sat lightly to the ethical requirements of the Christian life. Experience, not right action was what counted.

Paul starts off by pointing to what everybody can agree on. Christ was raised from the dead. There was a tradition, almost a credal statement about who and how many had seen him, and Paul repeats this at the start of the 15th chapter of 1st Corinthians. Then he uses an agricultural image. In his resurrection Christ was "the first-fruits," the early arrival of a bumper crop that acts as a guarantor of how good the crop is going to be, and guess what, those who belong to Christ are that later crop.

Then the imagery changes to that of political conflict and military conquest. Christ will destroy "every rule and authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death."

There is a two pronged strategy here. On the one hand there is the assurance that what happened to Jesus happens to his followers also. Jesus opened a door through which others may enter. And this is not just about the survival of some inner spiritual essence of a person, the escape capsule of a soul that is a kind of ethereal phantom that replicates us in a shadowy way. Christians are raised as a spiritual body. Our bodies are crucial to our sense of identity. Through them we experience the world, and are linked to others. We think with our bodies, as well as manipulate the world around us. So transformed bodies are what are raised in this great harvest at the end of time. Those who have died recently in the Pauline churches will experience this destiny. Later the Church will declare that while most believers arise at the end, some exceptional Christians, most notable Mary, will go to be with God immediately.

Yet just at this point Paul shifts the focus on to the present interim time, the time of the Church, the pause between the first and the second coming of Jesus. These days of struggle and uncertainty, and of sufferings and setbacks are an arena of Christ’s continuing ministry. They will continue for longer than Christians had at first expected. Paul himself keeps revising his time estimates throughout his letters. And there is a reason for this.

In a hidden way, in patterns of unfolding grace, Christ is methodically taking on, and dealing to, all that resists the rule of God. He is working through an agenda of eliminating the unseen principalities and powers that hinder and resist the kingdom of God. And the last of these is death.

Death is the problem being addressed in this morning’s second lesson. It is not just the inevitable end to our biological term of life. This gradual disintegration of our bodies brings with it many of the sufferings that human beings fear and must contend with. It challenges and limits human achievements, since all fade away with the passage of time. But most seriously of all it threatens to cut us off from God, to disconnect us from the one who gave us life in the first place, who sustains us in life now, and who defines what the life that is really worth having amounts to.

It is not as though the human race has to put up with what we call history until God chooses to end it at a time of his own choosing. God is using this envelope of historical time to do what must be done to prepare for the arrival of the rule of God in which the insidious power of death will be abolished. His son Jesus Christ is on a mission of conquest to undermine all the support structures of death, to overcome the network of hindering and limiting oppressive influences that give it its power.

Here it may be objected that in a world of Gaza civilian casualties, of Ebola virus epidemics, of the emergence of an ISIS dominated terror state, and of New Zealand society’s determination to push of God out of its life in so many ways, the evidence of Christ the conqueror at work is little to be seen. But that is to forget what we read in the Old Testament, of a God who is perfectly capable of working through catastrophe and crisis to bring his purposes about, who uses even what at first appears to be the enemies of the people of God as his agents of judgement. It is also to forget that if we look along a line of salvation events, of God appearing on Mount Sinai to give Moses the Law, to the incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ, to his saving death and resurrection, to the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost, to the ecumenical Councils that acknowledged the divine status of Jesus Christ, and the acknowledgement of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is to see that the human race has come to know more and more of who God is, and what he intends for us. These milestones, rather than any facile view of human progress, is to see the real advances that the human race has made in its comparatively recent history. And God is able to take the human races repeated no, no, noes to him, and work them into his yes, yes, yes to us. He can outwit, out flank, and out manoeuvre all that human mendacity can try to do to thwart his purposes. Christ the conqueror cannot be defeated. He will prevail. He will have the last word in the human story. And death shall have no dominion.