Tuesday, October 24, 2023  

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Today’s Scripture Reading 
1 Corinthians 15:51–58

Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain. (NRSV)

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Reflection

What started at the beginning of chapter 15 finds its culmination here in these verses: the Apostle Paul’s teaching about resurrection and why it matters for Christians.

He passed on to the Corinthian Christians (and to us) what he also received, that Christ died for our sins and was raised. Then he addressed objections to the very idea of resurrection (“How can some of you say, ‘There is no resurrection of the dead’?”), and now he’s going to explain why any of this matters for today.

Hope for a resurrection in the future animates meaningful work in the present. Belief in “the resurrection of the body” (the Apostles’ Creed) does not serve to make Christians idle, merely enduring this mortal coil until we can be in heaven. Rather, such hope inspires steadfast, immovable, excellent ministry to those in need, in the confidence that it matters, both for today and in the mysterious future.

Christian belief in resurrection is bodily, for one thing, which means that our embodied existence is not scorned by God. The Corinthians’ objections to resurrection were based on an attitude toward the body as something less holy than purely spiritual reality. But Jesus was incarnate in a body and lived a bodily life, and when he was raised from the dead it was in a body, so the things we experience in our bodies bear on our spirituality, and that will always be the case, even in the afterlife.

Of course, we talk about this with a healthy measure of humility, handling it as a mystery and not as some point-for-point prediction about the end of the world. And at the heart of that mystery are transformed bodies. Using symbolism and textual references that first-century Jewish readers would instantly recognize (“the last trumpet”), Paul paints a picture of all people made “imperishable” and “immortal,” embodied in a way that death cannot change.

The work we do in Jesus’ name to dignify the bodily life of all God’s children — feeding and clothing and listening — is not in vain, because we hope in a mysterious life-after-life-after-death in which the bodies we are today will all be changed, when “death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more” (Revelation 21:4).

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Prayer
Lord, we believe. Help our unbelief. Amen.

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Written by Rocky Supinger, Associate Pastor for Youth Ministry and Worship

Reflection and Prayer © Fourth Presbyterian Church

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