No Resurrection? How Does That Make Sense?

Friday of the Twenty-Fourth Week in Course 2024

From the beginning of the Church way back in the first century Christians have been proclaiming and celebrating the physical Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. That was a real historical event that occurred three days after He was murdered by crucifixion at the hands of the Romans.

Then what is this statement quoted by St. Paul when he wrote to the Church of Corinth, maybe three decades after the event: “how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?” It’s not clear what the back-story is for this claim, but it leads to one of Paul’s best little classes in logic. Perhaps there was a Sadducee-trained Jewish Christian in Corinth. They didn’t believe in any resurrection. Theirs was a very sad viewpoint, you see? There may have been Gnostics there, who believed that matter is evil and spirits are good, so bringing our material bodies back to life was offensive. Anyway, Paul’s logic goes like this:

If you believe there is NO resurrection of the dead, then Jesus Christ did not rise in His glorious body, and did not ascend to heaven and reign over all creation, so He’s just dead. If He isn’t raised and is just dead, then I’ve been preaching all these years for nothing, and paying my own way to do it, and our faith is a waste of time and effort. Moreover, that means I’ve been lying to everyone all this time. On top of that, we are stuck in our sins because Jesus has no power to atone for them or forgive them, and all those Christians who died in faith are dead forever. If all we have is this wretched life and the physical pleasure we can suck out of it, we are to be pitied more than anyone else.

But if Christ is risen, like the first fruits of a glorious human harvest we are all invited to, and He has, then we must be the happiest of humans. The psalmist catches some of that emotion by singing to God: “I shall behold thy face in righteousness; when I awake, I shall be satisfied with beholding thy form.”

The three little verses from St. Luke are kind of like a condensation of the whole Gospel ministry: Jesus went all about the territory of Galilee, healing diseases, driving out demons, and not leaving anyone out, especially the women. There’s a little bit of background gossip thrown in for effect. It answers the question, “how did Jesus financially support all the people who followed Him? He wasn’t multiplying bread and fish daily, was He?” There were healed women in Christ’s retinue, and they were wealthy. They shared what they had with Jesus and the disciples, as all of us must do for the Church, and especially for our evangelists. Jesus and the disciples were freed up to teach and preach and heal. We know this tradition passed on to Paul and the other apostles, and down to us today. Those who have assets support those who do not, and the Gospel continues to be spread.