Continuing the discussion of the Resurrection, Paul connects the general resurrection at the end of time with the resurrection of the Savior Himself. He says: how can you claim that there will be no resurrection from the dead when before your eyes you have a clear example proving the opposite - the resurrection of the Savior Himself (vv. 12-16)?

At first glance, such doubts in a Christian setting may seem completely impossible. But if we suppose that there were many recent converts to Christ from paganism in the Corinthian church, the situation becomes more understandable. In the pagan world, ideas about the immortality of the soul were much more widespread than ideas about resurrection. In Paul's time most religious pagans believed in life after death, but the afterlife was no longer associated for them with the world of shadows, where all go regardless of how they lived on earth, but with the immortality of the soul, in which the person is preserved fully or almost fully, so that after death the soul can experience delight or suffering depending on what kind of life its owner led in the world of the living.

Meanwhile, the Bible says little or almost nothing about this kind of afterlife, or about the immortality of the soul, focusing all attention on Judgment and on the general resurrection at the end of time. But the apostle does not draw his readers' attention to this divergence. He speaks of something else: to abandon the traditional Jewish ideas of Judgment and the general resurrection, replacing them with some pagan teaching about the immortality of the soul, means also abandoning the Kingdom brought into the world by the Savior (v. 17). If the immortality of the soul alone is enough, if the pagans are right, then the world will forever remain as it is, and those seeking a better life and higher justice will receive what they long for in their turn, after death. Then there is no Kingdom, and no need for one. But that is no longer Christianity. Jesus came into the world to give those who seek the Kingdom its full reality, not some after-death bliss that becomes an eternal refuge for a soul fleeing the world. And if there is no living in the Kingdom and no seeking it, then there is no point in following Christ. He will give those who follow Him nothing that could make them happy within the limits of our untransformed world lying in evil (vv. 18-19). He can give the faithful only the Kingdom. And only in all its fullness. And not someday after death, but here and now.

Speaking of his gospel, Paul mentions a certain "writing" that speaks of Christ's death and His resurrection. Judging by this mention, at the time when he wrote his letter to the Corinthian church, certain specifically Christian texts already existed in the Christian community. Perhaps this is not a reference to the Gospels known to us, but to some records that formed their basis. And to what was central in them: the testimonies about the Messiah's death and His resurrection. And yet no texts could replace living testimony.

Especially the testimony of a person who had not been with Jesus during His earthly life, as the other apostles had, and in general had not been planning to become His disciple or follower. A person who, on the contrary, had been an enemy of Christians and had persecuted them as much as he could. The testimony of precisely such a person best demonstrates what the Kingdom brought into the world by the Savior is, and how it affects a person.

Paul, who at that time was not yet Paul or an apostle, but Saul, a disciple of Gamaliel, was never approached by anyone trying to convince him of the truth of Christianity. He had never heard anything at all about what today we would call Christian teaching. For him Christianity was not a teaching, but a meeting. A meeting with a power far greater than his own, in which he recognized the power of God. And behind that power, to the great astonishment of the future apostle, stood the One whose followers he had intended to persecute as enemies of God.

That is how Paul became acquainted with the King of the Kingdom whose breath and power he felt there on the Damascus road. And he became an apostle not in order to preach a new teaching, but in order to tell everyone ready to hear about his meeting with the Risen One and about the Kingdom that He had revealed to him. About the meeting that became the center and meaning of his life and his testimony.

Paul's words about the Resurrection in today's reading are the best illustration of what in church practice is called tradition or handing down. First of all, at the center of genuine tradition there is always a foundational fact without which Christianity as the experience of the life of the Kingdom could not exist: the fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ (vv. 3-7). And tradition confirms this fact through the testimony of eyewitnesses, thanks to whom it becomes not simply a story about a historical event, but the gospel in the original sense of the word, good news for everyone seeking the Kingdom (vv. 1-2). The testimony of eyewitnesses is fundamentally important here, because if the Resurrection is only some mystical event that does not touch anyone concrete, if no one has ever experienced it as the reality of his own life, then we, living millennia after the events described by the evangelists, have even less reason to hope that the Resurrection can have anything to do with us. But if it once really changed the lives of those who accepted the Messiah risen from the dead, then we too can hope that the Resurrection will enter our life, changing it and joining us to the Kingdom. No less important are the testimonies of those whose meetings with the Risen One, like the apostle's own meeting with Him, occurred after Pentecost, when the history of the Savior's earthly ministry had already ended (vv. 8-9).

Indeed, without such meetings, we could quite reasonably suppose that the possibility of meeting and directly communicating with the Risen One was limited only to those forty days after the Resurrection about which the evangelists speak. In that case we would have to accept the thought that the Kingdom was a reality related to our world only during those forty days, and hope that it would be opened to us again at the end of time with the Savior's return. But Paul's own experience, like that of many other witnesses who lived later, says that the Kingdom did not disappear after the Ascension, that it is still open to everyone who seeks and will remain open until the end of time, when it appears in all its fullness. And if that is so, then it is possible to live in the Kingdom already today, just as it is possible already today to meet the Risen One, if only one truly wants this meeting. Paul's own example confirms the possibility of new life (v. 10), becoming a convincing illustration of the words he spoke and making them part of that living tradition which is founded not on books describing the Kingdom, but on people living in it.