NOTES for Co1 15:30-31
Paul understands perfectly well that Christianity is not a religion, not a teaching, and not even a special kind of spiritual or mystical experience. Christianity is a spiritual process on a cosmic scale, into which a person is included by God's mercy for his own salvation. And salvation does not consist in somehow mysteriously pulling a person out of the world that lies in evil and placing him in a quiet corner prepared for him in advance, where after the death of the body his soul will enjoy joy and peace, resting after a hard and stormy earthly life.
Many people would sincerely like the completion of their earthly life to be just that, and this is exactly how they imagine what in the Middle Ages and later came in Christian circles to be called paradise. But God has prepared for us something far more grand. He offers us the chance to become participants in His plan to return the world to the state in which, according to the intention of its Creator, it was meant to exist: the state of God's Kingdom. This is a plan that far surpasses in scale the plan and duration of any person's earthly life.
Of course, by joining this process we ourselves will also have to change, both at the present earthly stage of our path and at all the following stages, which together could conventionally be called the afterlife, though it would perhaps be more accurate to call our present stage pre-life. Of course, this is not what we sometimes expect and strive for, not a quiet and cozy corner where one can rest from earthly labors. But at the end of the path, in the Kingdom, a fullness of life awaits us that cannot be found in any corner.
This is the prospect Paul speaks about, the prospect he recalls to the recipients of his letter. Perhaps he does so because not only in the Middle Ages and the modern period, but already in the first Christian times, it happened that someone forgot this prospect and hoped only for a quiet and cozy afterlife in exchange for faith in Christ. But the apostle decisively dispels all such hopes. Christianity is not for those seeking cozy corners; it is for those seeking the Kingdom and the fullness of life.