NOTES for Co1 15:12-20

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.

Somehow, in everyday usage the word faith has come to mean the opinion that God exists—as though this could be doubted. But the Apostle Paul gives this word a completely different meaning: that Jesus of Nazareth, crucified on the tree, rose from the dead. Everything else was, in essence, said by Jesus Himself, and our trust in His words rests on faith in His Resurrection.

Therefore, we turn to Him in prayer: He is alive and consequently hears us. Therefore, we seek His authority: He is alive and shepherds His sheep. Therefore, we await our final hour with hope: He is alive, and we shall see Him. Therefore, we accept what befalls us in life: He is alive and is with us always, to the end of the age. Therefore, we feed on His Flesh and Blood: this is the Flesh and Blood of the One who will never die again, but will live—in us.

People guessed from the earliest times that physical death is by no means the end of a person's existence. Some ideas about the afterlife already existed among people in the Paleolithic era. But when it comes to Christianity, the matter is not the afterlife, but something qualitatively different: resurrection. It might seem that the difference is small. But it only seems so at first glance. In fact, every idea of an afterlife, of postmortem existence whether of a shade or of a soul, presupposes that after physical death a person no longer lives a full life.

From the most ancient idea of the world of shadows, the kingdom of the dead, where all are equal and where there is only a semblance of life, to teachings about recompense after death, about a good and bad afterlife, characteristic of civilizations such as the Egyptian or Greek, the spiritual and historical distance is very great. But even the ideas of the immortality of the soul characteristic of Greek philosophy did not presuppose a full life after death: only the soul remained of the person, only thought and self-awareness, while everything else remained on earth with the body left behind at the moment of death.

Of course, this is not the world of shadows, where consciousness barely glimmers and where there is no place for thought or memory, but still one cannot speak here of life even in that very relative fullness characteristic of a fallen person in a fallen world. For Greek philosophers, however, many of whom after Plato considered the body only a prison of the soul, such incompleteness was preferable to life in the body.

The Bible from the very beginning orients a person not so much toward existence after death as toward the complete overcoming of death. This is not surprising: none of the authors of the biblical books looks at the body as a prison of the soul. For them the fullness of life presupposes life in the body.

But to recent pagans who had turned to Christ, such a view evidently seemed strange. They may have imagined the Kingdom as some dwelling place of pious souls, something like the medieval Orthodox or Catholic paradise. Paul does not tire of reminding them that the Kingdom is not paradise, not Elysium, and not the fields of Osiris. The Kingdom is new life in all its fullness, spiritual and bodily, in the same fullness in which the fullness of the life of the risen Christ was revealed to the faithful.

For Paul, Christ's resurrection from the dead is the cornerstone of Christianity as a whole. Indeed, Christianity in every age has been founded precisely on faith in the resurrection of every person from the dead, and on the belief that this process began with the Savior's resurrection. And the point is not merely that without life after death, a person's earthly life proves largely meaningless.

In ancient times, belief in the immortality of the soul and in recompense after death was characteristic of the Egyptians, to some extent of the Greeks, and of certain other peoples. But the Bible speaks of something else. It is not saying that some part of the human person, however important, is preserved after death and that this allows a person to go on living, remembering and remaining conscious of themselves. The Bible speaks of something greater: it speaks of resurrection, of the whole person returning to life—and to a full life, not the partial and limited life that the soul alone would inevitably have. For all its importance, the soul is only a part of the human person, not the entire person.

But for human resurrection to become possible, the world had to change. Death and the evil that gave rise to it had to be driven out of the world they entered after the Fall. The world had to become God's Kingdom once again, as it had been on the first day of creation: on that first day there was neither darkness nor evil in the world; it was entirely permeated by the light of God's presence, which made it the Kingdom of the living and utterly real God. This is exactly how God wants to see the world, and He will accept nothing less. According to His design, the human person must become an inhabitant of this world and attain in it a fullness of life that is unimaginable today.

Christ's resurrection from the dead became the center of this process. Human salvation consists in joining the universal resurrection; otherwise, a person will have to forget about the Kingdom. The apostle understands all this perfectly and never tires of reminding others, for to remain outside what is happening means losing everything. Christianity itself then loses all meaning, turning into a religion, a doctrine—in short, into something that cannot by itself bring anyone into the life of the Kingdom. And to live on talk about a Kingdom toward which one is not journeying truly means being the most pitiable of all people.

Believing Jews knew about the universal resurrection long before Christ came. They knew that the day of Judgment would come, and that everyone who had ever lived on earth would have to return to life, stand before God, and give an account of the life they had lived. They also knew about the messianic Kingdom, where those raised from the dead would become neighbors of those who were still alive when the Messiah came. In Paul's day, the messianic Kingdom was regarded as the Kingdom of God, in which the earthly and the heavenly were joined so that the righteous, raised from the dead and miraculously restored to life by God, would live alongside those who entered it without having died.

In those days, however, the Messiah was not regarded as the bearer of the Kingdom. He was merely its King, while the Kingdom itself was established by God according to His will. The Messiah was considered an ordinary human being by nature, given a special vocation: messianic ministry. One did not necessarily have to be born the Messiah; one could become the Messiah just as others became prophets. God called a person to ministry, and the prophet became what he was meant to be.

Paul, however, speaks of a different Messiah, the One who revealed Himself to him on the road to Damascus. This Messiah was not merely the King of a Kingdom established by God: He Himself bore that Kingdom within Himself and had borne it from His own birth, which was itself extraordinary. A Messiah who contains within Himself the entire fullness of the Kingdom is a new image; nothing like it existed in the traditional Judaism of the Gospel era.

The image of such a Messiah and such a Kingdom compelled people to look differently at familiar things. The Kingdom entered the world not simply as an external force, like the breath of God, originally foreign both to the fallen world and to fallen human nature. It entered the world through a Man who differs from each of us only in that His humanity is entirely free from the dominion of sin.

And the bonds of love established with this Man open the fullness of the Kingdom to each of us: they open it in a human way, just as these bonds of love unite us with Him in a human way. Human relationships themselves become the spiritual foundation of the Kingdom, and God enters into them, making them divine-human. Thus the life of the Kingdom becomes our life, its history becomes a fact of our spiritual biography, and its triumph becomes our salvation.

On the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Catholic Church reads passages of Scripture that speak of the Virgin’s role in the metahistory of humanity’s salvation (in the Book of Revelation), of how insignificant death is in the face of the Resurrection (1 Cor 15:20-26), and of the human glorification of the Mother of the Lord (Lk 1:39-56). The Virgin’s hymn in the Gospel of Luke shows that her glory is the Lord’s glory in her, through her glorification of God.

Continuing the discussion of the general resurrection, Paul evidently does not separate it from the history of the Kingdom gradually unfolding in our transfiguring, but not yet fully transfigured, world. And for the apostle, only resurrection, and by no means the immortality of the soul, is the true victory over death.

In fact, for him the whole history of the Kingdom turns out to be a sequence of stages following one another on the way to this victory. The main victory has already been won: Christ has risen from the dead, and His resurrection becomes the pledge of the Kingdom's final triumph at the end of time (v. 20). He is the first, but others will follow Him. The pivotal confrontation of the present age, in the apostle's thought, is the confrontation between Christ and the Kingdom with its fullness of life, and the death that entered the world after the fall - a death that cannot be defeated by hoping only in the immortality of the soul (vv. 21-22). But resurrection is a process requiring time, time that can also be measured by the clocks of our transfiguring, though not yet fully transfigured, world. This is not surprising: the Kingdom is not alien to our world; it enters it in order to transform it completely, and the history of the Kingdom cannot unfold apart from the history still continuing by inertia in our world, although its meaning and driving force were exhausted with the Savior's coming.

According to the evangelist's testimony, the process of the general resurrection began at the moment of the Savior's death on the cross (Matt. 27:50-53), and it will be completed, according to Paul, on the day of His return (v. 23). On that day the Church will reveal to the world its fullness as the fullness of the body of Christ, of which the apostle spoke. Those who sought the Kingdom and found it in the present age will be able to enjoy fully that fullness of life which today, even after touching the Kingdom, we experience only in part.

For those who sought nothing, that day will become the day of the last Judgment, at which their destiny in eternity will be decided (vv. 24-25). Without such a judgment, the completion of the present historical stage is impossible, just as without it the full and final triumph of Christ and the Kingdom over the death that entered the world with the fall is impossible (vv. 26-28). Only such a prospect gives meaning to Christianity and Christian life; otherwise it is not worth beginning at all, for if the world will forever remain as it is now, then it is better, following the well-known saying, "to eat, drink, and be merry while we are alive" (vv. 29-33). Christianity is not a religion but life in the Kingdom, and therefore following Christ makes sense only for the one to whom this Kingdom is more important than anything he has or can find in our still untransformed world.

Christ’s resurrection is the beginning of a new, risen humanity; it is in this sense that the Apostle Paul calls Him the firstfruits of those who have died. The union of Christians with Christ is like the mysterious bond of all people with Adam: we all sinned in Adam, and therefore death reigns over all people (cf. Rom 5:12–14). Adam was the first human being to die and thus opened the age of death; Jesus was the first human being to rise and thus opened the messianic age of resurrection.

A question immediately arises here: “Why, then, do Christians continue to die, and why has no one except Christ Himself yet risen as He did, in a new body, never to die again?” The Apostle’s answer is remarkable because the entire interval between Christ’s resurrection and the resurrection of those who are in Christ is contained in the one short word “then” (1 Cor 15:23).

For God, “one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day” (2 Pet 3:8). We do not know how long the history of the world will last from Christ’s resurrection until His second coming; nearly two thousand years have already passed. Yet this entire age is no more than a brief interval in God’s design for the world and humanity. Scripture calls it the “last days” (cf. Heb 1:1–2; 2 Pet 3:3).

At the end of the passage is a thought that, nineteen centuries later, one of Dostoevsky’s characters would express in different words: “If there is no God and no immortality, then everything is permitted.” The words “let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (1 Cor 15:32) are a quotation from Isaiah’s prophecy (Isa 22:13). They are spoken by people feasting and making merry in besieged and perishing Jerusalem. There is no hope in that merriment, but we have hope: Christ.