NOTES for Co1 15:30-31
Paul understands perfectly 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 the sake of his own salvation. And salvation does not consist in somehow mysteriously pulling a person out of the world lying in evil and placing him in a quiet corner arranged for him in advance, where after the death of the body his soul will enjoy joy and peace, resting after a difficult and stormy earthly life.
Many people would sincerely like the end of their earthly life to turn out exactly this way, and this is how they imagine what in the Middle Ages and later in the Christian world came to be called paradise. But God has prepared something far more grand for us. He offers us the chance to become participants in His plan to return the world to the state in which it was meant to exist according to the design of its Creator - the state of God's Kingdom. This plan far exceeds the scale and duration of any person's earthly life.
Of course, as we enter this process, we ourselves will have to change. This is true both at the present, earthly stage of our path and at all the later ones, which together could conditionally be called the afterlife, though it would perhaps be more correct to call our present stage pre-life. Of course, this is not what we sometimes expect and strive for, not a quiet, cozy corner where we can rest from earthly labors. But the fullness of life awaiting us at the end of the path, in the Kingdom, is such as cannot be found in any corner.
This is the prospect Paul speaks about and reminds the recipients of his letter about. Perhaps he does so because not only in the Middle Ages and the modern era, but already in the earliest Christian times, it happened that someone forgot this prospect, hoping only for a quiet and cozy afterlife in exchange for faith in Christ. But the apostle firmly dispels all such hopes. Christianity is not for those who seek cozy corners; it is for those who seek the Kingdom and the fullness of life.