NOTES for Co1 15:20-34

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.

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.

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.

What does Paul mean, when speaking about Adam, in whom all die, and about the Christ, in whom on the contrary, all have life? Do not people live a natural life, “Adam's life”? And don’t Christians die, although partially, because they are not yet transformed to the end? If we look at the natural life of a man and at its life in the Kingdom as at two lives completely diverse, isolated one from another, the question will remain unresolved. Already the division of life into natural and spiritual does not allow to adequately understand the apostle. One can understand Paul only by having looking at life with the look of the authors of the biblical books, who did not divide the life of man into parts. In fact, when God breathes in the nostrils of man His breath, and man lives, he receives life in all its possible plenitude for his nature, both spiritual or physical.

But before the fall it is in particular the spiritual component that prevails in his life: it is not accidentally that the biblical author connects the lively strength ("the soul") of the unfallen man with this breath of God, which makes him just like his Creator. And the natural component of the human life in itself contradicts not at all that: because before the fall, prevails in man the spirit, and not the nature. The situation is different after the fall: the lively strength of the fallen man is now connected not with the breath of God, as it was the case before the fall, but with the blood, with what is natural, physiological.

Now already the nature begins to prevail over the spirit in the life of man, and man begins more and more to look like animal: because the life force of animals is connected also exceptionally to nature, with the same blood, which is in many similar to that of man. And the mortality of man is connected in particular to this ascendancy in his life of the natural principle over the spiritual. But man, even the fallen, is not deprived of the spiritual life: because he does not lose definitively the image of God after the fall. But if before this image was clearly visible, forming the core of the personality of the perfect man, then now, after the fall, he shows through only in man, constantly darkening the prevailing natural principle.

And in Christ, through Whom man joins the life of the Kingdom, begins the process of the transformation of the human nature damaged by the fall. Transformations, the result of which is not only the overcoming of the consequences of this fall, but also the change of the quality of the nature forming the personality of man. Such change, after which one can’t already naturally speak about any mortality: because in a new transformed person the spirit does not simply triumph on the nature, but also the nature is completely under the power of the spirit: because only such a nature, changed by the breath of God can become an organic part of the Kingdom.

Death at all times seemed to man the most terrible enemy. And the most terrible were of course its invincibility and inexorability. Everyone knew that everything will end in any case with the leaving into the world of deaths, in this world of darkness, where there is no real life, but is only an existence, which, maybe is the worse than the nonexistence itself.

We can notice by the way that no people of the antiquity look at death as a departure into nothingness: this idea appears later, it is necessary to consider it as the fruit of the philosophic reflections, and not the spiritual or mystic experiments. And in the experiment it was not exactly the disappearance of the human personality, but the exhaustion of the vital forces of man and the gradual disintegration of his personality: in the kingdom of the dead, in the world of darkness, the memory is gradually lost, the capacity to think is lost, almost extinguishes the consciousness, and man addresses his own shade, dwelling in a state either of sound sleep with horrible dreams, which is impossible to remove, either the delirium, from which it is impossible to come out. Like this saw the world of darkness practically all the peoples of the earth. For the plenitude of the picture, it is possible again to add that the lord of the world of darkness was usually a merciless and relentlessly spirit, whose favorite leisure was to torment those that turned out to be in his possession.

Of course, over time to certain peoples (for example, to the Egyptians and Greeks) appeared the representation of the after death less darkly and of the posthumous reward, but, at the first place, it was something all the same from the cultural point of view local, and, secondly, even such after death did not suppose the plenitude of life: because the soul is not a whole man, the Egyptians and the Greeks connected the soul with the personal consciousness, but about the physical in relation to the posthumous existence, it was usually not about: because and for the Egyptians, and particularly for the Greeks the body was rather seen as the prison for the soul, than as its house, although temporary. But here is, the yahvisme directed from the very beginning its followers not on the after death, although and joyful, but on the complete overcoming of death. It is difficult to say exactly when appeared in the yahvisme the representation of the resurrection, but already Isaiah of Jerusalem speaks (although not directly, but rather with hints) that in the messianic Kingdom there will be not only diseases, but also death.

And in the pre-captivity period, was already forming in the Judaism the representation about the general resurrection on the last day, the Day of Judgment, when everyone will return again in the world of the living to appear in God's judgment. In the first Christians Churches the situation was a little bit looked otherwise: because for the Christian the coming of Christ is this very Judgment that says the Judaism. And the Savior Himself points directly at Him as the One, to Whom God gives the whole judgment, by adding: whosoever believes in me does not come to the judgment, but whosoever does not believe is already condemned. In fact: it is about the faithfulness of Christ and of this Kingdom, which He brought to the world.

Kingdom, in which there is no place for death: because death is the consequence of sin and the evil, in which, according to the word of the Gospel, lies the world. But in our time, in the time of the Kingdom to come, when the world is transformed, but is not yet transformed till the end, and in the world, and in our life there is again a place for death. It [death] will disappear only when the Kingdom, transforming the world, will reveal itself in it totally. Then in this new world there will really already not be a place for death. As we see, that is why the apostle calls it the "last enemy", the last one in this sense that it is this enemy that will resist more than the others, till the very end, until the day of the last Judgment and the definitive triumph of the Kingdom, when it will undertake its last and complete defeat.

Paul describes a lot and differently the dynamism of the revelation of the Kingdom in the world. In principle, there is nothing surprising here: because we live at the time of the Kingdom to come, Paul understands of course perfectly that and tries to bring up to the readers of his messages what he finds important to tell them on this subject. And hardly to anyone of the Christians could appear doubts on the fact that, in the dynamism of the revelation of the Kingdom, the relationships of Jesus with His Heavenly Father play a decisive role. But how thus to understand Paul's words that the Son will subdue Himself unto the Father only when the Father will subject everything to the will of the Son? Was not Jesus absolutely subjected to the will of the Father from the beginning? But all the same we cannot speak about a complete subordination of man to God before the total transformation of the human nature.

And here it is already not important if this nature is damaged by the original sin, or not. Even if the humanity had in its history such a sad page as the fall, transformation would always be necessary for the human nature in order to enter the Kingdom. And if that was the case, then until the return of the Savior and the triumph of the Kingdom, it does not come to speak about God's full power over man; it remains a certain gap, that the non transformed nature is not able to overcome.

But even if it was the case, indeed, all this should not concern the Savior Himself: because He is Risen already in a transformed body! His humanity already from the moment of the resurrection was in nothing against His will, and if before the resurrection He could get again tired or feel pain, then after the resurrection it was already impossible. And nevertheless: indeed, His life is inseparable of the fullness of the Kingdom, which He carries in him and gives the world through the Church. And paradoxical as it may sound, the fullness of His transformation depends on the completeness of the transformation of the world and humanity; it is connected to them, as the head with the body.

Paul indeed does not call allegorically and symbolically the Church the body of Christ: the transformation of His human nature will not end as long as will not be transformed whoever is connected to him by spiritual relations, relations of the love, which penetrated into the Kingdom. But the breath of the Kingdom is the breath of the Father entering the world through the Son, through this Kingdom, which the Son brought to the world. And the Father, acting in the world through the Son, brings Him closer to Himself. So that in the end of time God becomes "all in all".

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.

The message about the physical resurrection of the deaths was new for the heathen who believed in Christ recently, and they perceived this message with difficulty. They were embarrassed by various "technical" questions: when? How? In which body?

Apostle Paul says that such obstacles witness about disbelieving to the Almighty and to the All-merciful God and any disbelieving of God is sin. Let’s note for ourselves Paul's words about "the ignorance of the God ", they {the words} can relate to us too, even if we believe in the resurrection of the body.

There are two rather frequent distortions of God’s image among the believers: either we present Him as a severe judge having no indulgence and no mercy upon sinners, or on the contrary, so kindhearted that our violation of the commandments doesn’t concern Him at all. It is clear that both caricatures lead to sin - disdain or mercy, or truth. Let’s then listen to the call of Paul “awake!”

The Apostle Paul warns us against a very serious danger: confusing different things. He says that when the Corinthians gather, “it is not the Lord's supper that you eat.” How, then, should it be eaten? What is wrong in the Corinthian community, and what does it have to do with us? It is perfectly clear that today, however much one might wish to, it is impossible to come to church for a meal: the Eucharist in its present form cannot serve as breakfast or lunch. Does that mean that everything is all right with us? I am afraid not. The problem is that a person comes to church not to meet God. What takes the place of that meeting is no longer so important. Today it is usually human fellowship. We feel our loneliness acutely, and in church we have the opportunity to spend time with people while expecting understanding, since people in church are indeed usually more kindly disposed than those in the street or on the subway. And so we come to socialize, to talk, to pass the time... The Church becomes a social club for us. And that is not eating the Lord's supper.