By Justin Crisp
St. Paul founded the community at Corinth around 51 CE, and he was in traveling in Ephesus some years later when he heard that the Corinthians were having some trouble getting along. His First Letter to the Corinthians, canonized in the Christian New Testament, is something like an urgent e-mail sent to an unraveling gaggle of dissidents. It’s Paul’s breathless attempt to settle the issues over which this community is divided and to recall to them the core of the Gospel he had shared with them some four or five years earlier. In chapter fifteen, we find Paul’s attempt to reiterate that core message and sum up the gospel he preached to them when they first met (1 Cor. 15:1-2). It is a powerful statement of the mystery at the heart of Christianity: the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, body and soul, and that resurrection’s crescendo and culmination in the resurrection of all creation. “For as all die in Adam,” St. Paul says, “so all will be made alive in Christ. … Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ” (1 Cor. 15:22-23).
I am always bemused when, each year around Easter, television networks run specials on what often goes by the name of the “historical Jesus”—the (apparently) “real” Jesus who has been buried beneath the rubble and debris of the church’s myth-making and theologizing, like a fossil awaiting excavation. The conversation always comes around to whether or not Jesus’ resurrection really happened, as if it were just one more historical data point that modern historiography could either corroborate or debunk. The philosophically honest historians will gently correct this and admit that the question of the miraculous is beyond their capacities to answer as historians. But the careless-and-grandstanding will propose that the lack of historical evidence makes the resurrection historically unlikely. And then they’ll run a clip of some well-meaning theologian who says it doesn’t really matter either way, because the resurrection is, basically, just a religious symbol for the daffodils coming up in the spring.
St. Paul thinks this whole discussion has got it the wrong way around. Jesus is no fossil to be excavated, and neither is His resurrection. Paul thinks of Jesus’ resurrection as being in organic relationship with the much larger way that God works in history, from beyond history, to redeem history. Jesus’ resurrection is an inaugural instance of something much more mysterious and thoroughgoing. It is the beginning of God’s consummation of creation, God’s putting of all to rights and His defeat of evil and death: “For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. … Then comes the end, when [Christ] hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Cor. 15:21-22, 24-26).
As Rowan Williams puts it, the resurrection of Jesus is something like a second big bang. It is the moment when God’s redemptive power and peace surge up through creation such that not even death can stand in their way—and which subsequently ripples throughout history so that we know its power now in the miracle of reconciliation and forgiveness, in the cracking of the most stubborn heart, in the liberation of one who suffers injustice, in any quiet moment of peace amidst chaos. We know the power of the Christ’s resurrection in any loveliness that emerges out of brokenness. It is not only something that happened in the past or that will happen in the future. It is something that happens still. Its life and light course through time and buoy us up as we await the completion of our Lord’s resurrection—the first fruits—in our own.
It is a most extraordinary thing to be able to perceive this loveliness in the midst of the bedlam of our world—and even more extraordinary to make it available to others. To live Easter is the vocation of all those of us today who consider ourselves disciples of Jesus—that by our lives the world may know the tomb was empty.
The Reverend Dr. Justin E. Crisp is a husband, dad, music lover, and priest. He is Rector of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church and lives with his wife, Jewelle, their pug, Val, and their daughter, Beatrice, on the St. Barnabas hilltop in backcountry. He previously served at St. Mark’s in New Canaan for ten years.
