I Cor. 15: 24 Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. 25 For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death.
It is said that “Death is like the sun; it’s a fact of life which we cannot avoid, but one we must not look at too closely, nor for too long. Still, I find that, as we age, it’s a good idea to think about our mortality, even, about our own memorial service, what testimony we would like to leave the world by way of scripture, song or message, and write it down somewhere. I have sometimes had in my files records of some people’s plans for their memorial service, should I be the one to lead it. Not only is that a good spiritual exercise, when people share those with me, I am honored by the trust and the deep spiritual sharing that it involves.
I’m in no hurry for my own memorial service. But one thing I’d like read at mine would be a personal note to the effect of, “Please excuse me for not being present at this service today. I hope you understand that I had a previous engagement I couldn’t break. Besides, if you were in the worship service that I am now in, you’ll understand why I’m not skipping it for the service that you are in, even though I had a part in planning it.”
Let me know if you think it’s cruel or crude to make light of death the way I just have, and I will be grateful for the education. But I take some permission and some inspiration to do so from the very words of the Apostle Paul in today’s reading, in which he boasts and exults in Christ’s victory over death at the empty tomb, saying,: “… Christ has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”
Paul’s friends in Corinth would have been very familiar with this kind of language. Everywhere you turned in the ancient Mediterranean world, you might see such images, or read such words in temples or on street corner monuments, celebrating a victorious military campaign or a battle in which Caesar, the emperor or some general was said to have put his enemies under his feet. People even carried them in their pockets and purses, inscribed on coins that were minted in honor of some military victory. In Latin, these images were called, “tropaion,” from which we get the word, “trophy.”
Here is one image from a coin that celebrates the subjection of Jewish rebels in AD 70. Here are some others…..
Now why would Paul take this imperial language, even military language, and use it for the peaceful resurrection of an unarmed man who prayed for his executioners, and sought revenge against no one for his unjust and untimely death? Why would Paul employ words like these to describe the resurrection of Jesus, the Lamb of God, and the Prince of Peace?
First of all, please note that today’s passage does not say that Christ has put any people under his feet. And that’s a major, radical difference between the way that the New Testament uses this language, of victory and conquest, and the way ancient kings, generals and emperors did. The Lamb of God is at war, all right, but not with our worldly weapons of death. Those are the wrong weapons, and for the wrong war. Nor does the Lamb of God, the Prince of Peace, wage war for our worldly and demonic purposes of conquest, killing, death and domination. This passage uses the language of war and empire to turn our customary ideas of valor and victory on their heads. Christ’s victory at the cross and the empty tomb is a victory for us, on our behalf, not against us. His is a victory over everything that divides, dominates and destroys us, like idols and idolatry, injustice, immorality, oppression, racism, nationalism and all the other –isms and ideologies in which people place absolute faith, and from which we try vainly to draw our value and meaning in life. Those things are the “dominions, authorities and the powers” that Christ has defeated. We worship, serve and fear those “dominions, authorities and powers,” only to become their slaves and their sacrificial victims.
The worst and most unjust and oppressive of these divisive, destructive and demeaning dominions, authorities and powers is death itself. For the loss and separation death forces upon us are oppressive; they diminish our capacities for life even as we live. “Every man’s death diminishes me,” wrote the poet, John Donne. Every time a loved one dies, we know, deep down, that we are worth more than this. And as the terrorist attacks in Belgium this week showed, death, and the fear of death, are the most powerful weapons in the arsenal of idols and injustice, to keep us in line, and under their feet. Death is the last enemy to be destroyed, because we can choose to fight and be rid of the dominion, authority and power of idolatry, immorality, injustice, ideologies and –isms, by the grace of God. Christ is always working to free his church of such things. We don’t have the same choice nor power over death and dying.
But Paul was addressing these words not to Caesar nor to his generals, but to the skeptics in the Corinthian churches who denied and disowned the very idea of a physical, visible, verifiable resurrection of Jesus. Not that these skeptics could not believe in a real, physical, resurrection, because they couldn’t reproduce it in a laboratory. It’s that they didn’t want such a resurrection. The preaching of the apostles, that Jesus arose physically from the tomb, so that one could see him, like Paul did, touch him and even eat fish and bread with him, fits with the very opening words of the Bible, that God saw all that he had created and said, “And it is very good.” It fits also with John 3: 16, that “God so loved the world….”
But such a physical, tangible, flesh and blood resurrection offended the sensibilities of some Greeks who believed that the whole point of being spiritual was not to better love God’s world, but to escape it. They believed that the material, physical world of soil, flesh, water and wind were nothing but the evil, inferior, mistaken, regrettable, accidental creation of demons. Therefore, the world of flesh and blood and bone and soil to them was not something created and cherished by God, destined for redemption and renewal, along with us. To them, the gospel of Jesus Christ was not the story of God’s love for all Creation, nor the call to love and tend Creation, including each other, as God’s faithful servants and tenants again. They saw the gospel of Jesus Christ as a private, personal escape hatch into some realm of pure, disembodied spirit for the few, worthy, knowledgeable elites to whom it was revealed.
The first problem Paul mentions with the kind of disembodied, rarified, super-spiritualized resurrection that the skeptics wanted, is that there were as many as five hundred witnesses of a very physically risen Jesus, most of whom are still alive, Paul says, including himself.
The second reason why Paul raises a stink against this heresy is that, if we disown and deny the physical, visible, tangible resurrection of Jesus, we miss the wonderful meaning of the resurrection for all of creation, beginning with ourselves. Jesus did not rise from the dead just to punch a hole through the material, physical Creation so that a worthy, evolved and enlightened few might escape it into some ethereal ream of disembodied bliss, as if God hates the world, and so should we.
Though the New Testament and the historic church have long declared such thinking heresy, and rightfully so, if we’re not careful, we too can make the gospel sound like it’s just a private, personal escape hatch from our messy, troubled earth to some disembodied super-spiritual bliss beyond the clouds.
That’s why I have some trouble singing the song, “This world is not my home, I’m just a’passin’ through.” It depends on what world do we mean? The one God made, or the one we make, which we increasingly call, “artificial reality?” Maybe we should add another verse that says,
“The world that’s not my home, is one of fantasy,
of social fame and shame, that’s mostly on TV.
But as for earth and sky, and people young and old,
God so loved his wide world that the whole can’t be told.” Amen, anybody?
God made us as body, soul and spirit, and loves us, all of us, as body, soul and spirit. We are to love him with the same capacities. But if all that Jesus had purchased for us on the cross, was the hope of some disembodied spiritual escape from God’s world, how would that have inspired Mother Teresa, of Calcutta, to tend to the very physical wounds, sores and sicknesses of the very real bodies of very poor and impoverished people? She demonstrated what it is to love the whole person, body, soul and spirit, the way God does. What we believe about the resurrection makes a real difference. It does matter.
As I read the Bible and look at the accounts of the Risen Jesus, it doesn’t look to me like God is only planning to liberate our spirits from the prison of the body, the way the skeptics in Corinth thought. Yes, in this fallen world it often feels like all the parts of us are at odds with each other. But each and every one of us is a unique and priceless masterpiece of God made of body, soul and spirit together, shaped in part by living in a certain time, in a certain place, with certain other people. God does not plan to just surrender and lose forever to death any part of that. God loves all that he has made. As I see it, then, the resurrection of Jesus is the first installment of the coming reunion of body, soul and spirit, and the recreation a sin-fallen Creation, after the victory that Christ achieved at the cross and the empty tomb has run its course to the end of this age.
Which brings us to the third problem with the way those first Century skeptics were thinking: in their quest for some future exit from God’s wonderful world, they missed the meaning and the blessings of Christ’s resurrection for the here and now, and not just for the future. For Paul does not say that Christ will only reign in some distant, death-free, post-resurrection future. Today’s passage says that Jesus reigns and must reign even now, as a result of his victory over the grave. Yes, he reigns even now in a world of terrorism, strife and environmental decay, when death continues to separate us from those we love, and the fear of death hampers the fullness of our joy.
But to see where and how Christ reigns, don’t look to Washington, nor to Moscow, or Beijing, not to Wall Street nor the London Stock Exchange, nor to some global corporate headquarters in Switzerland, Los Angeles or New York. Look to the church. Yes, the church, as crazy, broken, divided and imperfect as we are. Yet we are also, the firstfruits of a resurrection reunion and recreation already in progress for all of Creation, even if sometimes in spite of ourselves. To see how Christ reigns in the church, do not look to denominational headquarters in Elkhart, Indiana or Newton, Kansas. Do not look to steeples, sanctuaries, cathedrals or colleges either, as necessary as those things are, for the moment, at least. Look instead to the death-defying lives and loves of those whose hope in this life and the next are centered on Christ and his resurrection victory. Look at the people who, because of Christ’s resurrection victory, have a different relationship with death than what we might have without it.
For so often in the world, the common human relationship with death is a crazy-making mixture of terror and worship, denial and obsession, feverish, frenzied activity, in order to create something that outlasts us, like a building or a business, and sheer apathy and despair. It’s like some raw psychic wound that we alternately hide from view, and then pick at, feverishly. That’s my take on the current zombie mania in movies, books and TV. One can’t drive for a half hour in any direction without seeing skulls, death heads and skeletons on cars, coats or clothing. Among the Latin American drug gangs, prayers are said and shrines are maintained to La Santa Muerte, or “Saint Death,” a skeleton in a baptismal gown. They worship and fear her because, at some point in their violent careers, she will claim her own. Al Quaeda and Islamic State are the infection of one of the world’s great civilizations by a death cult. But remember, it was our own Western Civilization that introduced the world to the first weapons of planetary mass destruction in the form of thermonuclear weapons. Those are some of the ways in which death acts as a “dominion, authority and power” over us.
The resurrection of Jesus has not yet freed us from the clutches of death, nor the pain of death’s separation. Again, death remains the last enemy to be fully defeated. But Jesus’ resurrection has guaranteed death’s final defeat. Therefore, we can have a different relationship with death now. One more like that of Christian, the main character in John Bunyan’s classic book, Pilgrim’s Progress, to some lions he met on his journey. As Christian approached The Palace Beautiful, on his way to The Celestial City, seeking shelter, food and rest late one dark night, he saw the lights of candles and a fireplace inside. But he was stopped in his tracks by a dreadful sound and an even more terrifying sight: two lions stood on either side of the path toward the door. There was no way through the thick brush around them. Just as Christian stood there, trembling, wondering if he should go back, the host of the house, standing by the door, called out to him, “The lions are only guards to my house. Trust me; they are chained, though you cannot see their chains in the darkness. They cannot reach you if you stay to the middle of the path and stray neither to the right nor the left.” With his heart beating fast and furiously, Christian walked ahead while the lions roared loudly enough to deafen him, and he could smell and feel the warmth of their breath, and saw their sharp claws reaching toward him. But he came through the terrifying moment unscathed and arrived safely to friendship, rest and refuge.
For the Christian and the non-Christian, death is still as unavoidable as taxes, leaky waders, and scam robocalls from “Rachel, of Cardmember Services.” It’s still sad and scary, too. Woody Allen said, “I’m not afraid of death.” But he went on to add, “I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
But when we dare to trust that the roaring lion of death has been chained, and that the one who did so is our gracious host who awaits us in the light beyond the darkness, the warmth beyond the chill, that makes of death neither a thing to live in terror of, nor to worship, nor to deny. It makes it a passing thing to take in stride, to prepare for, but not to live for.
Here’s what a life free from the worship, the terror and the denial of death can look like: Sophie Scholl, a young woman in Hitler’s Germany, led a peaceful student resistance movement against the Nazis, because of her Christian faith. Accepting that she might die for her activity, she wrote in her journal: “Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.”
Even after her arrest, in the shadow of her approaching death, Sophie wrote, “Lately I’ve noticed something grand and mysterious peering through my sheer joy in all that is beautiful, a sense of its creator . . . Only man can be truly ugly, because he has the free will to estrange himself from this song of praise. It often seems that he’ll manage to drown out this hymn with his cannon thunder, curses and blasphemy. But during this past spring it has dawned upon me that he won’t be able to do this. And so I want to try and throw myself on the side of the victor.” The victor of whom she spoke is Jesus Christ, the Risen Lord. He chained the lions of death at the empty tomb. Therefore, Sophie could overcome her fear and walk past them, with courage, love and integrity.
And so can we. Because Christ is Risen.