But at the same time, Jesus’ death is not just a literal death; it is also a literal resurrection. A real resurrection with a real body and a real person standing there that they could handle and touch and furthermore the kind of person who could eat broiled fish to demonstrate the reality. It was no ghost.
I wonder if you have noticed this too, that when Hollywood tries to portray these things in movies it inevitably spiritualizes the resurrection. I saw one of these on television recently. The death was real enough. When the Roman soldier took the hammer and drove the nail through the hand the sound was something you could hear in our living room. The death was real. But then the resurrection came and all you could hear was the music. You could not even see the Lord. People rushed about in the joy of the resurrection, but where was He? I looked for Him. The only view you had of Him was a great ethereal Christ floating up in the clouds, drifting off into nowhere. That was no resurrection. If that was the kind of resurrection there was, I can guarantee that Thomas would not have believed in it and I do not think Peter and John would have either.
But it was not that. It was a real flesh-and-blood resurrection, and these men knew that when they touched the Lord’s body. Therefore they were willing to go from that obscure corner of the Roman Empire throughout the world of their day proclaiming Christ’s death and resurrection and standing upon it to the point that they were willing to be crucified themselves rather than deny their Lord. That is how real it was.
There is a poem by John Updike that says this in contemporary language in such a good way I want to quote it to you. Updike really has some insight in this poem. It is called “Seven Stanzas at Easter.”
Make no mistake: if he rose at all it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers, each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart that—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not paper-mȃché, not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb, make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
That’s a great poem. And furthermore, it’s one that sees what Paul is talking about as he writes this great chapter. You see, a mythical resurrection does not give birth to this kind of conviction. But a real resurrection does. “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”
Now Paul himself gives the conclusion. You find it in verse 58. He tells us to be steadfast, unmovable, and to abound in the Lord’s work. He does not say that we are going to be successful in the Lord’s work—though we hope we may. He does not say that we are going to be accepted in the Lord’s work—though we hope there will be a degree of acceptance also. But he does say that we are to abound in it and to be steadfast in it, and that we can do that and that we will do that if we believe in the resurrection.
Will we believe it? Will we do it? Will this be true of us? There is work to be done. And if we go out from an Easter service with sort of a mystical gleam in our eye and say, “Oh, isn’t it wonderful that Jesus rose from the dead!” and that is the end of it, that is not much better than the liberal theologians. But if we say, “Jesus rose in a real world with a real body, and in a real way with a real voice commissioned His disciples to do real work until they in His own time die and are raised again also in real bodies to be with Him,” then we have understood the point and can live differently.
And if you say in the midst of a world such as this, threatened by suffering, death, hostility, sin—all these things—“How can I be steadfast?” the answer is, you can be steadfast if you stand upon the Lord.
We sing it in one of our hymns:
His oath, his covenant, his blood support me in the whelming flood;
When all around my soul gives way, he then is all my hope and stay.
On Christ, the solid rock, I stand; all other ground is sinking sand.
And indeed all other ground is sinking sand. But He is the Rock, the Rock of ages.
