O.K., so I'm going to change the lectionary epistle lesson for Easter this year. I'm on a plan to preach the epistle lessons all year, but in the Easter cycle I'm much more excited about the text from I Corinthians 15 that's assigned for next year (cycle C rather than this year's B). Some of this wonderful chapter is also assigned for late Sundays in Epiphany, which means it seldom actually appears because an early Easter often cuts the Epiphany season short.

So the upshot is that my text is I Corinthians 15:12-26. I'd love to do the whole chapter. I read much of it at my grandmother's funeral many years ago and I find it one of the richest and most hopeful passages in the Bible.

In the verses I've selected, Paul engages in what logicians call a reductio ad absurdum in support of hope for the general resurrection. Reductio arguments begin by hypothesizing the opposite of that which you wish to demonstrate. Thus beginning in verse 13, Paul engages in a series of "if-then" conditionals, designed to show that if one assumes that there is no resurrection of the dead, the resulting conclusion is that the whole Christian faith is absurd.

The argument unwinds like this:

v. 13 If there is no resurrection of the dead,
        then Christ has not been raised.
v. 14 If Christ has not been raised,
        our preaching is useless and so is your faith.
v.15 If Christ has not been raised,
        we are liars about God (for we testified that Christ was raised).
v. 16 If the dead are not raised,
        Christ has not been raised either.
v. 17 If Christ has not been raised,
        your faith is futile,
        and you are still in your sins.
v. 18 Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost.
v. 19 If only for this life we have hope in Christ (i.e., no hope of resurrection),
        we are to pitied more than all others.

There's a number of fascinating things about this logic. It's not the tight sequence of an analytic philosophical argument, but we can discern one main stream of inference:

If the dead will not be raised,
then Christ has not been raised.
If Christ has not been raised,
then our faith is [a lie, futile, a failure (to forgive or save), pitiful, i.e., absurd].

The basic argument is that denying resurrection of our bodies leads to denying the resurrection of Christ, which leads to the conclusion that Christian faith is pointless, which no believer wants to suggest. So no true believer can, with rational consistency, deny the resurrection of the dead.

There's no proof or evidence for Christ's resurrection in this argument. Paul did that business, and very well, in the verses I skipped, 1-11. Here he's more intent on showing how central the doctrine of bodily resurrection is to the Christian faith. Without it, the whole structure of Christian belief collapses into absurdity, like a house of cards.

Another interesting dimension is that v. 17 suggests that a doctrinal focus on the Cross as the instrument of forgiveness may be a bit unbalanced. Without Christ's resurrection, we are still "in our sins." His death alone does not atone. The work of atonement is only completed in His rising. And presumably, then, we are not really "saved" until our bodies are raised.

Which all brings us to what good Christian doctrine has always affirmed--and what N. T. Wright has correctly seen as necessary to strongly reaffirm (see Surprised by Hope)--that our hope in Christ is for the raising of our bodies like Christ was raised. Any other hope, going to heaven, for instance, is merely temporary, and not the ultimate Christian hope. As Wright forcefully suggests, this forces the Christian mission to include directions that may have been neglected, i.e., care for people's physical well-being and care for the physical world.

If, as verse 20 says, "Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep," then our mission and hope is not to save people's souls out of this world. As Wright argues, and Paul makes clear here, hope for just "going to heaven" makes hash of the Christian faith. Though we go to heaven for awhile, it's not our final hope. It's a literally immaterial hope that in the end has no substance at all if it's turned into our final hope. "If the dead are not raised, Christ has not been raised, and if Christ is not raised, our faith is futile."

Our hope and purpose is to participate in Christ's resurrection, first in working toward His redemption of the whole physical order, and then in the raising of our own bodies. Our goal is to make both us and our world ready to live as a new creation, a new physical creation that remains in continuity with the old one. Our hope is that the dead will be raised right along with Jesus. Nothing else is worth preaching this Sunday.

Read The Last Battle or The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis. It's all there. Of course, it was already all there in Scripture, if we would just pay attention.