This great passage, properly understood, is one of the most encouraging texts in all the Bible. Enjoy the video (and share it, if you can think of someone who would benefit from watching it) or read the text of the sermon (always a little different from what I actually say) below.

(1 Corinthians 15:19-28) If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in his own turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, 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. For he “has put everything under his feet.” Now when it says that “everything” has been put under him, it is clear that this does not include God himself, who put everything under Christ. When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all.  (NIV)

I think it was Dr. Johnson who said, “Men live in hope, die in despair.”

I was in college when I first heard that quote—not in an English lit class but in the Student Union, while I was playing ping-pong. (I changed my major from billiard science to ping-pong my junior year.) The professor of ping-pong was my roommate and great friend George Ashok Kumar Taupu Das – I called him “the doctor.” Looking back, I’m amazed at his patience. In our first games, he beat me 21-3 or 21-4 and, even then, I only scored points when he was goofing around or not paying attention.

But after months of playing almost daily, I had become competitive. He was still beating me every game, but it was 21-10, then 21-14, then 21-18—and he had started paying attention.

It was during one of these contests – sometimes tied, sometimes the lead changing by a point or two – that the finish line came in sight for me. Just a couple of more points, and I would finally win. But the doctor got serious, shut me down, and handed me yet another defeat.

I must have said something about how I would get him next time. And that’s when our resident genius John Erdel, who was sitting there, idly watching the game, gave me a deadpan look and said: “Men live in hope, die in despair.”

What a dismal view of life! What a demoralizing view of death! “Men live in hope, die in despair.” Anyone who actually believed that would die in despair but could certainly not live in hope. But the resurrection of Jesus means that we can live and die in hope. The death and resurrection of Jesus has transformed the landscape. It is the biggest thing that has ever happened in the world, and whether you know it or not, it is the biggest thing that has ever happened to you.

Last week, we talked about what the resurrection means. This week and next, we will look at why it matters. (And if you missed last week’s sermon, you should go to www.californiaroad.org and watch it online. It provides the foundation for what I’m going to say today.)

The resurrection of Jesus Christ makes a difference in my life—in the way I think, and act, and in the way I will die. We need to drill down into this passage to see why that is true.

In verse 22, Paul writes: “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.” In verse 53, he announces the defeat of death: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” Then, in verse 54, he borrows the words of the prophet Hosea to taunt death: “Death, what happened to your victory? Where is your sting now, Death?” Paul wants us to know that the resurrection of Jesus has brought death’s reign of terror to an end. Death has tyrannized humanity since the time of Adam. The fear of death lies behind, and feeds, all other fears. We cannot even imagine life without the fear of death.

Susan Sontag, the brilliant atheist writer and filmmaker, was 71 when she died from cancer. The doctors and nurses tried to talk to her about death and help her prepare, but Sontag refused to listen. Death was too awful even to think about.  It terrified her.

For Sontag, this world had become a foul tomb, filled with the stench of decay—but she didn’t dare leave it. “She thought herself unhappy,” her son said, yet she “wanted to live, unhappy, for as long as she possibly could.” Even though life was a nightmare, she was afraid of waking up. How different her life would have been if she’d had the hope of the resurrection.

We who have that hope expect to wake up to joy unspeakable that is full of glory. Because the death-defeating life of Jesus is, by the Holy Spirit, already in us, we can face death with courage and even joy. The author of Hebrews writes: “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Hebrews 2:14-15).

Our friend Amy Snapp was the Kids’ Min Director at our previous church. She was diagnosed with cancer in her forties. Like Sontag, she improved with treatment, and the cancer went into remission for a while. Then it came back.

Unlike Sontag, Amy wasn’t hiding from the future. Toward the end, when I stopped to see her, she told me: “I’m good. Ready to go. I’m not afraid.” She said she expected dying to be an adventure, like Lucy going into – and through – the wardrobe in the Chronicles of Narnia.

When Amy mentioned Narnia, it brought to mind a favorite passage, which comes at the very end of book 7. The Lion Aslan, the Christ figure of Narnia, says to the children: “You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be.”

(I am quoting.) “Lucy said, ‘We’re so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often.’

‘No fear of that,’ said Aslan. ‘Have you not guessed?’

Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them.

‘There was a real railway accident,’ said Aslan softly. ‘Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream has ended; this is morning.’

And as he spoke he no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

Jesus, and the resurrection of Jesus, gives his people hope in the face of death. In 1973, during the reign of Idi Amin, the Butcher of Uganda, the people of Kabale were ordered to come to the stadium to witness the execution of three men. Bishop Kivengere asked for, and was granted, permission to speak to the men before they died. He approached them from behind and was surprised by what he saw when they turned around. Their faces were radiant. They smiled. One of them said, “Bishop, thank you for coming … I wanted to tell you: Heaven is now open, and there is nothing between me and my God. Please tell my wife and children that I am going to be with Jesus.”

The bishop thought the firing squad needed to hear that, so he translated their remarks into the soldiers’ own language. It left the firing squad so flummoxed that they forgot to pull the masks down over the Christians’ faces before executing them. The condemned men were looking toward the people in the stands and waving, handcuffs and all, and the people waved back. Then shots were fired, and the three were with Jesus.

The next Sunday, the bishop preached in the hometown of one of the three men. As he spoke, the huge crowd that had gathered erupted into a song of praise to Jesus![1] The hope of the resurrection can free us from the fear of death, but it does so in exact proportion to our nearness to Christ. Even Christians remain fearful when they are far from him.

By his resurrection, Jesus Christ cut death down to size. The English poet George Herbert said, “Death used to be an executioner, but the gospel” – he’s referring to the death and resurrection of Jesus – “has made him just a gardener.” But what a gardener! When he plants those who belong to Jesus, they rise with a splendor that is indescribable, unspeakable, and full of glory.

But our hope is greater than the hope that we will somehow survive death. The resurrection gives us reason to believe that we will be – that nothing can stop us from being – fulfilled, completed, perfected. Paul puts it this way: “The body that is sown” – gardener imagery again! – “is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power…” (vv. 42-43). And verses 52-53: “we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.”

Susan Sontag got it wrong. Earth is not a grave but a garden. This – weakness, sickness, inability, depression, aging, loss – is no more the whole story than the kernel is a whole stalk of corn or the acorn is a towering oak. God’s plan for humanity is not pain and suffering but joy and glory. It is not weakness but power. It is not sadness but joy. It is not the shame we know but a glory that eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor human mind imagined. (1 Cor. 2:9).

You, if you have received resurrection life from Jesus through faith, will be happier than you can now conceive, stronger than you can now imagine, and overflowing with the vitality of love. The promise would seem too good to believe if we hadn’t already tasted this life, experienced its power, felt its love.

Listen: Jesus’s resurrection is evidence that the long, tortuous project known familiarly as Shayne Looper – substitute your own name if you have Jesus and he has you – will one day be finished and it will be good. Very good. Even Shayne Looper will be crowned with glory and full of joy, bringing glory and joy to God himself and to all the rest of us. This – nothing less, and certainly far more – is what awaits the people of God.

But the hope of the resurrection is more than the hope – as great as it is – that we as individuals will be fulfilled. It is the hope that all things in heaven and on earth will be made right, good, and glorious. The resurrection means that God’s plan is unstoppable, and that heaven will make right every earthly wrong. What has happened to Christ will happen to us, and something like it will happen to the world.

There are times when that has been hard to believe. I have stood in the ER with a family as the doctor performed CPR on their son and brother, whose body lay before them, torn by a hideous gunshot wound. The doctor eventually gave up. Too many times, I’ve sat with families – sometimes a young dad and mom, the mom holding her three-year-old or her baby in her arms – while the nurse removed life support.

I’ve cried with too many people whose image of themselves was shattered like glass by the terrible abuse they suffered as children. You’ve known them too. We’ve not only known them; we are them: the sufferers, the abused, the wronged, the fearful, the damaged. So, what if the future holds inconceivable glory? The past holds unutterable pain. Even if we someday attain joy, will we not always be haunted by the suffering?

No, we will not. C. S. Lewis was right: We “say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.”[2]

Listen to these words of hope from the throne of God. “‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’ He who was seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I make all things new!’”  

The singer-songwriter Andrew Peterson put it into words this way.

“After the last tear falls, after the last secret’s told
After the last bullet tears through flesh and bone
After the last child starves and the last girl walks the boulevard
After the last year that’s just too hard

There is love…

Cause after the last plan fails, after the last siren wails
After the last young husband sails off to join the war
After the last, ‘This marriage is over’
After the last young girl’s innocence is stolen
After the last years of silence that won’t let a heart open

There is love
Love, love, love. There is love.

And in the end, the end is oceans and oceans of love and love again
We’ll see how the tears that have fallen
Were caught in the palms of the Giver of love and the Lover of all
And we’ll look back on these tears as old tales

‘Cause after the last tear, falls there is love.

There is love because, after the last tear falls into nail-scarred hands, there is God.

Our hopes are audacious and unparalleled. The Marxist hoped for a better world. The Christian hopes for a perfect one: a new heaven and new earth, where righteousness dwells (2 Peter 3:13). Karl Marx’s most enthusiastic hopes fade from sight in the shining hope of the resurrection, the way the light of a candle fades before the noonday sun.

Our hope is not just that our sins – worse than we remember and more than we can count – will not be held against us, though because of Jesus, they will not! Our hope is not just that our pains will be forgotten, swallowed up in bliss. Our hope is not just that our shame will be buried with us when we die and left in the grave when we rise. Our hope is not just that evil and injustice will be destroyed, never to return. Our hope is that God will be all in all (1 Cor. 15:28).

This hope is not like the Buddhist hope of Nirvana, in which the delusion of selfhood is at last extinguished and there is only the Unity. No, when God is all in all, we will be more than we have ever been. We will have become us, more ourselves than ever before, made to be with God and to be filled by God.

What lies at the foundation of all existence is not some subatomic particle or the so-called four fundamental forces. What lies at the foundation of all existence is a relationship: the overflowing, joyous relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And what rests at the pinnacle of all existence is relationship: the overflowing, joyous relationship of Father, Son, Holy Spirit and, by the triumph of grace, us.

This long story of bullets and wars, of marriages ended and innocence stolen, is different than we thought and better than we’ve dreamed. It is the story of the perfectly joyful, perfectly beautiful Trinity making perfectly joyful, perfectly beautiful beings of us and inviting us to join their party. Emptiness is not our future, but fullness, “for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:9).

Because of the joyful love of the Triune God, this is what awaits us. And it has been made possible, made real, by the loving sacrifice and glorious resurrection of our man in heaven, who is also “our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.”

This is why the resurrection matters. This is why we hope. Amen.

---

[1] Colin Chapman, The Case for Christianity

[2] C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce ©1946. HarperCollins Edition 2001. p. 69.