Waiting in Hope
1 Corinthians 15:1–4, 54–58
So here we are, come to the 8th day. The 8th day was a day of new beginnings. It was the day for circumcision, and the day for the consecration of the priests after their seven days of purification. But of course we’re here in celebration of the great 8th day, that morning when the priests, with the Sabbath behind them, would have woken in Jerusalem to begin their service anew, while down below, women entered a garden to perform a priestly duty of their own, there to anoint a body. But when they arrived, they discovered that there wasn’t any work to be done: the stone had been rolled away and his body was gone. They didn’t know what to make of it; Mark’s gospel just says that they went away afraid. But it’s why we rise this morning, why we rise every Sunday morning, celebrating the resurrection of our Lord!
Of course, the celebration feels different this year; the celebration is different this year. We’re not supposed to be doing this through a screen; gathering for worship isn’t supposed to contribute to our collective Zoom fatigue! But that only means that this year, more than ever, we need to hear of the hope of the resurrection.
Two weeks ago, NT Wright wrote of the irony that the pandemic has hit during the season of Lent. Social distancing, he wrote, “makes a mockery of our little Lenten disciplines. Doing without whiskey, or chocolate, is child’s play compared with not seeing friends or grandchildren, or going to the pub, the library or church.”[1] And what’s more, as he went on to explain, it’s not like this season has a fixed endpoint – it’s not like a normal Lent, where you can mark Easter on your calendar and tick off the days. Instead, here we are, with the sun rising on Easter morning, and we are still waiting.
Waiting puts us in good company. The people of God have always been a waiting people. Israel waited for deliverance from slavery, then from exile, then for the Messiah. The book of Hebrews commends those who knew that “they were strangers and exiles on the earth,” and lived their lives waiting for “a better country, that is, a heavenly one.”[2]
We had no Maundy Thursday service this year, but I did spend some time reading in the gospels of Jesus’ last supper with his disciples, and I was struck with a new force by what he said in all three of the synoptics: “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.”[3]
Jesus is talking about the great meal to come, the wedding feast of the Lamb, the one we’re all waiting for – and that even Jesus is still waiting for. Think about that: as we wait, we wait with the crucified, risen, ascended, exalted, glorified Son of God, seated in power at the right hand of the Father. Waiting puts us in good company.
We have lived all our lives in a world that’s not the way it’s supposed to be, but under normal circumstances we find ways to get used to it, to tell ourselves that maybe this fallen world isn’t so bad. But we don’t know what we’re missing – we’ve forgotten the garden, and haven’t yet tasted the new heavens and the new earth. But now, this year, we know exactly what we’re missing. Could it be that this time is a time in which God is training us to wait, to yearn, to pray for his kingdom to come more fervently than we have?
We wait, but we wait with hope. Paul tells us explicitly that the reason that we not only wait, but even grieve, with hope is “because we believe that Jesus died and rose again.”[4] And so this morning, even as we wait, even as we grieve, it is, more than ever, time to remind ourselves of the hope of the resurrection. It is now, as always, “of first importance.”
Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures…
When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
“Death is swallowed up in victory.”
“O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain. – 1 Corinthians 15:1-4, 54-58
Resurrection hope gives us the resources to wait, not knowing how or when this will end, and not having the resources to end it ourselves. Elsewhere Paul reminds us that this is what hope is: “…hope that is seen is not hope. …But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”[5]
Oliver O’Donovan says that there are three ways to contemplate the future: anticipation, deliberation, and hope.[6] Anticipation is our natural expectation that we can count on things going on as they always have in the past: “In the morning, the sun will rise.” Deliberation is when we begin to plan and strategize, throwing our own intentions for action into the mix: “When the sun rises, we take the bridge!” But hope is what you need when anticipation and deliberation run out – when you have no reasonable expectation that things will just work out or that you can trust in your own capacities. The sun rises, and there’s the bridge – but it’s held by the enemy, and you’re outnumbered, and surrounded, and all you can do is hope for salvation from the outside. Sometimes you don’t even know what to hope for.
This is exactly the kind of hope the resurrection provides: hope for the impossible, the unnameable, hope for the unlooked-for, unasked-for salvation from outside. The women left the garden in fear; when they told the disciples, no one knew what to make of it. No one had a category for the news that Jesus was risen, even after he had told them it would happen. We’ve gotten used to it, and so we’ve lost a sense for just how astounding the resurrection was: no one was even hoping for it! Sometimes Christians will argue for the truth of the resurrection by saying that no one would have died for that lie, but the reality is even stronger: that lie could not have come from those minds. NT Wright (again) has laid this out[7]: the world at that time was divided into Greco-Romans who neither wanted nor expected to get their bodies back after death, and Jews, who believed in a physical resurrection – but of everyone, at the end of history. The resurrection of one man in the middle of history made no sense at all. Keller writes, “If someone had said to any first-century Jew, ‘So-and-so has been resurrected from the dead!’ the response would be, ‘Are you crazy? How could that be? Has disease and death ended? Is true justice established in the world? Has the wolf lain down with the lamb?’”[8] It would take some time for Christians to figure this out; even the gospels, Wright says, “have the puzzled air of someone saying, ‘I didn’t understand it at the time, and I’m not sure I do now, but this is more or less how it was.’”[9]
Paul explains what was going on: the resurrection of Jesus was the “firstfruits”[10] of the promise Israel was waiting for, and it meant something that no one had dared to hope for: that even here and now, where “in the midst of life we are in death,”[11] death itself has been defeated, and in Christ, we are set free from the law of sin and death.[12] Death doesn’t belong in the world; it only came into the world because of man’s rebellion against God.[13] But Jesus offered himself on our behalf: he atoned for our guilt, canceled our debt, defeated God’s enemies[14] – and so death has lost its sting, and sin has lost its power. This is the unbelievable good news of the Resurrection: because Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf was accepted by his father – because our sin was nailed to the cross with him and his record has been credited to our account – we no longer labor under the law of sin that pays out death as its wage. We are recipients of God’s free gift of eternal life,[15] and we begin that life now, at peace with Him![16]
The law of death says that time is short, and the losses brought on by this crisis are permanent and irrevocable – loss of time, loss of work, loss of identity, loss of life. The Psalmist saw the problem: “The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away,”[17] and cried out for help that the Lord would “establish the work of our hands,”[18] after we are gone. The pandemic has only made more stark what was always the case. If we are left in our sin, we are ultimately cut off from our creator; if death is the law of the universe, then life ultimately has no meaning, because it will all come to an end, with no one to remember.
“But thanks be to God,” Paul writes, “who gives us the victory in our Lord Jesus Christ” because we are united to his atoning death and to his unquenchable resurrection life. The resurrection gives us hope for this dark time, but it gives us hope for all dark times, even for the fallen world that we remember, and thought we could bear.
In Christ, the law of sin and death is no more. “For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical,” wrote Flannery O’Connor. “Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws.” They don’t belong. They are impostors in God’s good creation. They don’t have the last word. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 15 that, as George Herbert said, "Death used to be an executioner, but the resurrection has made him just a gardener." That is what gives us the ability to hope – to hope beyond hope for a salvation that we know is beyond us. We rest in a God who is at work while we sleep, who invites us to come to him and learn from him how to truly rest. From the cross, our Savior said his work was finished. He rested on the seventh day, and rose on the eighth, at the dawning of a new creation.
He is risen! “'The Lord has risen' contains… the resolution of the dramatic tension built up over centuries,” writes Kevin Vanhoozer. “How would God make good on his promises? How could God keep covenant with covenant breakers? How would God bless all the nations through the seed of Abraham? 'The Lord has risen.'”[19]
He is risen! All the good news the church has to proclaim is found here; it all comes down to this. He was dead, and behold, he lives forever, and we live in him. And so we wait with hope: “Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”[20] Amen.
Nathan Barczi is Associate Pastor at Christ the King Presbyterian Church in Cambridge, MA. Nathan holds a PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as a PhD in Theology from the University of Nottingham. Nathan is a member of the St. Augustine Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians
Notes:
[1] NT Wright, “Christianity Offers No Answers About the Coronavirus. It's Not Supposed To.” Time, March 29, 2020, available at https://time.com/5808495/coronavirus-christianity/, accessed April 9, 2020.
[2] Hebrews 11:13, 16.
[3] Luke 22:15-16. Only Luke includes the first sentence, but all three synoptics include Jesus saying that he will not eat, or drink the fruit of the vine, again before the kingdom comes.
[4] 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14.
[5] Romans 8:24-25.
[6] Oliver O’Donovan, Finding and Seeking (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014), 145-166.
[7] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2003), pp. 60, 82.
[8] Tim Keller, The Reason for God (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 205.
[9] N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, p. 611.
[10] 1 Corinthians 15:20.
[11] Medieval Christian hymn, attributed to Notker I of Saint Gall.
[12] Romans 8:2.
[13] Romans 5:12.
[14] Colossians 2:13-15.
[15] Romans 6:23.
[16] Romans 5:1.
[17] Psalm 90:10.
[18] Psalm 90:17.
[19] Kevin Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: a Canonical-linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 41.
[20] Romans 5:3-5.
