First Importance

1 Cor. 15: 1-11; 12-20

This is now the 12^th and final sermon in a series of sermons I’ve been preaching on 1 Corinthians.  We started this series back on Jan. 8, took a break during Lent, and then started up again after Easter.  So as we wrap up this morning, I’d like to highlight the main themes of this letter – call it a refresher course in 1 Corinthians.

Corinth was quite a city.  Because of its strategic location and its shipping industry, many of the Corinthians became exceedingly wealthy.  Corinth doesn't seem like the place where Paul's preaching of the gospel would cause MANY of the people to become Christians, as we’re told in the book of Acts. 

Corinth IS the type of place to run ads for the latest fads, because it was full of people who didn't seem to concern themselves with things that last but instead concerned themselves with the fad of the moment.  That was the general tone and atmosphere of Corinth.  Yet many from that city did believe, because somehow, Jesus Christ made sense to them, he won them over, and he convinced them that he's durable and will last a lifetime, as opposed to fads that will fade over time.

What caused Paul to write his letter to the Corinthians was that they began to forget what they had first learned about Jesus Christ.  Paul reminds them that what he had handed on to them as of “first importance” was the love of Christ - "I decided to know nothing except Jesus Christ, and him crucified" (2:2).  The love of Christ is not a theory or concept, but a concrete action: the event of Jesus Christ dying on the cross on our behalf, being buried, and then being raised again on the third day.

So Paul begins his letter by reminding the Corinthians of how they first decided to become Christians.  Paul realizes that the Corinthians are beginning to drift away from Christ as their center and put their focus on other things, such as charismatic leaders and spiritual gifts.  They’re starting to lose confidence in what they had first discovered.  Paul’s concern is to center them again around Jesus Christ, who is the source of all faith, hope, and love.  Christ had originally made sense to them and won their respect, and they had learned from him a new kind of love, wisdom, and power over against the conventional wisdom of Corinth.  They had decided to center their lives on Christ, but now their focus had started to shift away from this center.

There were various ways in which the Corinthians showed this imbalance.  For example, the church at Corinth was the largest, wealthiest church Paul ever established, yet Paul constantly had to remind them that, since God had greatly blessed them, they were called to be a great blessing to others.  The Corinthians had trouble remembering that they were stewards of God’s mysteries and servants of Christ.  They needed to have a healthier view of stewardship, one which took into account an overview of the whole household of God. 

For all their wealth, we’re told that the Corinthians gave less to help the suffering church in Jerusalem than did the much tinier and poorer congregation in Philippi (2 Cor. 8).  They were too preoccupied with their own lives, too inwardly focused, and they often forgot about their brothers and sisters in Christ, both in their midst and in other locations. 

And so Paul creates his marvelous parable of the body of Christ, with all of us individually members of it, to show how bound together we are. He says in C. 12, “For just as the body is one and has many members, so it is with Christ.”  He envisions a community in which all the members share one another’s sorrows and joys.

Paul’s approach throughout this whole letter has been to put everything into a larger theological framework; to put separate parts of our life into the larger whole.  C. 13, his famous chapter on love, is a great example of this concept.  Love that derives from Jesus Christ as Lord is the larger context from which Paul centers everything in his life.  That’s a context that’s big enough to hold our lives together.  Only the love of God can cover and undergird all things and will never collapse.

And now at the end of his letter, Paul returns to this central theme once again.  He starts C. 15 by saying, “Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you – unless you have come to believe in vain.  For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures”  (15:1-4).

Incidentally, as an aside, this is an area where “The Da Vinci Code” really got it wrong.  That book claims that the Gnostics tried to make Jesus less divine but failed in their attempt.  In reality, early, Orthodox Christianity made the strong and persistent case that Jesus was both fully divine and fully human.  The Gnostics hated this human stuff about Christ “dying and being buried.”  They actually wanted to make him more divine and less human.

But back to today’s text - Paul’s overarching theological framework throughout the book of 1 Corinthians is the love of God shown in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Jesus was human enough to have truly suffered on the cross and died.  But the good news is that the story doesn’t end there – “Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died” (15:20).

What a remarkable letter Paul wrote to the Corinthians.  It’s as relevant today as it was 2000 years ago.  Jesus, in allowing himself to be crucified, and then being raised from the dead, never defeated his enemies.  No, he did something better: he defeated his enemies’ greatest weapon – death.  And we’re invited to join in this victory, so that, with Paul, we can say, “Where, O death, is your victory?  Where, O death, 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.”  Amen!