Death, Where Is Your Sting?

A trumpet blast, ringing out across the whole world. In a moment, in the blink of an eye, everything changes. And a question echoes, almost like a taunt: death, where is your sting?

The believers in Corinth lived in a Greek city, and many Greeks found the idea of a body rising from the dead strange, even silly. The soul might live on, they thought, but bodies were best left behind. So some people in the church had started saying there is no resurrection of the dead. Paul is writing from Ephesus, and he has saved this for near the end of his letter. Because if this goes wrong, he says, everything goes wrong. So he starts with the most important thing of all.

I passed on to you what I first received, Paul says. “That Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.” And then he lists the witnesses, like a lawyer calling people to the stand. He was seen by Peter. Then by the twelve. Then by more than five hundred believers at one time, and most of them are still alive, Paul says, so you can go and ask them. Then he was seen by James. Then by all the apostles. “And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.” Paul calls himself the least of the apostles, because he once persecuted the church. But by God's grace, he says, I am what I am.

So how can some of you say there is no resurrection? Paul asks. If there is no resurrection, then Christ has not been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is empty, and your faith is empty too. You are still in your sins. And those who have died believing in Christ are lost. If our hope in Christ is only for this life, we are more to be pitied than anyone. Then Paul's voice rings out. “But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept.” The first sheaf of a great harvest still to come. As in Adam all die, he says, so in Christ all will be made alive, each in turn. Christ first, then those who belong to him when he comes. He must reign until every enemy is under his feet. “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.”

Then Paul shares a mystery. “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.” What wears out will put on what never wears out. What dies will put on what can never die. And then the old words of the prophets will come true: “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” Paul can almost shout it. “But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” So, he tells them, stand firm. Don't let anything move you. Keep giving yourselves fully to the Lord's work, because you know your work in the Lord is never wasted.

Paul was right that the Greeks doubted bodily resurrection. In the play The Eumenides by the Athenian writer Aeschylus, the god Apollo says that once the dust has drunk up a man's blood, when he has died, there is no resurrection. When Paul preached in Athens about Jesus rising from the dead, Acts tells us some of his listeners mocked him. To many people in Corinth, the claim that Jesus had risen bodily was astonishing news.

Death, where is your sting? You'll find it in First Corinthians chapter fifteen, verses one to twenty-eight and fifty to fifty-eight. A list of witnesses, a promise of a trumpet, and a victory over the last enemy of all. So here is a question to carry with you. How does the hope of Jesus' resurrection change the way you face sad or frightening things?