“Which Hill?” – 1st Corinthians 15:1-11

“What is the hill that you are willing to die on?” This is a question leaders might ask themselves when facing a contentious issue or resistance to a new idea. It’s a question of perspective – is the issue at hand significant enough to stake everything on? Is the principle behind it all worth sacrificing my career, my reputation, my future? Or spin it another way: are there things upon which there can be no compromise? Politicians ask this when considering whether to tackle a hot-button issue. Managers and CEOs ask this when attempting to implement a new program. And pastors ask this when wanting to try something new: is this hill worth dying on? Think about: What hill, cause, or ideal would you die for? What, for you, is there simply no room for compromise?

Paul’s hill is the Gospel of Jesus, particularly the news of the cross and resurrection. Paul is writing to brand-new believers in a Greek city. The predominant Greek notion about human bodies and death was this: that the soul was a truest essence of a person and the body was merely a physical incarceration of the soul, inferior and corrupt. Everything physical was merely a crude veil to the true spirit of things. At death, the soul would be liberated from its prison, blissfully never to return. This was the prevailing notion of most Greeks of the day.
So when Paul comes to town and starts talking about a Messiah that comes back to life, in the flesh, it turns more than a couple of heads. When Paul preaches the resurrection from the dead in nearby Athens, Acts 17 reports: When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, “We want to hear you again on this subject.” The sneering hasn’t stopped, even today, for those who find talk about resurrected bodies superstitious and highly unscientific.

Some have called 1st Corinthians 15 the most important passage in the entire Bible, for it encapsulates so succinctly the bedrock of Christian faith. While no bit of scripture is more holy than the other (don’t be fooled by the red ink!), there is something to this claim. Because Paul climbs the one hill upon which we, Christians, can have no compromise: the Gospel of Christ’s saving death on the cross that redeems us from sin and his defeat of death in the resurrection. All other opinions about the nature of the Christian life and faith orbits this central gravitational truth. Without this center, we cannot call ourselves “Christian”.

Why is this the hill we must die to defend? Because without the cross and resurrection, there’s nothing left but a really great guy and some morality tales. But Paul says without faith in Christ’s central deed, “you have believed in vain.” The Greek word for “vain” (eike) literally means “with no result” or “without reason”. That is, belief without the death and resurrection of Jesus has nothing to show for it. There is no ultimate good or happy conclusion to show from it. There is no reason to do it other than to amuse ourselves.

Instead, Paul reminds the young Corinthian believers, “What I received I passed on to you as of first importance” (vs. 3). Have you ever tried to share your hobby or passion of a particular subject with a child? Take something you love to do and imagine yourself teaching them about the basics. In the movie, “A River Runs Through It”, the father-figure is a Presbyterian pastor who teaches his kids how to fly fish. He starts them off by practicing the basics in the front yard, before he even gets them to the river. When learning an instrument, you have to get some basic rudiments of the instrument down (how to hold your hands properly, how to shape your lips just right, how to strum correctly). They are the “first things”. Until you do so, your fingers, lips and arms won’t be able to do the more complex things. You cannot knit a sweater until you’ve learned the basics of how to hold the needles or to do simple knots. These are the things of “first importance”.

So it is with the life of faith: unless one’s house isn’t built on the rock, it will only become so big. Paul tells us the thing of “first importance” is this core affirmation: “that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared…” Let’s break this down :

The first word is loaded: “Christ”. We say it so often, throw it at the end of prayers, we can just assume it was Jesus’ last name! It is actually a title. It is the Greek word for a more important Hebrew word, “messiah”, which means “Anointed One.” To anoint something is to set it aside for a special purpose. We anoint our elders with oil, recognizing that they are called by the Spirit to particular duties within the church. With Christ, he comes to enact a very particular task that no one else could do.

The task? “die for our sins.” We need to be careful here as this is a phrase that we’ve heard so much, that we might gloss over what is at stake. So often, we think of sins as bad behavior; lying or using foul language, cheating or stealing, murder or adultery. If sins were simply an issue of behavior, we wouldn’t really need someone else. It would be simply be a matter of self-discipline, conditioning our wills until we mastered good behavior. But sin is more like cancer, something that we cannot fix on our own. Our souls have a disease that keep us centered on ourselves. It doesn’t get better by itself. Jesus’s “anointed” task is to come and cure the disease.

But to kill off sin, it has to die. This is what makes Jesus’ dying so crucial. Without his death, sin cannot die. However, as someone who was not diseased with sin (unlike the rest of us), he was free to do something about it. Paul emphasizes this point by saying that not only did Jesus die, he was buried. Jesus was really dead. Not a coma or a deep sleep. It wasn’t some kind of heavenly hoax that looked, sounded and smelled like death. No, Jesus died. Really died. Like, what we face at the funeral home, died. We see that Jesus would go to ultimate lengths to free the world from the sin disease and restore it to full health, the way God wanted it to be from the beginning!

But that’s not all. Paul continues, “…that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.” This is the other side of the same coin. The work of the cross is incomplete without the resurrection. So often we lift up the grizzly suffering and crucifixion of Jesus as central and the resurrection as the happy epilogue. But if Jesus had simply stayed in the grave, death would win. There would be no future. Jesus’ sacrifice would have also been in vain. The resurrection is not merely the defeat of sin but the defeat of death itself, the restoration of life and relationship with God and each other. It is one event in two-parts: crucifixion and resurrection. You cannot have one without the other. With resurrection, we have a future. We have a reason to believe.

Paul says not simply to take his word for it either. There are two things that corroborate this central claim to faith. One, that the Gospel (the saving hope of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection) did not happen in a vacuum. The good news didn’t pop out of no-where. These things happened “according to Scripture.” Paul here is referring to the Old Testament (the New not having been compiled yet). For generations, people had been looking forward to this one that God would lift up to rescue his people. God has had a plan all along. As one author has said, “Jesus is God’s way of refusing to give up on his dream for the world.” Jesus is the culmination of God’s master-plan for human history.

But Paul not only points to Jesus’ place in the history of salvation, but also encourages them to take note of all the other accounts of his resurrection. Peter and the disciples, a gathering of 500 believers, James and all the apostles, even including Paul himself, who saw the Risen Jesus on the road to Damascus. It’s as if Paul says “If you don’t believe me, ask any of these other folks.” It is critical for Paul to hit this home because Jesus’ resurrection is historic fact. It wasn’t metaphorical or a well-orchestrated scam on the part of the disciples. Somewhere in the sequence of our space and time, Jesus entered reality, actually died and actually rose from the dead.

Paul talks about the Gospel as the place (the hill) that we take our stand. Many of the apostles (like many that Paul has listed here) were martyred for what they believed. Now, a group of people don’t get together, fabricate an extraordinary story around a wise teacher and his generally unpopular teaching and then be willing to hand-over their lives to preserve the lie. There was no fame or money in it. Some disciples (like Matthew the tax collector) left behind lucrative careers. The most reasonable explanation is that these people experienced something unlike anything else they’d ever heard or seen; something so fantastic that it changed their lives forever, giving them something that they would be willing to pay the ultimate price to defend. For Paul, there was no question: the foundation of the Gospel, the death and resurrection of Christ, was historic fact and in no way would he yield.
Sometimes, the idea of “taking a stand” can come off as arrogant or an “I’m better than you” attitude. We have good reason to be cautious for many well-meaning people (plenty of Christians!) having given the Gospel a bad name for “taking a stand” in the wrong spirit. But we must be equally cautious about the pendulum going too far the other way.

In our culture today, we are made to feel guilty about sharing our beliefs. Faith is a private matter. “What if I offend someone?” The problem here is that we are asked to become something less than ourselves as followers of Jesus in order to allow someone else to be who they are. Faith in Jesus isn’t about helping to prop up a religion. We believe in Jesus because in Him, we see the reality of the world around us and the activity of a loving God. We experienced the greatest hope and love of the world but we keep it to ourselves. Being a follower of Jesus isn’t about having something to do on Sunday morning but it is the way we see and interact with the people and the world around us. Our faith in Jesus speaks to the core of who we are. And to somehow diminish who we are in the name of “comfort” is not a holy endeavor.
It is the excuse we come up with to keep ourselves safe.

But let’s take Paul’s lead on this. Here is the most prolific author of the New Testament; a dedicated missionary who gave up his very successful, upwardly mobile career in the Temple in order to spread something the Good News of Jesus. Notice his attitude in the midst of it all: “But I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle for I persecuted the church of God.” Paul actively sought to crush the Christian movement, even sanctioning the wrongful execution of the earliest apostles. But now something is different. He says, “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them – yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.”
For Paul, he doesn’t stand up arrogantly and talk about how great he is or how he’s got his life together. He gives all credit to “the grace of God.” Grace is the packaging that the Gospel arrives in. Grace means “gift”. God gifts us his saving death and resurrection. There is no tab for us to pick up and we certainly haven’t earned it, no matter how good we think we’ve behaved.

So to “take a stand” out of the feeling like “I’m right, you’re wrong” is to miss the point. But if we receive the Gospel as the precious gift, our response can only be humble gratitude. This does not mean we don’t speak openly about our faith, but it definitely informs the attitude by which we do it. We too are called to be gracious and loving, just as Christ’s death and resurrection bring grace and love to us. We remain true to who God has made us to be while extending love and grace in our tone of voice and language.

Paul says that the grace affected him. His encounter with the Risen Christ and the Gospel that he brings changed him. Are you changed? Do you feel like things are different since you’ve heard the news of Jesus’ saving faith? Do you feel a sense of humble gratitude at the gift God wants to give you?

It’s important to note that Paul says in verse 2 that “By this gospel you are saved…” A more accurate translation is that “By this gospel, you are being saved…” emphasizing the ongoing nature of this Gospel. In other words, God’s grace is still working. We are still a work in progress, therefore we have no right to think we are better than anyone else, regardless of their ideas about life. The news of Jesus’ saving death and resurrection continues to shape and grow us more into His likeness. Are you still changing and growing?

There are a lot of opinions about what the Christian life looks like. But this is the one thing that we all must affirm without compromise: the saving death and victorious resurrection. And affirming these without compromise does not mean we demand something from others. It simply means with both the humility of a sick person made well and the resolve of someone, we are not afraid to be who God has created us to be. As Paul says, “By the grace of God, I am what I am.”