Word to the Wise
Friday, September 19, 2008 - Friday in the Twenty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time
[1 Corinthians 15:12-20 and Luke 8:1-3]If Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some among you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then neither has Christ been raised. And if Christ has not be raised, then empty too is our preaching; empty, too, your faith.
After dealing with all the political and moral divisions amongst the Corinthians, St. Paul comes to an even more serious problem, the content of the Christian message as preached to the Corinthians. I have been reading for the past several months (it takes a little at a time) the big tome of Bishop N.T. Wright THE RESURRECTION OF THE SON OF GOD. It is fascinating to become acquainted with the various strands of belief in resurrection and in THE resurrection of Christ that have appeared over the course of time not just in the Judaism and Greco-Roman civilization within which Christian faith developed, but in some of the contemporary arguments about this article of the faith. Bishop Wright is painstakingly detailed in his treatment, but the main core of faith remains solid. Christ is risen and so will we be! However, I am not recommending that everyone drop what they're doing and read Bishop Wright's lengthy learned book! We have our faith and its expression in scripture and the creeds of the Church and tradition. What strikes me as most remarkable is the survival, despite so many different voices, of the truth as St. Paul preached it to the Corinthians and as he preaches it to us today when we read his words. Our faith is not empty, nor is it subject to a popular vote or the vote of the notorious JESUS SEMINAR. Our hope is in Christ and not in any given age or advance of civilization. St. Paul puts it very succinctly at the end of the passage for today when he writes: "If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all." We haven't and we aren't! AMEN
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