Mocking Death

In this episode, I reflect on the profound journey of faith we experience in the priesthood, accompanying individuals through life’s significant stages. From the joy of weddings and baptisms to the somber moments of end-of-life care, we witness the transformative power of faith. Drawing from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, particularly the 15th chapter, we explore themes of sin, death, and resurrection. Paul’s message is clear: through Jesus Christ, we triumph over death and sin, embracing the hope of eternal life. This journey of faith invites us to live as new creations, transformed by God’s grace.

00:00:00 One of the kind of gifts of the priesthood is that we get to kind of journey with people through a whole different range of their lives; stages of their experience from the joy and wonder of a wedding to the gift of the first child that comes along, and celebrating that baptism and preparing a couple yesterday for the baptism of their child. And just the the joy and wonder that they experience. But we’re also there at the end of life and there as a person is not able to to take any more breaths. And of course the last couple of weeks we’ve been praying very fervently for Pope Francis as he struggles to breathe, as he’s perhaps his time is either about to have a miraculous recovery or his his time is coming to an end. And so it’s quite propitious that we’re reading from First Corinthians at the moment, every year when we begin the the readings in the ordinary time of the year, we always spend a long time with the first letter of Paul to the Corinthians and Year A from Sundays 2 to 8, we read from the first section in year B, from Sundays 2 to 6 we read from the second section, and here in you see from Sundays 2 to 8.

00:01:27 We also read from the final section of the letter. So we read more from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians than any other of the letters of Paul, or any of the other New Testament writings other than the Gospels. And we’ve spent the last four weeks in this 15th chapter of this first Corinthians. And Paul in this chapter is kind of pondering what happens when we die. He’s pondering what happens when Jesus returns, what happens to our mortal reality. He knows the reality of sin, particularly in a community like Corinth. Like Corinth, which is a notoriously wicked place. It’s a port city, people coming and going. Traders coming and going. And so it has all of the services that normally accompany such a place, all kinds of, of prostitution and, and so forth, drug dealing and, and all kinds of things that, you know, you wouldn’t want to tell your mother about. And yet, Paul didn’t expect to find any kind of life or any possibility of community in this place. And yet he ended up saying 18 months because this became one of the most flourishing communities that he had in any of his adventures, any of the different places where he established little communities.

00:02:49 And so Corinth becomes this sign for us of the life and the transformation that is possible for us who believe. And Paul is wanting us in this final section to realize that all of this will happen not as a result of all kinds of work and effort on our part. It’s just before the the the reading that we have today, he says. All of this will happen in just the blink of an eye. This rapid, sudden transformation. You know, social media, you often kind of get those images where someone is dressed one way and then flash and they suddenly dressed in a different way. And it’s that kind of sense that in that moment, everything that we have experienced, all of that frailties, all of our woundedness, all of our inability to do anything, that’s what mortality and perishable is all about. But all of that in this flash of an eye because of God’s grace, not because of anything that we do, but we cooperate with God and we offer ourselves to God. And suddenly all of that is changed and transformed, and mortality is replaced with immortality, and perishable is replaced with imperishable, that we will be able to experience that fullness of life in in God.

00:04:09 Corinth is like many ancient cities also kind of overwhelmed by a society that’s all about honor and shame. Paul writes more about shame in this, in this letter than he does anywhere else, and he’s reminding this community that all of the shame that we’ve experienced because of our sin, all of that will also be transformed. All of that will be utterly changed because of his glory and his goodness, and that all of this changed on the day that Jesus did not stay dead, that he did not stay in the tomb. On the day when the disciples, the women first went to the tomb and the stone was rolled away, and they looked inside and it was empty. He wasn’t there. He was risen. And this invitation for us is an invitation to what he is then able to declare, oh, death, where is your sting? O death, where is your victory? Because the victory of of sin has now been overcome because sin, he says, is a result of death as a result of sin, that we’re not able to escape from the reality of sin.

00:05:27 And so death is just a natural consequence of that. It’s interesting that the Paul is quoting here from two places. He says that he’s he’s quoting from Scripture, but he actually takes both quotes and kind of reverses them somewhat. The first one he quotes from is Isaiah 25 eight. And there he kind of takes that claim and he reverses it, throws it on its head. The second one is even more kind of extraordinary. He’s quoting from the prophet Hosea chapter 13, verse 14. But there we hear, O death, where is your disease? Oh, Sheol, where is your destruction? So that’s pretty strong, but it’s almost like the the death and destruction. And Sheol will have the final word, which is still the belief there in the Old Testament. But Paul changes that, oh, death, where is your disease to, O death, where is your sting? He’s kind of mocking death. It’s in that shame on our society. He’s really speaking down at death and declaring, you’ve got no power over us anymore.

00:06:35 Because as Christian people, we know that death will no longer have the final word over us, that we will not just have our souls transformed, but our whole bodies will be changed and transformed in that blinking, that twinkling of an eye, that suddenly everything that we’ve hoped for, everything that we’ve longed for, will be satisfied and will be fulfilled. We get, you know, all the Scripture passages that the status and the final two chapters of the Book of Revelation is another place where we can go to see how this story will end. The death will not have the final word over us. The sin will not have its final victory. That’s the victory that Paul is able then to realize. And we’ll get it. Also, in his letter to the Romans as he transitioned from chapter seven into chapter eight, we get this beautiful sense of Paul so frustrated by his sin, frustrated by all of the failure that he sees around us, and yet within himself. He realizes that thanks be to God, who has given us this victory, he has given us this transformation.

00:07:42 As we come to the final days before the season of lent. Let’s indeed remember the victory that Jesus has won for us, the gift that he has claimed for us. That indeed there is no sting anymore in death. That sin no longer has any power over us, that we can be changed and transformed, that we can begin to live that new creation life. Now we can begin to experience with the wonder of immortality, the one there having perished. Ability, the gift of transformation. As long as we open ourselves and allow God to do that work in us as we let go of sin, as we surrender our desire to cling to anything that will lead us away from God and open ourselves to his victory and claim that victory over our lives.