Welcome to the Pauline Family's "Year of the Bible"! We've been reading the Bible clear through this year. We are finishing the New Testament, so read along with me. But first, let us pray:
Father,
When the fullness of time had come, you sent your Word in the One who said, “Whoever sees me, sees the Father.” No revelation can surpass this until Jesus comes again. By your gift, the Church continues to receive unfathomable riches from the inheritance handed on from the Apostles and guaranteed by the Holy Spirit.
Let the Spirit who inspired the writing of today's pages "guide me in the truth and teach me" to follow Jesus ever more closely, until he calls me to follow him to the Kingdom where he lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever. Amen.
Today's chapters are 1 Corinthians 15-16 and 2 Corinthians 1 (yay!).
Every Sunday when we pray the Creed, we proclaim "the Resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come." Today we read the-ever first detailed explanation of what those words mean. Evidently, some in Corinth were attempting to "spiritualize" the Resurrection and the Christian teaching a bit more congenial to their sophisticated minds. Remember the amused reaction Paul got in Athens (Acts 17:32-33) when he mentioned that God "raised [Jesus] from the dead"? The ancient Greeks did not really have much esteem for the human body. It was so...physical. The Greeks were inclined to favor a more ethereal vision of the "real" world.
This kind of thinking is also present among many present day believers. It is very common to hear the body referred to as a "container" or "temporary home" of the "real person," or to treat the body and its sex as irrelevant, as raw material that can be manipulated at will (an approach critiqued by both Pope Benedict XVI and, more recently, Pope Francis in Laudato Si). Some of the old language used in spirituality may even reinforce the confusion by referring to the body as a "prison" for the soul. (Of course, when those books or prayers were written, belief in the General Resurrection was also reinforced by popular piety and powerfully graphic depictions of the Last Judgment.)
"If the dead are not raised, then Christ was not raised, and if Christ was not raised, you are still in your sins." Salvation is a joke, and the Gospel is a lie. And yet Christ was raised: Paul can produce a list of witnesses who saw him with their own eye, including himself. (What we call his "conversion" he calls an appearance of the Risen Jesus.)
Paul reminds the Corinthians that it's not just our souls that will go to Heaven: Our bodies are meant for Heaven, too. Our mortal bodies, our very fleshly selves that walk and talk and eat, that experience pleasure and pain and eventually will die, have an immortal destiny. We will rise again! Christ's Resurrection is only the preview, the "first fruits," Paul calls it. All of that is in today's first chapter, though it will take the Church centuries to unpack what Paul states in such a summary way, and with language that may not work as well for us as it might have for people of the first century.
Paul's closing remarks in 1 Corinthians refer to a collection (an age-old Catholic tradition!) for the poor in the Church of Jerusalem. It is significant that the monies are being gathered in an ongoing way when the community meets "on the first day of the week": another testimony to Sunday Mass. Paul is writing from Ephesus, the capital of the Roman province of Asia (not what we call Asia); notice that Prisca and Aquila, whom he first met in Corinth, are with him there!
As 1 Corinthians ended, Paul mentioned his travel plans. At the beginning of the Second Letter to the Corinthians, we see that things did not quite work out as Paul had hoped, and there were hard feelings on the other side of the Aegean Sea as a result. One of the first things Paul has to do in this letter is address the rift in the relationship. But not before he turns to God in a prayer of blessing. Significantly, this blessing-prayer is praise of the God who consoles those who suffer. The theme of consolation will be an important one in this passionate epistle.
Finish reading 1 Corinthians here and start reading 2 Corinthians here.
N.T. Wright's Paul: A Biography is the book I would recommend to someone who wanted to read one (only one) book that combined the life and letters of St Paul. Written by a noted Scripture, this is a flowing narrative that is scripturally enlightening and historically sound. Wright gives the reader a way of following Paul through the Acts of the Apostles and the writing of his letters, making Paul the person that much more approachable, and the letters themselves more readable as a result of having a social and historical context.
While we read Paul's letters to the Corinthians, you might also enjoy A Week in the Life of Corinth. This historical novel is set in first-century Corinth and outfitted with historical footnotes and archaeological sidebars. Ben Witherington III is a Scripture scholar in the Evangelical tradition, so there are some points in which his description of the worship in the Corinthian community mirrors that tradition rather than the Jewish roots of the liturgy we know so well, but his description of the social life and values of ancient Corinth may be extremely helpful in understanding things Paul takes for granted in his letters.
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