Paul preached belief in the resurrection

February 8, 2004 -- 5th Sunday in Ordinary Time

By Fr. Richard Ver Bust

	Fr. Richard Ver Bust

The letters of Paul, we have seen, are responses to immediate and specific situations. They deal with the problems that the early Christian community faced.

Each community lived in a different culture. Each community, as we saw two weeks ago, had a diversity of members yet a unity in their confessing of the Lord Jesus.

Paul saw that diversity and built upon it stressing that these gifts of the Spirit were for the benefit of the church.

Paul wrote, not just as a private individual, but as an apostle and missionary preacher. He sent his letters as an extension of his mission. He used the letters to continue the gospel message and applied the message to concrete problems that emerged when he was no longer there.

Corinth was a Greek city with many different religious groups.

The Jewish community seems to have been vital and vibrant. Paul visited the synagogue there. There were temples to the Greek gods as well as Egyptian. The ethnic mixture of the community of Paul's day made it special.

One of the groups that Paul knew were spiritualists. They believed they possessed a special wisdom and they thought the body was unimportant.

They were influenced by a strain of thought derived from Philo which saw the body as something material and from which their spark of life tried to escape. They would have thought the Christian belief in the resurrection of the body was meaningless.

Our second reading is Paul's response to this group. Paul stressed in a credal statement that the church's belief in the resurrection of Jesus was the basis of all belief.

Paul uses as almost a formula the statement in verse 3, "I handed on to you first of all what I myself received." This was a belief or truth that Paul had taught and it was one which he himself had received.

The teaching is one the early community of Christians had formulated and made part of their lives. It is still part of our own profession of faith in the Creed we recite.

Paul stresses that the appearances of Jesus are by the initiative of Jesus. He then lists different people who had benefited from these appearances and who, because they were still living, might be sought for their witness.

Paul adds his own name to the list and shows that in his conversion experience he too knew and saw Christ. Paul stressed that because of that experience he became an apostle and a witness. Paul was not boasting but simply stating a fact.

He ends by telling the Corinthians that whether they believed him or the others, this is what the Christian message is all about.

This was what Paul had preached to them for their own conversion. Paul was setting the foundation for believers in Christ's resurrection to accept their own resurrection.

(The late Fr. Ver Bust directed the master's program in theology at St. Norbert College, De Pere.)