The Life to Come

A Sermon preached by the Precentor, Canon Anna Macham

Sunday 7 September 2025

1 Corinthians 15:12-19 and John 11: 17-45

Today concludes our summer sermon series on the Nicene Creed. This morning we’re looking at the final lines, We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.  Amen. 

This section can sometimes feel a bit like the poor relation in the Creed.  When reading books about the Creed, most, in my experience, devote little attention to it, if they consider it at all, preferring instead to concentrate on the theological controversies such as Arianism that led up to its formulation of statements about the major Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation.  This lack of attention reflects the dominant preoccupations of the Creed itself, but it also undoubtedly reflects our modern reluctance to speak about matters of life after death and what happens to us after we die.

Yet a belief in the resurrection is foundational to our faith.  In his sermon on the Creed, Dean Nick spoke about the importance of the tiny words “For us”. Even though today’s section is just two short lines seemingly tacked on at the end, this bit about looking forward to our own resurrection and the life of the world to come is no afterthought but relates directly back to the section of the Creed that’s all about Jesus’ death and resurrection.  Jesus’ death and resurrection and ours are intimately connected.

In 1 Corinthians 15, which we heard from as our first reading, Paul makes this very clear to the Corinthians, who apparently believed in Jesus’ resurrection, but not that they themselves would rise. But believing in their own resurrection, Paul argues, is an essential part of believing in Christ. “For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised,” Paul argues, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins”. Paul’s argument in this long chapter is hard to follow and difficult to interpret, but he claims that it’s simply not an option to think as a Christian that you will not be raised. Resurrection, according to him, is central to our faith. If we claim either that Christ did not rise or that we will not, then we remove an essential element of salvation.  Christ is just the “first fruits” of all of us who also will be raised (for a very helpful summary of different ways of interpreting this and other New Testament passages about life after death, see Paula Gooder, Heaven, SPCK, 2011, Chapter 8, especially pp.88-90).

Within this clear belief in our resurrection, the New Testament writers express a variety of views about the form it will take. Later in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul states that our resurrection bodies will be bodies, even if they are transformed.  Just as a seed must die in order to be turned into a plant, he argues, so we can only become the embodied people that God wants us to be by dying and rising again.

By contrast, when later in 2 Corinthians he speaks of “longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling” when “the earthly tent that we live in is destroyed” (2 Corinthians 5:1-10), this could be taken to imply that we discard our body when we exchange earthly clothing or tabernacle for habitation in heaven.  The Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection also could be seen as implying the same range of interpretation, stressing both the materiality of Jesus’ body, which ate boiled fish, but at the same time the radical transformation of the resurrected Christ who passed through closed doors and was sometimes not recognisable to his beloved disciples.

For the New Testament writers, then, in the resurrection there is continuity with what went before, but also radical change.  Change, because we will have an imperishable “spiritual” body according to Paul, perhaps something like Jesus’ own changed resurrection body; yet in spite of that change, also continuity as we may also hope to remain as recognisable, named, persons – just as the risen Jesus, despite not being recognised straight away, was also still identifiable.

Talk of the resurrection of the body sounds strange to our modern ears, challenging our credulity even while the conviction that we will remain recognisable, somehow still ourselves, feels instinctively right, in keeping with our understanding of ourselves as God’s beloved children, and is comforting, particularly when we have recently been bereaved. We’re in the realm of paradox here, and metaphor; like the biblical writers, we cannot know exactly what lies beyond death. There’s only so much that we can say. How it might be possible to inhabit some form of “personal” life after death has been the subject of much discussion amongst theologians, who have used insights from modern physics and philosophy, music and creativity among other disciplines, to try and begin to imagine how this might be the case (see for example Vernon White, Life Beyond Death: Threads of Hope in Faith, Life and Theology, DLT, 2006, pp.52-57).

For Paul, however, it’s clear that resurrection is about much more than our bodies being rejuvenated. It’s about something radically new, an act of transformation in which the post-resurrection bodies, though still bodies, will be entirely transformed into a new way of being. “We will not all die” he writes, “but we will all be changed” (I Corinthians 15:51).

What’s more, this renewal isn’t something that will happen only in the future. Resurrection is already happening now. This is why, in today’s Gospel, Jesus corrects Martha’s misunderstanding that Lazarus will be raised at the last day by raising him now, in a miracle that prefigures his own imminent death and resurrection. With the death and resurrection of Jesus, the new creation has already begun. God’s future has already burst in upon the world, overcoming evil and vindicating goodness.

With the resurrection, the justice of God’s kingdom that we hear talked about in Jesus’ parables of the Kingdom of heaven, feasts which welcome everyone, the poor and the excluded, is initiated. Rather than making us passive, deferring this justice to the future, pie in the sky when we die, our Christian hope in the resurrection is something that we can begin to live now. And this is our Christian calling. In caring about the plight of the most vulnerable in our world, in working towards climate justice and the renewal of creation, in caring for and properly valuing ourselves, we are living the future hope of resurrection in the present.

Above all, the resurrection is about God’s love. In the life, teaching, passion and dying of Jesus, in his deep compassion for Lazarus’s plight, we see the love of God at work- a love that does not let Jesus go on the cross, and that does not let us go, either: having created us, God does not simply write us off.  His promise to his people, his covenant faithfulness, means that he must recreate us even in death. Just as God raised Jesus, so he will raise us. Such is the reach of this love, as Paul writes, “…that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord”.

The resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, then, are no small thing in our faith, an afterthought in the Creed that makes us feel uncomfortable or renders Christianity unbelievable for anyone outside the Church. The “hinge-point” in the middle of John’s Gospel on which everything turns, our resurrection as related in the story of Lazarus is central in our faith. Proclaiming our own resurrection week by week in the Creed reminds us that it matters and makes a difference in our lives.

For theologians throughout the ages, the Creed was just a starting point- inspiring them to describe the resurrection of the body in images as various as the flowering of a dry tree after winter, the donning of new clothes, the hatching of an egg, the return of the Phoenix from its own ashes or the reassembling of broken potsherds, to name but a few (see Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336, Columbia, 1995, p.6). The idea of life after death has not gone away in our culture – as a society, it still holds our imaginations and haunts our hopes, even if not our actual beliefs. Allowing the hope of our own resurrection to renew and change us now, and to capture our imaginations in the present, might enable us better to believe in our own resurrection, and to celebrate this vital aspect of our faith and to speak about it with greater confidence.