In parts of Africa, religion is big business. Even when the economy is bad, any smart aleck could start his or her own church and make profit in no time. So there was this guy who started a church, but things were not working out too well. In desperation he consults an old, wise man. “Why are people not joining my church,” he asks, “Why are they not following me?” This is the advice the old man gave him: “If you want people to believe you and follow you, this is what you must do. First you have to die, lie buried in the grave for three days and rise again. Then they will believe in you and follow you.” Evidently the old man was not very sympathetic to the young man’s cavalier attitude to religion. Nevertheless, his answer agrees with the point Paul makes in today’s second reading from his First Letter to the Corinthians, that belief in the death and resurrection of Christ is the bedrock of the Christian faith.

If Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some among you say there is no resurrection of the dead? (1 Corinthians 15:12)

We do not have enough information on the Christian sect in Corinth that denied the resurrection, neither do we know for sure the grounds for the denial. Different schools of thought in New Testament times rejected the resurrection for different reasons. First, there was the school of empiricism, which believed only in what we can see and touch and measure. The Sadducees are a good example of this. As we read in Acts 23:8 “The Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, or angel, or spirit.”

Then there is the school of dualism, which holds that the human person is made up of a perishable body and an immortal soul principle. At death the soul sheds off the gross body and continues in being as pure spirit. These people reject the resurrection because they do not believe that the perishable body can participate with the soul in immortality. This dualism was a hallmark of Greek religions. We encounter this group in Acts 17, where Paul addresses the Greeks in Athens. “When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, ‘We will hear you again about this.’” (Acts 17:32).

Finally, there is the school of mysticism. This is a Christian sect that held that the resurrection is not an afterlife reality but a mystical, inner experience that believers have already in this life. We hear of them in 2 Timothy 2. “Among them are Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have swerved from the truth by holding that the resurrection is past already.” (2 Timothy 2:17-18). Perhaps the heretical group that Paul is fighting in Corinth is of this school of thought. For them Christianity is an inner, spiritual thing that has little to do with the body, the material or the social order.

Paul argues that they are wrong because Christ has been raised from the dead. If it is true that the dead do not rise, then there is no way Christ could have risen. But as it is, the resurrection of Christ proves that bodily resurrection is a reality. Moreover, Christ’s resurrection is not an isolated event but a representative one. Just as Adam fell and all humankind share in his fall, so in Christ will all humankind share in the resurrection.

So much has changed since the days of Paul, yet so much remains the same. As in Paul’s days, we still have people around us who, like the Sadducees, value only what we can see, touch and measure. I do not mean just the self-confessed atheists and humanists. I include also those who profess to be Christians but show themselves to be hard-core materialists by their life-style. No one who truly believes in the resurrection can be a materialist because such a person would know that the ultimate riches in life are the riches that will accompany us at the resurrection. All other riches are illusory.

Today also, owing to contacts with Eastern and New Age religions, many Christians are adopting beliefs in forms of immortality that are incompatible with the doctrine of the resurrection. Among these are the spiritualistic and metaphysical beliefs that only the soul survives death and that the body is of no ultimate account. This belief is common in cults where members abuse their bodies and those of other cult members. Belief in the resurrection demands that we respect the human body because the body is sacred and will share in the glorification of the human person at the resurrection. Similarly, the belief in reincarnation, which is popular in New Age religions, is incompatible with the Christian belief in the resurrection. Whereas reincarnation says that we have got many lifetimes to get it right, resurrection insists that we have just this one lifetime to get right with God.

As we recite the creed today, let us reaffirm our belief in the resurrection of the dead. Let us resolve never to deny the resurrection by our way of life as the materialists do who say, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (1 Corinthians 15:32), or as the New Age people do who window-shop from one religion to the other thinking that they have many lifetimes to make up their minds and get right with God.