Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

The apostle Paul declares in our text that Jesus’ resurrection is the guarantee of our own resurrection. Because he lives, we too will live. We don’t have too much trouble believing that, but many people want to know how long will we live?

Let’s look for a few moments at how long we might expect to live in these temporal bodies. If you live in Japan, there’s a good chance you could live well past the age of 100. There’s an old saying in Japan: "Old people are everybody’s treasures." If that’s the case, and it should be, then Japan is one of the richest countries in the world — cars and electronics notwithstanding.

A 2008 survey revealed that Japan has more centenarians than any country in the world with 36,000 citizens aged 100 or older. That’s a huge increase from 1963, the first year the country started recording the number, when there were only 153 people in the centenarian category. Eighty-six percent of Japan’s current century-club members are women, with the oldest woman in the country being a 113-year-old from the island province of Okinawa. Incidentally, Okinawa has the largest concentration of centenarians in Japan, at 838 (that’s 61 for every 100,000 people).

Compared to other nations, Japan’s longevity factor leaves the rest of the world looking positively sickly by comparison. Out of 1.3 billion people in China, for example, there are only 18,000 centenarians, while in the United States the ratio is about 10 per 100,000. Life expectancy in Japan is a full four years longer than in America.

But is living that long really a good thing? What is the quality of life after 100? After all, who wants to spend his or her golden years drooling on themselves and rusting away in a wheelchair or nursing home? Here, again, is where the Japanese respect for their elders as "treasures" trumps our obsession with youth and fear of aging. Turns out that many of these Japanese elders are partying like it’s the "roaring twenties."

Take a guy named Tadashi Kozakai, for example, who’s 101. He goes dancing twice a week, exercises every day and gave up smoking 11 years ago at age 90. Or consider Masaaki Hatsumi, a relative youngster of 77, who’s one of the world’s grandmasters of Ninjutsu (in other words, he’s a super Ninja!). Then there’s Shitsui Hakoishi, who at 92 has been cutting hair for 75 years and still gives her clients a shave with a straight razor. "When my hands start to shake, I will have to retire," she says. These folks aren’t exactly waiting around to die.

Definitive Japanese cultural traits, good genes and a focus on social activity and family may have something to do with long life in Japan, but diet appears to have even more of an impact.

We Americans have been told over and over that just four things are needed to live a basic healthy lifestyle: Be a nonsmoker, exercise at least 30 minutes a day five or more days a week, eat five or more servings of fruits and vegetables a day and maintain a healthy weight. Yet, a 2005 Michigan State study revealed that only three percent of Americans do all these things. What gives? This body can’t last forever.

Well, besides the fact that pork fat rules and that exercising requires sweating, our drift toward a shorter life span may have as much to do with ancient Greek philosophy as it does with potato chips. It’s a philosophy that Paul confronts in this section of his first letter to the Corinthians. He writes to people who have come to believe in Christ but who still hold on to some ancient assumptions about the body — assumptions that many Westerners, and even church folks, still hold today.

You could argue that the idea originated with Plato, somewhere around the fourth or fifth century B.C., who postulated a dualism between the body and the soul. Speaking in general terms, Plato believed the body to be the enemy of the soul primarily because the body engages the world through its senses, which can deceive a person’s view of reality.

For Plato, the real world was the world of eternal and universal ideas that can be seen only with the mind’s eye and can be known by humans only after death (or before birth, as human souls were thought to be pre-existent).

To put it another way, Plato saw the body, although beautiful and worthy of art and sculpture, to be a kind of prison: something to be sloughed off at death so the soul could move to a higher plane of knowledge and existence.

It’s interesting to note how this philosophical idea has permeated Western culture and, perhaps most tellingly, much of Christian theology and thought. The idea of an eternal and blissful heaven as the realm of the soul at death is a vision that many Christians and even nonreligious people believe to be true.

In this view, the body has no ultimate use or value in comparison to a disembodied spiritual life lived on clouds behind pearly gates where souls have wings and plunk on harps all day long. It’s the kind of philosophical view that’s even expressed in our hymnody in lyrics such as "Some glad morning when this life is o’er, I’ll fly away."

So if most people believe even unconsciously that their bodies are simply destined for the ground anyway while their souls will experience heavenly bliss, what incentive is there to care for the body in the present? Why live a long life on earth when eternity in heaven is waiting? Why not "eat, drink and be merry" in the present body, because tomorrow we’ll die (1 Corinthians 15:32, quoting Isaiah 22:13)?

These may have very well been the questions the first-century Corinthians were asking, having been culturally steeped in Hellenistic philosophy and living in a prosperous cosmopolitan city where there were plenty of opportunities to eat, drink and make merry in many self-indulgent and disgraceful ways.

When Paul came to Corinth and preached a gospel centered on the resurrection of Jesus’ body as the "first fruits" of the general resurrection of human bodies at the end of time (v. 23), it’s no wonder that some of them scoffed at his message. Bodies coming out of tombs may be a wonderful spiritual metaphor, but for many of them, like some Christians even today, believing it to be literally true was spiritually and intellectually repugnant.

But the resurrection is not a metaphor.

The empty tomb on Easter morning is the linchpin for the whole Christian movement and the only hope for all of creation. If Easter hadn’t really happened, if the tomb wasn’t really empty because Jesus hadn’t literally risen from the dead, then the consequences for Paul and the church were staggering.

Without it, Paul’s preaching ministry would have been useless (v. 14) and deceitful (v. 15), and his life of constant risk and danger on behalf of the Gospel would have been in vain (vv. 31-32).

For the Corinthians and for Christians then and today, the consequences of no resurrection are disastrous. Without resurrection, Paul says, "Your faith is futile and you are still in your sins," and those who have died are simply dead. Notice the lack of happy visions of a disembodied spiritual heaven for them as a consolation prize; no Platonic parachute to save them from death.

For Paul, the resurrection of Jesus was absolutely vital because it meant that God wasn’t abandoning the creation project that he had been working on since Genesis, despite humanity’s desire to engage its own failed self-indulgent and self-destructive project.

In the resurrection of Jesus, Paul says, God was doing nothing less than reversing the curse of sin and death that entered the world through human sin. "For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead; for as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive." The resurrection of Jesus was a prototype and the beginning of the resurrection to come for all of us in "the end" when Jesus returns, destroying the forces of evil, and God sets his good creation right in the way that it had always been intended.

Unlike Platonism, the resurrection of Jesus wasn’t a means of circumventing death or simply seeing it as a transition to a better, more spiritual existence. On Easter, death itself was placed on notice that its reign of terror was nearing an end. For Paul, the body is not the enemy, as it was for Plato, but death is! The goal of life isn’t just a ticket to heaven, but a renewed body in a renewed creation. Paul spent the rest of this 15th chapter fleshing out how that works.

The point of Easter isn’t merely that it’s a nice metaphor for some kind of new life, often symbolized by eggs, bunnies, green plastic Easter grass and all that stuff. It’s not just evidence that Jesus was divine and eventually went back to heaven and, if we just happen to pray the right prayer and/or do the right things, we’ll get to go be with him there someday in spirit (and, if we don’t, we might get "left behind").

No, the point of Easter is that this world, God’s good creation, matters. As people created in God’s image in his good creation, we care for ourselves, we care for each other and we care for the earth because we know that God has not and will not abandon this creation project but will ultimately make it whole again.

As we await that great day, we are to spend our lives not giving into death but embracing the goodness of life. The point of the gospel isn’t that we go to heaven to be with God but that God comes here to be with us: "Your kingdom come … on earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 6:10).

So why not "live long and prosper"? Whether we are 10 or 110, each day we live gives us another chance for a Holy Spirit empowered opportunity to advance the coming kingdom of God on earth and to bring the day of death’s ultimate defeat that much closer.

Sometimes, even at Easter, we find ourselves so consumed with the small things, things that are only for this life, that we forget about the more important things, things that are forever. We may, for example, count on Jesus to make our life smooth, easy, pleasant – free of stresses at work, unpaid bills, illnesses, or conflicts at home. In spite of what the TV preachers promise, Scripture promises none of those things.

If we follow Jesus because we think that He will keep trouble away from our doors, then we’ve missed the point. In fact, St. Paul says we are to be pitied. Because everything Jesus went through, all the sufferings he endured that first holy week all those years ago, were for much more. And Jesus’ empty tomb proves that he accomplished all he set out to do, to give us life that is so much more than this temporal life.

What happened at Jesus’ tomb that first Easter Sunday so long ago was real and is real. It’s an event that took place in the real world. Jesus was seen by hundreds of people after he rose and before he ascended into heaven.

Just as Christ Jesus himself rose to new life after being put to death on a Roman cross, God will not abandon us to the grave after our own flesh loses its life. We can be glad, secure in the reality of the empty tomb. We can rejoice in the certainty of our resurrection, a doctrine based on an historic reality. We can be glad the enemy of death has been destroyed.

He is risen and we too shall rise. Alleluia Amen.