Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Christ is raised: we too will raise
But if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some among you say there is no resurrection of the dead? For if the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all. But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. 1Cor 15,12.16-20
If we would open an inquiry among the today Christians, perhaps only few would state that they believe in the final raising of the bodies, meanwhile the all of them believe that the eternal life exists. Perhaps the reason rests in the fact that nobody, thinking to the happy life of the communion of the saints, does not feel the need to return in the future in the body, where we have experienced our limitations, our difficult understandings and the social injustices. Also in the Corinth church, mostly disturbed by philosophical influences against the resurrection, it was in this way.
In the today passage Paul, after having accurately prepared the ground in the first part of the letter, deals with this subject, stating that, by the end of the times, our body will raise. He states that the negation of the raising of the dead people implies the negation of the raising of Christ and, consequently, the collapse of the entire Christianity. Our today meditation starts, on the contrary, from the certainty of the Christ raising and from the reality of the mystic body of the church: if Christ, being the leader, has raised, also the remaining of the body will have eventually to raise, because it is not thinkable that, after have been loved as he loved us, eventually he will be separated from us because of the corporal death.
This is the theological truth to which the anchor of our faith has to be hooked. Otherwise, Paul says to us “And if Christ has not been raised, then empty (too) is our preaching; empty, too, your faith (1Cor 15,14) and “if Christ has not been raised, empty is your faith and you are still in your sins, therefore, also those who died in Christ are lost”.
Being such the consideration on the matter, it will be good to believe in the final raising of the dead people, without any further questions: we will raise because Jesus Christ raised, full stop. We will see by the end of the times when and how this occurrence will take place. By this act of faith we have one additional reason to believe to the end of the times in which we are immersed, to the “parusia”, another truth to be accepted without any additional thoughts, but only because Jesus Christ revealed it.