As we celebrate Pentecost, let us not forget Easter! Though separated from Easter by over a month in time, Pentecost does not leave Easter behind, cannot in fact be understood without it. The reason is that the life of the Spirit indicative of Pentecost requires embodiment, the embodiment of the risen Christ.
We learn about the importance of embodiment from 1 Corinthians 15. As a background, we should begin by noting that Pentecost was not a problem for the Corinthians. If nothing else, they were people of the Spirit. They basked in the power and manifestation of the Spirit, took great pride in being pneumatika, people of the Spirit (1 Cor. 12:1), which is why Paul’s charge that their behavior was more carnal than spiritual hit them where it hurt (1 Cor. 3:1-3). Sluggish on the path towards sanctified embodiment, the Corinthians failed to see that the power of the Spirit is realized in the depth of the soul only as it is realized in the expanse of our embodied life together. Pentecost needs the risen life of the crucified Christ.
It needs to be said against all opinions to the contrary that Paul defends Christ’s bodily resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15. The confessional statement that Paul quotes in verse 4 makes that point clear. Christ was “buried” and was “raised,” this contrast implying that Christ’s rising reversed his burial (unearthed him). This victory in Christ’s embodied life was the fulfillment of his bearing our sins for us on the cross (v. 3). He overcame sin in his body and was bodily raised so as to open his risen life to mortal flesh by imparting the Spirit to all flesh.
This rudimentary point is made to address a larger problem. The Corinthians who were denying resurrections were apparently not explicitly denying Christ’s resurrection but ours. They were implicitly severing Pentecost from Easter in the experience of the church, as if life in the Spirit could be enjoyed without embodiment or embodied righteousness that anticipates new creation, including a risen body. Note verses 12-14:
But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.
Paul says to his opponents in effect, “You don’t seem to realize the full impact of what you are saying! If bodily resurrection is not at the horizon for us, then the very proclamation of Christ crucified, buried, and raised is in jeopardy too, and, if that is in jeopardy, so is the entirety of salvation.” In other words, if resurrection is not possible for us, it was not possible for him. In that case, the hold of sin and death on us as embodied creatures remains in place.
Paul’s fundamental logic implies a few assumptions. For one thing, implied is the fact that the proclamation of the resurrection of the crucified Christ was so widespread in the ancient church that not even those who doubted resurrections for us doubted his. Paul’s logic (“if we are not raised, then neither was Christ!) would lose its rhetorical force if Paul’s opponents were explicitly attacking Christ’s resurrection too. Paul is also assuming a holistic anthropology. There is no victory in the Spirit for the soul that is not embodied. No resurrection, no victory. Most significantly, the result of such holism is the inseparable link Paul assumes between the victory of the Spirit in Christ’s rising bodily from the dead and the same victory in our resurrection. Christ was raised for us. Thus, the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost is the outpouring of Easter life, opening up the victory of Christ’s self-giving love on the cross to all flesh for the sake of embodying Christ in the world, personally, ecclesially, and eschatologically.
Paul thus concludes his discourse on the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 with a reference to Pentecost. This is the climactic point of Paul’s proclamation of the risen Christ, for Paul applies resurrection (transformed embodiment) to an area of concern that was close to the Corinthian heart. Note verse 45: “So it is written: ‘The first man Adam became a living being’; the last Adam, ‘a life-giving spirit.’” Adam and Eve produced progeny that bore their natural image, but, in pouring forth the Spirit (rising to be the life-giving spirit), Christ produces a family born of the Spirit, bearing his image, the image of his risen body, which is the concrete victory of divine love and the final reality for which Adam and Eve and their seed were made.
So, the dead will indeed be raised in the image of the crucified and risen Christ and the gift of the Spirit is the down payment of it! Living in the Spirit of Pentecost allows us to live in this victory of divine love in soul and in body in the here and now. The more we lean into this risen life in the power of the Spirit, the more any other end for this life other than resurrection seems unimaginable. As we celebrate Pentecost, let us keep Easter in the rearview mirror!