Friday • 10/15/2021
Friday of the Twentieth Week After Pentecost (Proper 23)

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 16; Psalm 17; Jeremiah 38:14–28; 1 Corinthians 15:1–11; Matthew 11:1–6

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 10 (“The Second Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 55:6–11; BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (“A Song to the Lamb,” Revelation 4:11; 5:9–10, 13, BCP, p. 93)

“…I handed on to you as of first importance…” (1 Corinthians 15:3). Paul felt it was important to remind the Corinthians of a few facts. Perhaps it’s worthwhile for us to recall them.

“…Christ died for our sins…” (1 Corinthians 15:3). Jesus of Nazareth was the only human who ever lived who did not, by God’s standards, deserve to die. He died for one purpose. It was not, as some think, to give us an example of heroic resignation in the face of life’s inevitable end. He died to receive in his own person the consequences of his people’s sin. Unjustly killed, he won for us forgiveness at the bar of justice.

“…he was raised on the third day…” (1 Corinthians 15:4). As his death was “for” us, so was his resurrection. By his rising from the dead, he takes us by the hand and lifts us with him, as the Book of Common Prayer says, “out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life” (BCP, p. 368). Because he lives, we live too: no longer subject to sin, to guilt, to shame, to endless death and separation from God.

“…in accordance with the scriptures…in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3,4). Paul repeats this phrase to underscore the point that Scripture provided forecast after forecast both of Christ’s death and of his resurrection. As Jesus had explained on the road to Emmaus on the day of his resurrection: “‘Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?’ Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures” (Luke 24:26–27).

The foreshadowing of Jesus’ death appeared when Joseph was lowered into a pit by his brothers and sent to prison by Pharaoh, when Moses was set afloat in the bullrushes, when Jeremiah was lowered into the cistern, when Jonah was swallowed by a fish, when David was persecuted by his enemies, when Hezekiah lay on his sickbed.

The foreshadowing of Jesus’s being raised appeared when Joseph was lifted from his pit by nomads and brought from prison to rule on Pharaoh’s behalf, when Moses was rescued from the bullrushes by his mother, when Jeremiah was pulled up out of the cistern, when Jonah was vomited from the fish, when David was delivered from his enemies, when Hezekiah was raised up from his sickbed.

“Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved…” (1 Corinthians 15:1). Paul reminds us that we are not free to invent our own story. We belong to a story that has been given to us, and we are called upon to pass it on unvarnished, unembellished, and unchanged. We are not free to substitute a theology that sneers at Christ’s substitutionary death for sin or dismisses the hope of a resurrection like his.

“…as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles…” (1 Corinthians 15:8–9a). When the staggering truth of Jesus’s death and resurrection hits home, it prompts a reassessment of oneself. For Paul, that truth meant realizing he wasn’t as special as he had thought—from which posture, of course, he was able to receive as a gift a new status and a new calling. For us, I pray that the staggering truth of Jesus’s death and resurrection “according to the scriptures” calls forth from us a similar combination of sober self-reflection and joy-filled reliance on “the grace of God that is with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10).

Be blessed this day,

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Detail, stained glass, Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando, Florida