The Resurrection Sleep Number

1 Corinthians 15:19-26   |   4/11/2004

Find the perfect sleep number and you’ll finally get a good night of rest. Looks like Jesus had a lousy sleep number.

Kamato Hongo of Kagoshima, Japan, passed away last fall, and her death may have gone unmentioned except for the fact that she died at the age of 116 — at the time, the world’s oldest person.

Hongo was born on April 8, 1887, married in 1914, had seven children, and lots of grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.

She died with her sense of humor still quite active, and on the day of her death, she performed a little hand dance peculiar to her native region in Japan.

But forget she’s 116. Here’s the interesting part: When she was 110, she had a hip operation, and after the operation, her sleeping habits began to change. She would sleep an entire day, which was then followed by being up for an entire day. When she died, she was sleeping for two solid days, followed by two days of staying wide awake. For the five years before her death this was her custom.

Here’s a lady who obviously had discovered her sleep number.

What’s our sleep number?

Our Resurrection Sleep Number is 1520. We’ll get to that in a few minutes.

Sleep numbers. That’s the gimmick one major manufacturer of mattresses uses to sell its sleeping systems — mattresses that promise to reduce pressure points, provide for proper spinal adjustment, let you sleep on a hard surface while your spouse sleeps on a soft one, and such a sleep system can be yours for an enormous amount of sleep number dollars.
Kamato Hongo had no trouble sleeping, and when she died, you could say she entered her final rest. She went to her eternal sleep.

In fact there is a long tradition in which sleep is a metaphor for death, and the sleep/awakening cycle a metaphor for resurrection.

Scripture is full of such allusions. Today’s text itself suggests this metaphor: “But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (v. 20 NIV). Earlier in this same chapter, the apostle Paul uses the same metaphor: “After that, [Jesus] appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep” (v. 6 NIV).

Even Jesus spoke of death as being sleep: Speaking to his bumfuzzled disciples, he said, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him.” The disciples said to him, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right.” Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead” (John 11:11-14). [NOTE: For more Scriptures that refer to death as sleep, see Animating Illustrations].

Not surprising, then, to find the concept in the canons of literature as well. Shakespeare records a befuddled Hamlet pondering his existence in his famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy:

To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: aye, there the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil.
(Hamlet, III.1.61-68)

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) regards death as something akin to lying down on the couch for a nap. The closing lines of his poem, Thanatopsis, go like this:

So live, that when thy summons comes to joinThe innumerable caravan, which movesTo that mysterious realm, where each shall takeHis chamber in the silent halls of death,Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothedBy an unfaltering trust, approach thy graveLike one who wraps the drapery of his couchAbout him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

Easter morning is a reminder that Jesus, too, died. His body took on the appearance of sleep. They laid him in a tomb, on a slab of rock.

Who could sleep on something like that?

In fact, there was no mattress, no tomb, no grave, with a sleep number so pleasant that could keep Jesus, the Son of God, asleep forever.

“Vainly they watch his bed,” writes the hymnist — who then provides the chorus: “Up from the grave he arose, with a mighty triumph o’er his foes.”

Clearly, the apostle has no doubts that Jesus Christ, the same one who was crucified and buried, has left sleep and death behind and is now our risen Lord. “Christ has indeed been raised from the dead” (v. 20 NIV).

Yet, the larger point that Scripture makes here concerns our own life and death. If Christ is our risen Lord, then we can take this as our guarantee that we, too, though we die, shall live. These were Jesus’ very words to Martha while his good friend, Lazarus, still lay in the grave: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11:25-26). The body may take on the appearance of sleep, resting as it will in the grave, but the soul will not die.

The apostle emphasizes this central tenet of our faith once again in his letter to the Thessalonians: “we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13 NIV).

When we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we are celebrating many things. We celebrate his victory over sin. “[Jesus] has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Hebrews 9:26).

We celebrate his victory over Satan. “He himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death” (Hebrews 2:14-15).

We celebrate his victory over death. “Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:54-55).

We celebrate his role as our advocate at the throne of God: “I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:1-2).

We celebrate his presence in our lives. The last words of the post-resurrection Jesus as recorded by Matthew assure us of this presence: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

But here’s the deal: We are also celebrating for ourselves. If he lives, so do we!

How great is that? There’s no sleep number mattress that can offer that kind of deal! He lives! We live! Forever. And ever. And ever.

We may not live in these mortal bodies of dust as long as Kamato Hongo. But when the body takes on the appearance of sleep, we live! The resurrected Christ is the guarantee of our eternal future in the presence of God!

But here’s a final question and thought. It would appear that some of us — we’re all guilty of this at times — are going through our present lives as though we’ve found our perfect sleep number. We’re comfortable, dozing, napping through life — through our vocations, through our careers, through our marriages and relationships — as though we cannot hear the resurrection call of Jesus Christ to awake from our sleep.

If Christ has risen — and he has — then let us live as though we, too, have been aroused from our slumber. Let’s get to work for the kingdom. Let’s offer ourselves as channels of blessings through the power of the risen Christ.

Let’s climb off the mattresses of comfort and convenience.

Let’s throw off the bedsheets of apathy.

Let’s cast off the robes of discouragement and despair.

Let us instead go forth into the morning of a new day — of promise, of hope, of life, of service, of mission. For that is the calling of the One whose awakening from sleep we now celebrate.

And that Resurrection Sleep Number? It’s 1520, for 1 Corinthians 15:20 NIV: “Christ has indeed been raised from the dead.”

Commentary

From the content of 1 Corinthians 15:12-18 it is clear that Paul was dealing at Corinth with some serious skepticism on the issue of resurrection. Because we are hearing only one side of this discussion — namely Paul’s side — it is unclear what the Corinthians to whom he is referring had come to doubt. Did they doubt that anyone could be raised from the dead, Christ included; or did they doubt that anyone besides Christ could escape the grave? Either way this raises some serious theological difficulties for Paul.

If, on the one hand, they believed that Christ walked out of the tomb and appeared to many people as Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 15:1-9, but don’t believe in the resurrection of the dead, that would imply that they don’t believe Christ was a real human being. They might have been laboring under one of the many heretical misconceptions of the day, such as Docetism, which taught that Jesus was never fully human, but rather a divine being merely visiting the earth and appearing human to our eyes. Denying Jesus’ humanity would be one way of accepting the resurrection appearances and the divine nature of Christ while at the same time denying that human beings might also be resurrected after the example of Christ. It appears from verse 12 that the community proclaims Christ risen but rejects the idea of the resurrection of the dead. That implies that they believe that Christ was never truly dead, and likely, never truly human.

Paul may have had this issue in mind because he insists that “since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being” (v. 21). This assertion says two things at once. It states categorically that Christ was indeed human, and that through him other human beings might be resurrected from the dead. Although stories of resurrection abound in Scripture, in both the Old and New Testaments, it would not be natural even for Jewish believers of this time, much less recently pagan believers, to easily accept the notion that all ordinary human beings could be raised from the dead simply through their sheer belief in Christ.

In the biblical stories of resurrection, there is a divinely chosen intermediary who works this miracle at the scene of the death, as in the case of Elijah and Elisha’s resurrection miracles (1 Kings 17:17-24; 2 Kings 4:8-37; 13:20-21) as well as Jesus’ own (Matthew 9:18-26; John 11:1-44). As for those who are believed never to have died at all, Enoch and Elijah, it was God who personally chose these extraordinary individuals for such a singular escape from death. While Paul insists that God personally raised Christ (v. 15), he does not argue this in order to prove that Christ was unique in God’s eyes. That would undercut his argument about Christ’s humanity. He is trying to communicate that not only Christ would benefit from this gift of eternal life. Ordinary Christians would as well.

Therefore, Paul’s insistence that God raised Christ is stated simply as a truth, which, if denied by this community, would undermine everything else he had taught them about God up to that point. His point is that God raised Christ, who was fully human, and would therefore also grant Christ’s human followers the same free gift of resurrection as well. Gone should be the days when, as in traditional Jewish thought, one believed that rewards and punishments were meted out to humans by God in this life. If we believe that, says Paul “we are of all people most to be pitied” (v. 19). The whole point of belief in the miracle of Christ’s resurrection is to believe that this grace was now available to all believers.

In order to argue further for belief in Christ’s full humanity, Paul returns to the comparison between the legacy of sin and death left to humanity through Adam and the legacy of grace and life left to the church through Christ which he also included in his letter to the Romans (Romans 5:12-21). Both death and eternal life entered this world through human agents. Interestingly, it is Adam, and not Eve, who is lifted up by Paul as the originator of human sinfulness. Perhaps this is because Paul is unconcerned with exegeting Genesis 2-3 and placing blame on the individual human who first sinned. He is trying to make the philosophical parallel between Jesus, as the quintessential “Son of Man,” or representative human being, and Adam, the paradigmatic human of Genesis 1. One represents the corrupted image of God. The other represents its restoration.

Christ is merely the first of those who will rise from the dead. As the representative human being, he represents the best of all of us. He is the human equivalent of the “first fruits,” the first and best example of the crop that ancient Israelite farmers were to offer to God. This new strain of humanity, this new crop, has as its first example the very Son of Man and Son of God himself. The implication is that now the strain of this crop is altered. It is now a new creation, and every example of this species in the future will be heir to eternal life. Christ will arise first, and then, at his coming, those who belong to him. This implies that the general resurrection of the dead will take place only at the return of Christ at the end of time. First Thessalonians 4:13-18 goes into greater detail. Here it is stated that those who have already died in the faith will rise first when Christ returns, and then those who are alive will be taken up to join them.

Concern for those who have died in the faith was a very serious issue, as Paul notes in 1 Corinthians 15:18. If one does not believe in the resurrection, then those who have already died in Christ are lost. An alternate view to this vision of the resurrection, however, exists in Christ’s words to the thief who hung beside him on the cross. Jesus’ assurance to him that “today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43) appears to show that Luke at least did not believe that one had to wait until the return of Christ to enter heaven.

Paul’s reason for the delay in the resurrection appears to be a belief that Christ must first vanquish evil in the world before the faithful dead can be raised. If the last enemy to be conquered is indeed death, this would make perfect sense. Resurrection cannot take place until death has been destroyed. Paul obviously envisioned this battle taking place on earth, at the end of time. Only when this last enemy is defeated then, can Christ’s followers join him in triumph in their new resurrection existence.

Animating Illustrations

Some of the Bible verses which refer to death as sleep:

• “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” Daniel 12:2.
• “[Jesus] said, ‘Go away; for the girl is not dead but sleeping.’ And they laughed at him.” Matthew 9:24.
• “The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised.” Matthew 27:52.
• “Then he fell on his knees and cried out, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’ When he had said this, he fell asleep.” Acts 7:60 (NIV).
• “For when David had served God’s purpose in his own generation, he fell asleep; he was buried with his fathers and his body decayed.” Acts 13:36 (NIV).
• “We do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope.” 1 Thessalonians 4:13 NIV.
• “And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continues as they were from the beginning of the creation.” 2 Peter 3:4 KJV.

A family was watching a movie of the life of Jesus on television. Their 6-year-old daughter was deeply moved as the moviemaker realistically portrayed Jesus’ crucifixion and death. Tears ran down the little girl’s face as they took him from the cross and lay him in a borrowed tomb. She watched as a guard was placed outside the tomb. And then suddenly a big smile broke on her face. She bounced up on the arm of the chair and said with great anticipation, “Now comes the good part!”

Now comes the good part!

—Kent C. Miller, “Living the resurrection life,” Trinity Presbyterian Church Web Site, Trinitypresdenton.org. Retrieved
October 23, 2003.

In its October 2003 issue, Esquire lists “Seventy Things That Make Us Very Happy to Be Alive Today.” The top seven:

1. The affordable 42-inch plasma-display TV: $3,000 and falling fast.
2. Ancient art from the cradle of civilization on eBay.
3. Botox for migraines.
4. Google image search.
5. Fast cash.
6. E-Zpass.
7. Netflix.

Tom Sawyer was quite the prankster. On one occasion he convinced Huck Finn and Joe Harper to run away. In the dead of night the three left their homes and sneaked down to the river. Along the way they picked up a frying pan, a tarp and a side of ham. Then they got on a raft and floated downstream several miles and landed on an island. There they fished and swam and played Indians and Pirates for several days. Would they stay forever? Huck and Joe were getting very homesick. Tom had a plan, though. He slipped away from the island at night and returned to town. Hiding under a bed, he found out that everybody concluded the boys had drowned in the river. A funeral was scheduled for Sunday. Clandestinely, Tom returned to the island.

On Sunday, most of the inhabitants of the town gathered at the church. The clergyman eulogized the poor departed boys. Mark Twain tells us that “the congregation became more and more moved till the whole company broke down and joined the weeping mourners in a chorus of anguished sobs.” Then there was a rustle in the balcony. A few moments later the latch clicked. The minister stared at the door, transfixed, and everyone else turned to look. The three dead boys came marching up the aisle, Tom in the lead, Joe next, and Huck in the rear. They had hidden in the unused balcony, listening to their own funeral sermon. The boys were smothered with kisses as the gloomy atmosphere turned to ecstasy.

In [the gospel of John] Jesus announces that he would leave and return. Unlike Tom Sawyer, it wouldn’t be a prank.

—Paul Howden, “Resurrection life,” May 4, 2003, St. Luke’s Reformed Episcopal Church Web Site, Stlukesrec.org.

Julian of Norwich was a great English mystic who lived in the 1300s. The book All Will Be Well (1995), based on her spirituality, tells us that “Julian’s great illness was a major conversion experience. All Christian conversion is primarily imaged by death-resurrection. It begins with baptism, but hopefully continues throughout one’s life. Any death experience is a stripping away, a dying to one’s past. The resurrection out of death is a new beginning, and new beginnings are uncluttered. The death experience forces one to sort out the essential from the expendable. People confronting life-threatening illness often undergo deep conversion experiences. They realize their time is precious. If they want to do something, they had better do it now.

“One could certainly maintain that Christian teaching in Julian’s day and even in our own is hardly uncluttered. Christians have so fussed over and nuanced the good news that sometimes it is difficult to see what is so liberating about the gospel. The liberation comes in resurrection. And Julian’s encounter with God puts things in perspective for her.”

Rev. [G.I.] Williamson was greeting his congregation following the morning service [in Fall River, Massachusetts]. In this cordial atmosphere, a number of fine Christian ladies approached Rev. Williamson and asked him when he had been saved. In other words, when was his personal crisis experience in coming to know Jesus Christ?

Before Rev. Williamson could respond, a 5-year-old girl standing beside them spurted out: “I was saved two thousand years ago” .… Her confession demonstrates tremendous insight! The ladies viewed salvation as an individual and subjective crisis experience, whereas the little girl already understood that her salvation was totally accomplished through the death and resurrection of Christ 2000 years ago. In other words, salvation is not dependent upon what I do, but upon what Christ has done.

—William D. Dennison, “Resurrection living,” New Horizons, April 2001, Opc.org.

Children's Sermon

Place a bowl of fresh fruit in front of the children — preferably a fruit that has just come into season and is now appearing in the grocery stores. Let the children know that this is the first fruit of the spring season, and because it is the “first fruits” it belongs to someone very special. Ask them if they can guess who gets the “first fruits” — do children, or grown-ups, or boys, or girls? Explain that God is supposed to be given the “first fruits,” because God is the source of fruits and vegetables and everything else that we need for life — we give this fruit to God as a way of saying thanks to God for all the good things he gives us. Then point out that Jesus is a kind of “first fruits” as well: The apostle Paul tells us that “Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died” (1 Corinthians 15:20). Let them know that Jesus is the first person to be resurrected, and we thank God today for the gift of new life that comes on Easter. Suggest that he is also our “first fruits” because he is just the first of many people who will be raised from the dead. Let them know that fresh fruit will continue to ripen in the months to come, and in the same way people who follow Jesus will continue to be given life after death in the months and years to come. Encourage the children to think of Jesus whenever they see a beautiful piece of fresh, ripe fruit, because both fruit and Jesus come from God, and God is the source of everything we need for a wonderful life, both now and forever.

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