Homily For The Eleventh Sunday after Trinity 2025
The Epistle appointed for the past few weeks has been taken from First Corinthians. St. Paul is contending with heresies and perversion with the Corinthian Church. It appears in addition to sexual immorality, which plagued the Corinthians, they found themselves struggling to believe in the reality of the resurrection. That there could be an existence of the person after death. They shared the same sort of intellectual mindset as the Sadducees - the theological liberals of Judaism in Jesus on time. They, too, disbelieved that there was a resurrection of the dead. Recall the time the Sadducees tried to trap our Lord by referencing the hypothetical situation in which one woman is married in sequence to seven brothers, each who died without leaving children. They asked Jesus whose wife she would be in the resurrection, hoping to show what the absurdity, in their minds, of a belief in the resurrection.
Jesus confronts them with their ignorance of God, their ignorance of what the resurrection is really about. For Jesus, and for Paul in our Epistle, the physical resurrection of Jesus on that Easter Sunday is an essential fact of the faith. There is no hope without that historic reality. Here, St. Paul speaks to the Corinthians about the connection of forgetfulness to apostasy, which is a threat for all God’s people. He made a point of mentioning it in I Corinthians 10, where he reminded Christians of the gifts of God to those in the Wilderness, those delivered from Pharoah’s bondage. All were saved through the waters of the Red Sea, all ate of manna, all partook of the water coming from the Rock. Faithful and unfaithful among the Israelites had the same circumstances, but with many God was not pleased because they forgot their redemption. They forgot the weight of slavery and instead fantasized about the produce of Egypt - onions, leeks, garlic and so on. God had saved them from Egypt, but many preferred the sensuality of food and drink in Egypt to freedom in God’s new work of redemption.
St. Paul reaffirms in our Epistle the importance of believing that Jesus Christ died for our sins - according to the Scriptures. That he rose again the third day - according to the Scriptures. In Greek, “rose again” is better translated as “hath risen” - meaning that the resurrection began on that Easter but its consequences, its effects are still felt in the present. We have the later record of how Jesus opened the hearts and minds of the disciples to see how all the law and prophets pointed to him. Here, at the midpoint of the Trinity Season, we are reminded of the centrality of the Resurrection and how the Scriptures point to Jesus. Moreover, we are reminded of the grace that calls us to live in obedience to God, compels us to look to Jesus for the power, the strength to live the Christian life. The power to live the Christian life is not conjured up, worked up by the Christian’s emotion.
The power to live the Christian life is received from the Holy Spirit, who raised Christ from the dead. The Holy Spirit strengthens us when we meditate on the truth, the historic fact of Christ’s conquest over death.
The Scriptures, that being the Hebrew Old Testament - bear witness to Christ both dying for sin and being raised again to new life. The Scriptures tell us this is true. Not only that, but St. Paul acknowledges the lesser authority of human eye-witnesses when first Peter, then the 12 apostles then 500 more Christians, who at the time St. Paul was writing were alive to testify to what they had seen, saw, touched and heard the truest evidence of our Lord’s physical resurrection. Or as St. John says in the very beginning of his first General Epistle - That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life.
In making reference to these witnesses, St. Paul is reminding the Corinthians that his preaching of the crucifixion and resurrection was not his novel invention but the conviction, the experience of hundreds of devout followers. It is the common and necessary belief of all followers of Jesus, for all our hope is founded upon the fact that Jesus was raised from the dead.
Here, in the Epistle, St. Paul speaks to his unworthiness to be an apostle. Christ was revealed to him on the Road to Damascus as St. Paul, then known as Saul, was attempting to destroy the bride of Christ, the Church. This is how much stake St. Paul put in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is the power of God to transform our present realities. St Paul, says here in our Epistle as he speaks of his own conversion and ministry, “But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.
Therefore whether it were I or they, so we preach, and so ye believed.” The grace of God, known through God’s love to us, undeserved, unmerited, is bestowed upon us. Unmerited favor causes the Apostle “labor more abundantly”, that is, to strive with intensity, but at the same time to confess the mystery, that such power is the “grace of God within me.” It is God’s work, in all time and in all places that fulfills His will. Indeed, it is God’s grace within the faithful believer that sustains faith. The grace of God enables the Apostle to admit readily that whether they preach, I preach, someone else, it is the power of God bestowed, granted upon us and to us. This is what matters. The resurrection of Jesus is an essential element of right belief - what scholars call “orthodoxy”. Right living - orthopraxy - is the natural result of the grace of God properly received.
It works a transformation in the heart of one who hears and believes. In our Gospel, Jesus tells a story of two men in the temple - one a Pharisee who touted his righteousness to God as though God was ignorant of it - I fast, I tithe, I give of all I possess, I am better than others like that tax collector in the corner. Jesus then tells about the simplicity of the tax collector’s prayer and the assessment of the all-knowing, all-seeing God of heaven. We read in our Gospel that the publican would not even look up but beat his chest and said - God, be merciful to me, a sinner. Jesus says God Almighty declared that the publican was declared righteous rather than the Pharisee. Notice the penitent spirit of St. Paul himself, who could catalog ritual righteousness akin to the Pharisee in the Gospel but instead focused on the grace of God that sought out one born out of due time, absent from the initial company of the apostles, one who was the least because he persecuted the Church. He harmed the Bride of Christ for which our Lord was content to suffer, die and be resurrected.
Yet, God had forgiven him despite his struggle to forgive himself as he relives the painful memory of his past sin. It is as though St. Paul is beating his chest in penitence and repeating his need of God’s grace and God’s abundance of providing through the objective, concrete, historical reality of Christ’s redemptive suffering and resurrection.
So, at this mid-point in Trinity season, let us truly believe what we confess - that the third day Christ rose again according the scriptures. We do so by not looking at our perceived righteousness, not looking to ourselves but resting in the objective fact of Christ’s resurrection- and meditating on what it means for us. His resurrection is assurance of our resurrection to life eternal, the downpayment as it were, for the hope of the life to come. The truth of the resurrection calls us to live a new life in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Instead of measuring ourselves against our brethren in comparative righteousness, we are called to action, exertion because of what God has done in the resurrection and what the Lord is doing through his Church in the present. Meditate on these words in St. Paul’s epistle to the Philippians: work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. 13 For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. The power of the Resurrection, that essential of the Christian faith, beckons us to work, labor more abundantly knowing God is really the one who is giving us the desire and power to live in obedience. Truly to do what is his good pleasure. May the power of Christ’s resurrection bring peace to our hearts and compel us to obedience to God’s will and commandment. Amen.
