"There is a space, there is an interval between Christ’s rising and ours because God will not abandon what he has made."

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The lectionary epistle for this coming Sunday is from Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth, 15.1-11:

“Now I want you to understand, brothers and sisters, 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, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you--unless you have come to believe in vain. For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them,though it was not I but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you believed.”

Critically, Paul’s argument does not end with verse eleven.

“But now,” Paul writes, and with that temporal adverb hitched to that tiny conjunction he swings up from the gloom and the dark and the doubt and the pitiable possibility into a blinding light.

“But now Christ has been raised from the dead!” 

And we can do the same! 

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