A Taste of Spring

1 Corinthians 15:20-23

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It’s been a bit of a weird winter here in Minnesota. You get up in the morning and it’s like 20 to 30 degrees outside. You go out, you get your car started, you warm it up, you defrost the windows, maybe you chuck on another layer or maybe even a coat. But then by around noon you get outside and it’s like 50 or 60. You have to take off a couple layers. By the time you get home, you’re probably thinking it’d be a good day to put on a short sleeve shirt, go take a walk. Just kind of bask in this little taste of spring.

There’s a certain sense in which Christ is like one of those little tastes of spring. But he’s more than that. He’s a ray of light, not just from a new season, but from a new creation that we can see in his resurrection from the dead on our behalf. Paul says it in this way in First Corinthians chapter 15,

But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. (1 Corinthians 15:20-23)

There’s a certain sense in which we’re all born into a kind of spiritual winter. It’s cold and dark all around us, in our lives and within us. Outside of us, we suffer. We undergo pain and emotional trouble. And finally death comes to all of us and makes our bodies cold. But more than that, and worse than that, our hearts are also cold and dark. We do not really properly understand or grasp the goodness of God and the goodness of the kind of life he wants us to have, and even when we do understand it, in some degree, our hearts are kind of cold towards it. We don’t really want to obey it. We kind of want to fulfill it a little bit and then get it off to the side so we can get back to doing those things in the dark that we would prefer to do for ourselves, the things we like to do.

And that sort of cold and dark in us if we want to really fix it, it’s not something that we can resolve on our own end. It’s kind of like if you tried to take two pieces of ice and sort of rub them together and hope you get fire out of it, it just doesn’t work. And that doesn’t come from us individually, ultimately, we’re born into this condition. It came from the first man, Adam, who was born in a sort of spiritual spring. He walked with God in light and warmth and love. And yet he and his wife, Eve chose to eat of the fruit God had commanded them not to eat. They sinned against him. They tried to find those things apart from him. And because God is himself, light and warmth and love apart from him, we can have none of those things. We grow cold and dark.

But that doesn’t mean we’re without hope, because the love of God is such that His Son, the second person of the Trinity, entered into the world as its light and as the consuming fire, who took on our sin and death into his own body and suffered it, consumed it therein in his death. But more than that, he displayed the light and glory and love of God in his resurrection on our behalf, so that he’s a sort of taste of the spring to come, so that even now he sends us His Holy Spirit, who comes into our hearts and teaches us to know him. He enlightens us, but he also gives us warmth. He teaches us to thaw our icy hearts and to begin to really love those gifts God has given us.

And even more than that, the day will come when the resurrected Christ shines his light upon us and raises us from the dead. And when we reflect that light and warmth of God, and live in it with him in perfect love forever, by the power of His Son, by the power of His Holy Spirit in us, and for the glory of God the Father. Amen.