The Bee Sting That Lost Its Power

In 2019, a beekeeper named Sarah Mapelli stood on a stage in Portland, Oregon, with twenty thousand honeybees crawling across her bare skin. The audience gasped. Every instinct screamed danger — those bees could deliver thousands of stings. But Mapelli moved slowly, almost dancing, completely calm. She knew something the audience didn't: when bees swarm like that, they gorge themselves on honey before leaving the hive. Their abdomens are so full they physically cannot curl to sting. The weapon is still there. The stinger still exists. But it has no power.

Paul stood before the Corinthian church and asked death the most audacious question in Scripture: "Where, O death, is your sting?" He wasn't pretending death doesn't exist. He could see the stinger. He had buried friends, faced execution threats, been left for dead outside Lystra. Death was real, and he knew it.

But Paul also knew what the cross and the empty tomb had done. Christ gorged death on Himself — absorbed its full venom on a Friday afternoon — and when He walked out of that grave on Sunday morning, death's stinger was still there, but it could no longer curl. It lost its power to deliver the fatal wound.

Every funeral we attend, death buzzes around us, trying to terrify. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ — the sting has been spent. The worst death could do, it already did. And it wasn't enough.