Because
I live, ye shall live also. — John
14, 19.
IN the labyrinth of
life, amid the many and devious paths that lead and mislead, there is a
way, at the crossroad of every human crisis, that guides us to heaven’s
happiness. In the perplexities of doubt and distrust by which
self-seeking men would overthrow the verities of life there is a truth
that serenely overtowers all the blind and sordid gropings of sin-bound
minds. Above the darkness and decay of death, clutching as it does all
that is human with its cold and blighting grasp, there is a life that
lives beyond the grave, that lives and loves when the measured tread of
marching death is heard no more.
That way, that
truth, that life, is given to us in our risen Christ and in the faith
which is ours, ours always, but ours especially on this blessed Easter
Day, when we find in Him a Savior who not only lived a life of love,
who not only died that death of immeasurable terror, but who, thank
God, burst His rock grave asunder, rose invincibly from the dead, and
today, on the anniversary of His glorious resurrection, gives us this
pledge of Easter triumph, ‘Because I live, ye shall live also.”
CHRIST’S
EASTER TRIUMPH: “I LIVE.”
Yes, Christ lives.
Let men repeat the falsehood, now almost two thousand years old, that
the body of Jesus was stolen from the grave; let them try to laugh away
His bursting forth from the tomb and propose a long and conflicting
list of fantastic and impossible theories which speak of suspended
animation and other absurdities of unbelief; let them suggest that the
people who went out to weep at the grave mistook another empty tomb for
the rock-hewn sepulcher of Joseph or that, as a German blasphemer
maintains, “the passion of a hallucinated woman gives to the world a
resurrected God”; let them declare with much detail that due to the
cool air of the tomb our Lord regained consciousness and left the
grave; let Spiritists insist that the spirit of the Lord Jesus
separated itself from His body at death and on that very day, not on
the third day, this spirit appeared to the disciples; let unbelief
blandly and openly deny the fact of the resurrection and assert with
the finality that only Biblical critics can employ, “An empty grave was
never seen by any disciple of Jesus”; — tonight I remind you, as we
stand before the sepulcher of the Arimuthean aristocrat and find its
seal broken and the great stone of overconfident unbelief rolled away,
that the fact of Christ’s resurrection, the very keystone in the arch
of our Christian faith, is one of the most definite, most repeated
assurances of divine revelation. Five hundred witnesses testifying on
one day; St. Thomas kneeling before the resurrected Lord, beholding
the wounds of the nail-marks and His pierced side; nine distinct
personal appearances — all this emphasizes that ours is not the
credulity of fanaticism, but that it is the happy conviction based on
the best human testimony and corroborated by the highest of all
evidence. Indeed, there is no fact of God’s merciful dealing with
mankind that is more frequently and forcefully attested than that truth
to which all Christendom subscribes when it confesses, “The third day
He rose again from the dead.” If the Easter-story is not actual
history, there is no history.
We have the
resurrection of Christ predicted in the Old Testament, clearly foretold
by the prophet of old in the Sixteenth Psalm, where Christ declares
that He, God’s Holy One, shall not be left in death and shall not see
corruption. Or there is the triumphant cry of victory by which palsied
Job breaks through the hidden future, “know that my Redeemer liveth.”
Verbally inspired by God, these and other prophecies are so powerful
and compelling that even if the later records disappeared or were
destroyed, we should have the assurance that our Savior, having been
“cut off from the land of the living,” would nevertheless “lengthen His
days,” to use the words with which Isaiah anticipated His resurrection.
We have the promise
of Christ Himself, who, long before He went the way of the cross,
challenged His opponents and declared that, though they might destroy
the temple of His body, yet He would raise it up again in three days;
who, when the curious and incredulous came to Him and asked for a sign,
told them that in truth they already had a sign, His resurrection, as
prefigured by the three days and three nights which Jonah experienced
within the great fish; who, in dozens of passages of comforting warmth
and majestic divinity, speaks of His deathless existence in the same
unqualified, positive promise and prediction that we find in our text,
“I live.”
We have in addition
the testimony of the holy gospels, which present the resurrection as an
accomplished fact, not once, but four times in independent accounts
from men some of whom were eye-witnesses of many of the events
recorded. These four inspired writers with their harmonious testimony,
but with details that appealed especially to their different
personalities, have transmitted a record that is so convincing, merely
from the human point of view, that even unbelievers have paid tribute
to the historical nature of the resurrection narratives.
We have finally the
overwhelming evidence presented by other New Testament writers, who
mention the Easter truth in almost one hundred passages as a cardinal
point of their teaching and consciously center their promises about
this historical occurrence. St. Paul says with definite finality, “Now
is Christ risen from the dead.” St. Peter declares, “This Jesus bath
God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses.”
Now, this truth of
the bodily resurrection of Christ, so mightily demonstrated in the
Scriptures, is not merely the victory of Christ and the corresponding
defeat of His enemies; it is rather the necessary and blessed climax of
His entire redemptive work, the seal of divine approval upon His
limitless self-giving, the benediction of God upon the sacrifice on
Calvary. Without Easter we should respect and honor the memory of
Jesus, but only as of one who died the victim of cruel circumstances, a
martyr to a futile cause. He would be a dead hero, but not a living
Savior. That is what the Apostle Paul tells us when he says, Christ be
not risen,… ye are yet in your sins.” But praise be to God, our faith
is not misplaced. Christ’s resurrection, cementing all His gracious
promises, rises up as a majestic monument to impress upon the
consciousness of all men that the cross is not the end; that, as Christ
suffered for all, as He died for all, so He also had to rise again for
all “according to the Scripture,” to complete the divine plan of
salvation, by which grace and forgiveness, full and complete, eternal
and everlasting, all-sufficient and all-embracing, are offered, without
condition or requirement, without money or without price, without good
works or even good intentions, without distinction of rank and
position, color and race, learning and culture, offered to all the
myriads of men embraced in the completed records of the history of all
lands and all ages.
Yes, He lives,
because without Him everything good and pure and noble would die. Did
you ever pause to consider what the world would be without Easter?
Probably many of you to whom today has been just another Sunday and who
see in Easter the annual fashion parade, the occasion for the yearly
visit to overcrowded churches, or the celebration of the return of
spring with all its vitalizing powers, will be ready to say that the
world would be just about the same without Easter as it is with Easter,
which came this morning and which in a few hours will be lost in the
past of all history.
But I am here this
evening to tell you that without Easter commemorating the resurrection
of Jesus Christ the best that we have in this world would be lost and
the happiness and peace of mind that millions now enjoy would be
impossible. About fifteen years ago a young Oxford graduate wrote a
fanciful story telling of the finding of an ancient inscription which
asserted that the resurrection of our Lord was a monstrous myth. When
the news of that archeological discovery was spread about, the world
became a madhouse. The restrictions of morality were thrown overboard;
happy communal life was destroyed; murder, crime, and violence in all
their terrible forms reigned; and to all appearances the breakdown of
human society was at hand. But at that critical moment it was found
that the inscription was not genuine, and the world, strengthened by
the assurance that Christ still lives, returned to its Easter faith and
happiness. Now, this is mere romance; and while we do not prove the
Easter records by the testimony of secular history, yet the
regenerative power of the Easter-message and the picture of a world
caught in chaos without the resurrected Christ is simply an application
of what St. Paul says when he declares, “If Christ be not raised, your
faith is vain,” and “we are of all men most miserable.”
The apostle is not
playing with superlatives when he thus describes the abysmal misery of
a creed that can only sob at the tomb of a dead Christ. Without a
resurrected Redeemer we are destitute of Heaven’s antidote to that
chilling and blighting paralysis that steals slowly and silently, but
always relentlessly and inevitably, into the hearts of earth-born
mortals — the fear of death. And is there a greater misery than to
stand hopeless and helpless before this grinning enemy of mankind, who
calls a sudden halt to human ambitions and spells an end in sorrow and
distress? It has been said with much force of fact that people today
often think very little of the hereafter because they are so engrossed
with the hard-fisted and material concerns of the present. Yet there
are times in every normal life when the hunger of the soul cries out in
a cringing plea for a life that does not end with death. To live, to
conquer death and death’s corruption, to be immortal and survive the
horrors of the grave, that is the sum and substance of man’s strongest
longing; but it is a goal which men alone have never reached. The
deceptions of modern Spiritism with its fraudulent seances and spirit
manifestations are vicious and destructive failures; the test-tubes
and crucibles of research are useless; the philosophies and human
deductions are strangely helpless. Men have argued that because down
through the corridor of time humanity has been guided by an “instinct
of immortality,” life after death must be a reality. They have pointed
to the butterfly emerging from a decaying chrysalis; they have taken
the scarab into their pyramids as a symbol of the life to come; they
have been perpetual witnesses of the annual revivification of nature
when the world reawakens from chilling winter to throbbing spring; and
in all this they have found an analogy to human resurrection. They have
insisted that life must live on after the grave; for without a future
existence life would betray a criminal deficiency in justice. Truth is
so repeatedly damned to the scaffold and flaunting error so secure in
its rampage of ruin that there must be a compensation for outraged
right and a retribution for triumphant wrong. But when life fades fast
and earthly props give way, the cumulative evidence for all such
argumentation fails to carry conviction. Only the Easter light can
solve the mysterious turns of time. If in our own lives there is to be
a triumphant note of confidence and indomitable hope; if the
gruesomeness of the grave and decay are to lose their paralyzing
clutch, we, too, must learn to estimate the folly of seeking the living
among the dead.
OUR
TRIUMPH: WE SHALL LIVE ALSO!
For, because Christ
lives, the promise continues, “ye shall live also.” Because Easter is
the seal of God upon the redemptive work of His beloved Son, the
shedding of His blood for the removal of our sins; because Christ was
victorious over death, the wages of sin, therefore we who believe in
Him have the divine assurance that we are not to be thrown upon the
scrap-heap of eternal discard after a few years of untimely decay, but
that our bodies, the marvelous living temples designed and created by
the divine and loving Father, though they may now be marred and
desecrated and weakened by sin and devastating disease and though they
decay in death and see corruption in the grave, are to be resurrected
and to be renewed and restored in the luster of wondrous beauty,
spiritualized and divinely fitted for the glorified eternities in the
heavenly mansions.
So when clods of
earth separate the form and features of loved ones from our view,
remember that the night of darkness will vanish when we hear the call
of consolation, “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” With firm Easter
faith we confidently anticipate the wondrous happiness of that reunion
before Heaven’s throne where severed friendships are reknit and
partings are no more. For we have this glorious promise, “If we believe
that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus
will God bring with Him.” Therefore, when disappointments and anxieties
and sorrows of various kinds and degrees all but overwhelm us, we can
raise our gaze from earth to heaven and declare with the Easter
conviction that “the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to
be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us.” We can lift
our tear-dimmed eyes to that glorified picture of immortality
envisioned by the seer of Patmos, “God Himself shall be with them and
be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and
there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall
there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away.
So, finally, when
the grim specter of death approaches, as the last grains of sand
trickle through the hour-glass of our life, in the courage of the hosts
of saints and martyrs, we are blessed with the unwavering confidence
that our Savior will sanctify our last hour with the fulfillment of His
promise, “Because I live, ye shall live also,” and enable us to be
translated from believing to seeing, chanting the Christian’s Easter
hymn of triumph, “O death, where is thy sting? 0 grave, where is thy
victory? ... Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our
Lord Jesus Christ.” Amen.
[The preceding sermon first aired in 1931,
and is in the book “The Lutheran Hour”.]