THE GOSPEL OF THE RESURRECTION
‘Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Which according to His abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.’
It was St. Peter who preached the first sermon on the Resurrection, immediately after it had happened; and his audience was the multitude assembled on the Day of Pentecost, who could have refuted him, had he been impressing on them either a delusion or an invention. ‘Whom God hath raised up,’ he said, ‘having loosed the pains of death; because it was not possible that He should be holden of it.’ The result was decisive and significant: ‘Then they that gladly received His Word were baptized; and the same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls.’ And here we have the same St. Peter nearly thirty years afterwards, in spite of all the unceasing persecution and opposition that he had undergone, basing his message to the Christian Churches on his abiding thankfulness to God, ‘which, according to His abundant mercy, hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the Resurrection of Christ Jesus from the dead.’ His appreciation of what had happened had only increased in intensity as the years of preaching and conversion had rolled on.
I. Is man a personal individual capable of immortal life?—That is the immense question which the Voice of God answers in every return of Easter. It is impossible, even in imagination, to divest the progress of Christian civilisation from its faithful acceptance of that Voice of God. Upon that acceptance depends the real sanction of all that is valuable even in worldly knowledge; still more all that is valuable in the daily conduct and motives of us frail mortal creatures; more than anything else whatever is of value in those higher thoughts which we cannot help having about God, and destiny, and mystery! Unless we can answer this momentous question, we have to say good-bye to all that is most interesting to us in our common life together as members of one nation and people, and to all that is of most importance to us as having minds that can reason and argue. It was because the Greeks and Romans could not, and would not, answer that question that there was neither hope in their national life, nor force in their moral conduct; and they sank into selfishness, despair, and ruin. If we are indeed destined to an eternal, individual existence, then a glorious responsibility belongs to all our present affections, actions, and pursuits; but if our whole being is confined within the circle of a few fleeting years, then we are only a riddle, an appearance in the universe which can never have any explanation; human life becomes a puzzle without any value, the world appears a scene of mere confusion, virtue in woman as well as in man becomes a mere delusion, the Creator an unkind and capricious, if really a conscious, Being, and all His plans and arrangements nothing but a blind self-evolving maze, into which and out of which none can find their way. ‘If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain.’ ‘Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.’
II. Think of what we should be without this answer of God to our perplexities, and if we were robbed of this priceless inheritance of well-grounded belief!
(a) We should become perfectly reckless about the future. There would be nothing to check our passions and excesses. The blot on Christian civilisation are those who care for none of these things. We should be like them. A short life and a merry, would be our motto; and it would be without scruple. Knowing how easily and painlessly life can be taken away, we should be perfectly ready to commit suicide at the first serious disappointment.
(b) We should become indifferent to everything high, good, noble, elevating. Present contentment and ease would be all for which we should care.
(c) How terribly selfish we should be! Why should we trouble ourselves at the tale of distress? To please ourselves as much as we could during the short space of our existence would be the common and general aim. Why care for humanity, when it would be, like ourselves, on the same level as the beasts that perish?
(d) There would be no reason why we should obey the Commandments. People think they would go on just as they do now under the sanctions of Christian belief, while they withdraw that belief; nothing can be more certain than that they would not so continue. The policeman would be the only authority that we should fear. We could blame neither man nor woman for every one of those degrading acts which personal responsibility has forced us to recognise as sin. If there were no future life, why should they refrain? Possibly some persons would think less well of them, but they would be forgotten in less than twenty years after they were dead.
(e) Our whole existence, in short, would be an enigma that had no answer—blind, dark, hopeless. Science, instead of unfolding the laws of God for our good, would be a terrible occupation, for it would remind us how the great remorseless organism of the universe would go grinding on, countless ages after we had ceased to be. What would it matter if a man were a great discoverer or benefactor? He would die like everybody else, and be forgotten, and be as if he had never been. It would hardly be worth while for a man to believe in God; God would become a mere necessary presupposition; if it was still supposed that there was such a Being, His nature would be veiled in impenetrable and unbroken darkness, and nobody would trouble about Him. Everywhere, as it was in the days of the faithless Roman Empire, would be one grim, general gloom and despair. The death of our friends would be a loss which, if we loved them, would stun us. Certain that they had come to an abrupt end, and that by no possibility could we see them again, our despair would be in proportion to our affection.
III. The voice of God in the resurrection of His Son has given the lie to this horrible opinion. ‘Now is Christ risen from the dead.’ The belief in the life beyond the grave is the common inheritance of every race of mankind; and the resurrection of the Son of God, for which the apostles and martyrs died, is the hand of God setting His seal to this common inheritance. ‘He that hath ears to hear, let him hear!’ If you doubt that voice of God, if there is not a spiritual life for men pouring out ever fresh from the risen life of the Redeemer, how can you possibly account for the history of the Kingdom of Christ, and all its glorious and peaceful conquests, in spite of every possible hindrance and drawback? How can you account for the history of the world and civilisation during the past eighteen centuries, to which in all human experience there is no parallel? How can you account for the redeemed life, and the conquest of self, and the great unselfish human love, and the spiritual beauty, and the wonderful and beneficent graces, which you see in countless individual Christian men and women—your wife, your mother, your little child, your friend? How can you account for that most true and most desirable of all experiences, ‘the peace of God that passeth all understanding’? We have listened to that voice of God, and to us it is the most priceless and vital of all our convictions. It has been to us as life from the dead; we have it day by day, and not found it wanting. I do not ask you to be always thinking of these fundamental truths; that would be impossible and overwhelming. But I do ask you, as the voice of God speaks to you anew and afresh on each Easter Day, to listen to it reverently and thankfully, and from the most secret chambers of your heart to say, Amen! And then I ask you to live with this strong conviction deep down in your inmost being: that you have each a personal and individual existence, that there is an Almighty Father, that He has spoken to us by His Son, that this Son has brought life and immortality to light, and that we have been redeemed by Him to be His grateful and radiant sons and daughters!
—Archdeacon William Sinclair.
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‘The calm, cautious, broad-minded German critic Ewald writes: “Nothing stands more historically certain than that Jesus rose from the dead, and appeared again to His followers; or than that their seeing Him thus again was the beginning of a higher faith, and all their Christian work in the world. It is equally certain that they thus saw Him, not as a common man, or as a shade or ghost risen from the grave; but as the only Son of God, already more than man at once in nature and power; and that all who thus beheld Him recognised at once and instinctively His unique Divine dignity, and firmly believed in it thenceforth. The twelve and others had, indeed, learned to look on Him, even in life, as the true Messianic King and the Son of God; but from the moment of His reappearing they recognised more clearly and fully the Divine side of His nature, and saw in Him the Conqueror of death. Yet the two pictures of Him thus fixed in their minds were, in their essence, identical. That former familiar appearance of the earthly Christ, and this higher vision of Him, with its depth of emotion and ecstatic joy, were so interrelated that, even in the first days or weeks after His death, they could never have seen in Him the heavenly Messiah, if they had not first known Him so well as the earthly.” ’
(SECOND OUTLINE)
THE FESTIVAL OF HOPE
The season of Easter is essentially the season of Hope. What the spring, with its returning life and promise of coming glory, is to the natural year and to the life of nature, that is the season of Easter to the ecclesiastical year and to the spiritual life of man. The very word ‘Easter’ is derived from the name of a Saxon goddess, whose festival was that of the returning spring. And the Fathers of our Church grafted the Christian festival of the resurrection of Christ upon the pagan festival of the resurrection of nature. The one spoke only of the sure and certain hope of animal and vegetable life; the other speaks to all Christians of the sure and certain hope of life everlasting. Both were festivals of Hope—the one of hope temporal, the other of hope eternal.
I. Hope belongs to the very nature of man’s moral being.—‘Hope,’ says the poet, ‘springs eternal in the human breast’ (Pope). ‘Those who have nothing else,’ says the ancient philosopher, ‘have hope’ (Thales). ‘O blessed hope,’ cries another, ‘sole boon of man: whereby, on his straight prison walls, are painted beautiful far-stretching landscapes; and into the night of very death is shed holiest dawn!’ Without hope life is not worth living. The statistics of suicide are the statistics of those who have lost hope. The miserable have no other medicine except hope; and when hope is gone all love of life is gone. But, with Hope, that ‘hovering angel girt with golden wings,’ infinite possibilities are before us. So long as a man has hope he is never defeated in the battle of life.
II. Hope is just as necessary in the spiritual and eternal life of man.—If in this life only we have hope we are wretched indeed. The instinct of immortality has been well-nigh universal. To this cause—the belief that the death of the body did not involve the extinction of the soul—may be assigned such ancient customs as the embalming of Egyptian mummies, and the placing in the graves of dead heroes their rude implements of the chase. But this belief in a life after death was but a faint and feeble hope. It was reserved for Christ to convert what was before He came but a ‘splendid guess, into an absolute certainty.’ He brought life and immortality to light. And He did so not merely by His statements about the reality of the life beyond the grave—by such consoling utterances as ‘In My Father’s house are many mansions’—not merely by His teaching on this the most important of all possible subjects, but also by the historic fact of His own resurrection from the dead. For if Christ had not risen, and so ‘overcome death, and opened for us the gates of everlasting life,’ then His words about the life beyond, and the immortality of man, would have had no greater authority than the words of the philosopher Plato. Immortality would still be only a beautiful probability, and heaven only a possible perhaps. We should have a hope indeed, but a hope how poor and feeble in comparison with that ‘lively hope’ which God, in His abundant mercy, has given us by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
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‘At the early age of forty-four, our great Puritan poet, John Milton, became totally blind. But so far from giving way to querulous despair, he says:—
Yet I argue not
Against Heav’n’s hand or will, nor bate one jot
Of heart or hope; but still bear up, and steer
Right onward.
And it was after this appalling affliction had overtaken him that he gave to the world his immortal poems of “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise Regained.” ’