I. It is a very wonderful fact, very startling at first sight to those who have not steadily considered it, that the chief ordinance of Christianity is the commemoration and proclamation of a death. Festivals of the nativity, of the resurrection, of the ascension, however beautiful may be their meaning and benign their influence, are at any rate not of Divine institution. The feast which Christ instituted is the proclamation to all ages of His death. Most surely our Lord must have intended to indicate thereby that feature of His work which He conceived to be in most vital relation to the accomplishment of His great hope for man. The death rather than the life, the life as looking on to the death and to all that was to spring from it, and the death as the most fruitful act and the most powerful instrument of His love, must be the chief fountain of peace, joy, and hope for mankind.
II. If this be true, if the Lord's death be the most luminous, the most blessed, the most quickening act of His life, truly and most deeply a birth into the eternal sphere, it casts most beautiful light upon our life and our death. The man who knew most deeply God's counsel about life, whose human life grew richer, grander, more pregnant with a glorious hope as the earthly element dropped piece-meal into the tomb, made this his aspiration and his prayer "That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death." No lives are so drearily cheerless as those which have been successful in the sole pursuit of gold; no future so blank as theirs, no eternity so dread. Look round on your supremely successful men. Estimate the number of rays of pure joy that shine upon their hearts and break the dreary gloom of their lives, and compare them with the man whose life is one deep-voiced hymn of triumph "I thank my God, through Jesus Christ my Lord," because I have learnt from Him, through His death, to call that life, and that only, which is eternal.
J. Baldwin Brown, The Sunday Afternoon,p. 219.
References: 1 Corinthians 11:26. G. Calthrop, Pulpit Recollections,p. 207; W. Cunningham, Sermons,p. 356; S. Minton, Christian World Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 42; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. i., p. 283; vol. iv., p. 224; vol. vi., p. 83; T. Arnold, Sermons,vol. iv., p. 228; F. D. Maurice, Sermons,vol. iv., p. 111; T. Birkett Dover, A Lent Manual,p. 151; Sermons on the Catechism,p. 242.