I. What did these words mean in the mouth of our Lord Jesus Christ? Before His crucifixion the words were clearly a prophecy of the Resurrection. But after the Resurrection the words must have had a fuller and, if we may dare to say it, a more literal meaning; they became to Him more literally true. "Christ, being raised from the dead, dieth no more" this was their meaning; this is indeed the crowning glory of the Easter victory: it is final.
II. We listen here again to the heart of the Church of Christ, to an utterance that comes from it again and again during the centuries of its eventful history. In three ways the Church of Christ has been from time to time brought down to all appearance to the very chambers of the dead, and from this deep depression she has risen again to newness of life. (1) There have been the distress and suffering produced by outward persecution; (2) the decay of vital convictions within her fold; (3) moral corruption. Yet whatever might be the load of passing distress and discouragement, there has reigned all along the profound conviction that the faith and life of Christendom would not die out, that the Church still might say, "I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord."
III. In these words we have the true language of the individual Christian soul whether in recovery from illness or face to face with death. The legend that the risen Lazarus was never seen to smile expresses the sense of mankind as to what becomes the man who has passed the threshold of the other world; and surely a new and peculiar seriousness is due from those who have had to pass it, and who have returned to life by what is little less than a resurrection. Like the risen Jesus, and in virtue of His resurrection power, such a life must "declare the works of the Lord."
H. P. Liddon, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxv., p. 296 (see also Contemporary Pulpit,vol. i., p. 352; and Easter Sermons,vol. i., p. 134).
References: Psalms 118:17. J. M. Neale, Sermons on Passages of the Psalms,p. 268. Psalms 118:19. J. Morgan, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xvi., p. 99.