He is risen; He is not here.
The words of an angel
Here we have the first gospel sermon preached after the gospel had been finished on the cross, and sealed by the fact of the resurrection. Not a sentence that dropped from the speaker’s lips by accident; nor are its words mere words that came uppermost, as though some other words might have done as well. They hold the germ of which the preaching of all true evangelists is but the expansion.
I. The first title under which Christ was proclaimed by a messenger from heaven after his crucifixion.
1. Jesus. The name given at the annunciation. Now it is fulfilled. He has saved His people from their sins. Henceforth this name shall be above every name. All through our life in time let us sing with Bernard, “This name is sweetness in the mouth, music in the ear, joy in the heart;” and all through our life in eternity let us expect to penetrate deeper and deeper into the soul of its beauty, and glory, and meaning.
2. Jesus of Nazareth. A lowly title, despised by men.
3. Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified. Words used among men to express contempt, an angel is proud to use; and the last phrase of degradation which His enemies flung at Him on earth was the first title under which He is proclaimed by a flaming prophet from heaven.
II. The first notice of Christ’s resurrection. Christ’s resurrection is-
1. A mystery.
2. A miracle.
3. A victory over death.
4. A fulfilment of His promise. (G. Stanford, D. D.)
The angel’s words
I. This message brings to us the glad tidings that he who once died for us now lives for us. For the salve of convenience in the presentation of thought, we may be permitted to speak of Christ’s death as having two aspects in its saving efficacy-a heavenward and an earthward aspect,-and we assert that its power in both directions depends upon the truth that He is risen.
1. The heavenward aspect. Our benefit, in this direction, from the death of Christ, depends on our trust in Him, and not on our ability to explain precisely what His death has done. We know, at any rate, that it has done all that was necessary, and that not only has He died, but also risen again. His resurrection, sanctioned by the seal of law and all the pomp of heaven, gave to His redeeming act the most public and solemn satisfaction.
2. The earthward aspect. He who is our Saviour must be our Saviour every day, and our Saviour in every place; our Saviour from Satan, from the world, and from ourselves. Not only must we, by the heavenward efficacy of His death, have the forgiveness of sins; but, by its earthward efficacy have Him with us as a living presence, ever at work by “the renewing of the Holy Ghost.” Some time ago the agents of Anti-Christianity placed posters about London, on doors, on walls, and on wooden fences, advertising the question, “Will faith in a dead man save you?” If, as thus insinuated, the Christian faith is like this, then Christianity is a shock to common sense. Dead Hampden will not take a hand against tyranny; dead Milton will not sing; dead Wellington will not fight; dead Wilberforce will not work for the emancipation of slaves in the Soudan; a dead lawyer will not save you from legal complications; a dead doctor will not save you from the grasp of fever; and just as fantastic, and just as insane, is the conception of salvation by faith in a dead Saviour-a Saviour who is behind eighteen centuries, a Saviour who was crucified but of whom we have been told nothing more. Without the resurrection all the gospel would collapse, as an arch would collapse without the keystone.
II. The grave is the only place where the true seekers of Jesus may not find him.
1. “He is not here”: this will not apply to heaven.
2. “He is not here”: this will not apply to any earthly solitude.
3. “He is not here”: this will not apply to the walks of human life. A Christian may say of his place of business, “Here I pass most of my life; this is my soul’s battlefield; and will Christ leave me to fight my battles alone?” Never! “Here, in my commercial life,” one may say, “Christ is with me, quickening my conscience, and holding my soul in life, while I seem to be only dealing with questions of material, colour, and shape; or with distinctions of weight and currency; or with tables of value, or calculations of outlay, or rates of exchange.” It is an axiom of sanctified reason and a sovereign article of faith, that Christ most is-where Christ is most wanted; and that wherever I am, if I want Him, and seek Him, He is near to my heart as the sun is to that which it shines upon.
4. “He is not here”: this will not apply to the worshipping assembly.
5. “He is not here”: this will not apply to the place where the prodigal stands in his rags and tries to pray, but is speechless; it will not apply to the place where the backslider bemoans himself; it will not apply to the spot where some interceding soul, whose concern for some other soul has risen to the point of intolerable, bursts into the prayer, “Lord help me!”
6. “He is not here”: Christ is not in the grave. To think of Christ as among the dead would be to give up faith in Christ. Christ is the life; He cannot, therefore, be among the dead; He must, therefore, be everywhere except in the grave.
III. The seekers of Jesus have nothing to fear, even from that which may look most alarming. When we are overpowered with a sense of the awful other world, let us remember that angels and ministers of grace are all our friends. We and they are under the same Lord, at home in the same heaven, choristers in the same service.
IV. All who know the glad tidings are bound to tell them to others. (G. Stanford, D. D.)
The women at the sepulchre
Very signal and very beautiful was the devotedness of these women. They put to shame the stronger sex.
1. Their faith, it is true, was weak. They cherished no hope of finding Christ alive. They had forgotten His own express prediction.
2. Yet, if there be no faith to admire, there is great love to commend.
3. And then, what zeal was in their love. They well knew how carefully the grave had been closed; but they did not turn back at the prospect of a difficulty which they might justly have reasoned was too much for their strength. Theirs was the love which seems to itself able to break through rocks, though hope might have been perplexed had it been called upon for a reason.
4. And love had its reward. They came with the pious intent of anointing the dead, and themselves were anointed with the most fragrant tidings that ever fell on mortal ear.
I. The information given to the women.
1. Their fears are quieted. “Be not affrighted.” They had no need to be terrified at the glories of an angel, who had not been alarmed at the indignities heaped upon their Lord. They who could come seeking the crucified Nazarene in the grave were not unworthy to hold converse with celestial beings themselves.
2. But the women needed more than the quieting of those fears which the apparition of the angel had naturally excited. They wanted information as to the disappearance of Christ’s body, and this was quickly furnished. There is something remarkable in the reasoning of the angel. He calls upon the women to behold the place where their Lord’s body had lain, as though its mere desertion were evidence enough of the fact of a resurrection. And so, in real truth, it was; to all, at least, who like the women, knew and considered the characters and circumstances of the disciples of Christ. The body was gone. Either, therefore, it had been raised from the dead, or it had been removed for the purpose of deception. If removed, it could only be by some of his immediate followers and adherents. But could they have stolen the body? The supposition is absurd. In believing that Christ was raised from the dead, I believe a miracle for which there was adequate power; but in believing that Christ’s disciples stole away His body, I believe a miracle for which there was no power at all. Hence the simple fact, ascertainable by the senses, that Christ’s body had disappeared, was, and should be still, sufficient evidence of the resurrection.
3. It may not, however, have been only as proving the fact of a resurrection, that the angel directed attention to the deserted grave; but yet further, because there would be high topics of meditation and comfort suggested by the fact that it had been hallowed by the body of the Lord. Pause awhile, that you may gaze on the consecrated spot, and gather in the wonders with which it is haunted. So interwoven is the fact of Christ’s resurrection with the whole scheme of redemption-so dependent is the entire gospel, whether for its truth or its worth, upon its not being possible He should be holden of death,-that if we could but fix attention on that empty grave, we should give hope to the desponding, constancy to the wavering, warning to the careless, comfort to the sorrowing, courage to the dying. Oh, linger awhile at the tomb in holy meditation. Solemn thoughts may steal over you, and brilliant visions may pass before you. That empty vault is full of sublime, and stirring, and glorious things-things which escape the mere passer-by, but present themselves to the patient inspector.
II. The commission with which the women were entrusted.
1. The glad tidings were not for them alone; and the angel directs them to hasten at once to give intelligence of the glorious fact. Were not these women highly honoured? Were they not well recompensed for their zeal and love? They became apostles to the apostles themselves; they first preached the resurrection to those who were to preach it to the farthest ends of the earth. As the first news of death came by woman, by woman came the first news of resurrection.
2. What a breaking forth of long-suffering and forgiving love is there in the fact, that the tidings were first sent to the disciples of the Lord. It seems to have been the first object of the risen Redeemer to quiet the apprehensions of His followers to assure them that so far from feeling sternly towards them on account of their desertion, He had returned to life for their comfort and welfare. Christ did not think little of having been deserted; but He knew how His disciples sorrowed for their fault; that they loved Him sincerely, notwithstanding their having been overcome by fear; and He gave a proof of His readiness to forgive and welcome the backslider, whensoever there is compunction of heart, in sending the first tidings of His resurrection to the men who had all forsaken Him and fled.
3. And this were but little. The disciples as a body had indeed played the coward; yet they had rather avoided standing forth in His defence, than shrunk from Him in open apostacy. One only had done that-denied his Lord-denied Him thrice, with all that was vehement and blasphemous in expression. Alas for Peter! But oh! the gracious consideration of Christi for indeed it is His voice which must be recognized in the voice of the angel: “Go your way; tell His disciples and Peter.” Those two words-“and Peter”-thrown into the commission are, I might almost say, a gospel in themselves. To all repentant backsliders, Easter brings glad tidings of great joy.
III. The promise.
1. There was an appropriateness in the selection of Galilee for this meeting of our Lord with His apostles, forasmuch as he was likely to be known to numbers there, He having been brought up in Nazareth, a city of Galilee, having wrought His first miracle in Cana of Galilee, and having laboured most abundantly in Capernaum and the neighbouring coast.
2. Moreover, as Galilee was called “Galilee of the Gentiles,” from its proximity to the territories of the heathen, this fixing the place of meeting on the confines of Judea might be intended to mark that all men had an interest in the fact of the resurrection, or that the blessings of the new dispensation were not to be restricted as had been those of the old.
3. And if it were only to the then living disciples that the promise pertained, of meeting their risen Lord in Galilee, assuredly some place there is of which it may be said to the Church in every age-“There shall ye see Him.” “He goeth before you” is, and always will be, the message to the Church. (H. Melvill, B. D.)
The holy women’s Easter and ours
Ah! my brethren, let us see whether, in our annual pilgrimage to the grave of our Lord, we have anything of the love which shows so conspicuously in these zealous women. It is so easy for us to keep Easter with high pomp and gratulation, coming to a tomb which we know to be empty, because death has been vanquished in his own domain, that we may readily overlook the strength of that affection which glowed fervently towards Christ whilst supposed to be dead-dead, too, with every circumstance of indignity and shame. When now the Church marshals her children in solemn precession, and leads them up to the place where the Lord was laid, there is a thorough consciousness that mourning is about to be turned into joy, and all remembrance of Christ’s having died as a malefactor, is perhaps lost in the feeling of His having come forth as the resurrection and the life. What would it be, if as yet we only knew Him as “Jesus of Nazareth which was crucified,” and not as the Son of God who stripped the grave of all victory? Is it not too much the fact that (if such expressions may be used) we tolerate the humiliation of Christ, in consideration of His subsequent triumph, just as we can overlook the circumstance of a man’s having been born a beggar, when we know him to have become a prince? We put up with, though we dislike, the cross, because we know that it conducted to a throne. And yet what ought so to endear to us the Redeemer, as the shame and the sorrow which He endured on our behalf? When ought He to seem so precious in our eyes as when, “a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” He “gives His back to the smiters, and His cheeks to them that pluck off the hair?” Oh! that heart has scarcely yet been touched with celestial fire, which is forced to turn from Christ in His humility to Christ in His glory, ere it can be kindled into admiration and devotedness. (H. Melvill, B. D.)
The place where they laid the Lord
I. Consider the manner in which He was committed there.
1. He was committed there by persons of remarkably interesting character. Joseph of Arimathea: Nicodemus.
2. He was committed there with many tokens of regard and affection.
3. He was committed there with unostentatious quietness and privacy.
II. Consider the ends which, by his committal to it, were accomplished there.
1. His committal to that place confirmed the reality of His death.
2. His committal to that place fulfilled the declarations of ancient prophecies and types.
3. His committal there completed the abasement of His humiliation.
4. His committal has delightfully softened and mitigated the terrors of the grave for His people.
5. By His committal there He immediately and necessarily introduced His own mediatorial exaltation and empire. This was the last step towards His exaltation; it provided for and secured it.
III. Learn the lessons which are inculcated there.
1. The tenderness and devotedness of His love.
2. The duty of unreserved devotedness to His will.
3. The abounding consolations we possess, in reflecting on the departure of our Christian friends, and in anticipating our own. (James Parsons.)
The risen Christ
Eight hundred years after Edward I was buried, they brought up his body and they found that he still lay with a crown on his head. More than eighteen hundred years have passed, and I look into the grave of my dead King, and I see not only a crown, but “on his head are many crowns.” And what is more, He is rising. Yea, He has risen! Ye who came to the grave weeping, go away rejoicing. Let your dirges now change to anthems. He lives! Take off the blackness from the gates of the morning. He lives! Let earth and heaven keep jubilee. He lives! I know that my Redeemer lives. For whom that battle and that victory? For whom? not you. (Dr. Talmage.)
The lessons of the empty grave
I. It is full of consolations.
1. It proclaims that life reigneth. The sorrow of earth is the seeming supremacy of death. The world’s creed is a belief in death as the Lord God Almighty, the terror and destroyer of all things. But the empty grave of Christ teaches us that not death, but life, reigns.
2. It shows that love reigns. Death seems to suggest indifference on God’s part to human woe. The resurrection tells a very different tale.
3. It restores hope to man. What Christ wins for Himself He wins for all.
4. It tells of redemption being perfected. It is accepted by God; or the great “Prisoner of Hope” would not have been discharged. And, accepted, Christ rises to reign, from a higher vantage ground and with new sovereignty. We have a Saviour now on the throne of all things.
II. Lessons on life and duty.
1. Self-sacrifice is the secret of goodness, success, and joy. The way of the cross always leads to some heaven. No love is ever lost, nor any sacrifice ever fruitless.
2. Nothing can by any means harm the good. By doing wrong we inflict the only thing worth calling injury upon ourselves. (R. Glover.)
The empty tomb
He lies there no longer. He was not lying there when the angel addressed Mary Magdalene. With most tombs the interest consists in the fact that all that is mortal of the saint, or hero, or near relative, rests beneath the stone or the sod on which we gaze. Of our Lord’s sepulchre the ruling interest is that He no longer tenants it. It is not as the place in which He lies, it is not even chiefly as the place wherein He lay, it is as the place from which He rose-that the tomb of Jesus speaks to faith. (Canon Liddon.)
Importance of the resurrection to the Christian
Let us suppose-it is a terrible thing for a Christian even to suppose-but let us suppose that our Lord Jesus Christ had keen betrayed, tried, condemned to death, and crucified; that He had died on the cross, and had been buffed; and that, instead of rising the third day, He had lain on in His grave day after day, week after week, year after year, until corruption and the worm had done their work, and nothing was left of His bodily frame save perhaps a skull and a few bones and a little dust. Let us suppose that that was proved to have happened to Him which will happen to you and me, which does happen as a matter of course to the sons of men, to the wealthy and to the poor, to the wise and the thoughtless, to the young and the old,-that which certainly happened to all the other founders of religion and martyrs, to Socrates and Confucius and Mohammed and Marcus Aurelius; what would be the result on the claims and works of the Christian religion? If anything is certain about the teaching of our Lord, it is certain that He foretold His resurrection, and that He pointed to it as being a coming proof of His being what He claimed to be. If He had not risen, His authority would have been fatally discredited; He would have stood forth in human history-may He forgive me for saying it-as a bombastic pretender to supernatural sanctions which He could not command. If He had not risen, what would have been the meaning of His death? Even if it still retained the character of a martyrdom, it would have been only a martyrdom. It could not have been supposed to have any effect in the invisible world: to be in any sense a propitiation for human sin. The atoning virtue which, as we Christians believe, attaches to it, depends on the fact that He who died was more than man, and that He was more than man was made clear to the world by His resurrection. As St. Paul tells the Romans, He was powerfully declared to be the Son of God in respect of His holy and Divine nature by His resurrection from the dead. If He had rotted in His grave, what must we have thought of His character as a religious teacher? He said a great deal about Himself which is inconsistent with truthfulness and modesty in a mere man. He told us men to love Him, to trust Him, to believe in Him, to believe that He was the way, the truth, and the life, to believe that He was in God the Father, and the Father in Him, to believe that one day He would be seen sitting on the right hand of God, and coming in the clouds of heaven. What should we think of language of this kind in the mouth of the very best man whom we have ever known? What should we think of it in our Lord Himself, if He was, after all, not merely, as He was, one of ourselves, but also, nothing more? He proved that He had a right to use this language when, after dying on the cross, at His own appointed time He rose from the dead. But it is His resurrection which enables us to think that He could speak thus without being intolerably conceited or profane. Faith in the resurrection is the very keystone of the arch of Christian faith, and, when it is removed, all must inevitably crumble into ruin. The idea that the spiritual teaching, that the lofty moral character of our Lord, will survive faith in His resurrection, is one of those phantoms to which men cling when they are themselves, consciously or unconsciously, losing faith, and have not yet thought out the consequences of the loss. St. Paul knew what he was doing, when he made Christianity answer with its life for the truth of the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:14). (Canon Liddon.)
Christ’s resurrection the Christian’s hope
Christ is risen. O how do those words change the whole aspect of human life! The sunlight that gleams forth after the world has been drenched, and dashed, and terrified with the black thunder drops, reawakening the song of birds and reilluminating the bloom of the folded flowers, does not more gloriously transfigure the landscape than these words transfigure the life of man. Nothing short of this could be our pledge and proof that we also shall arise. We are not left to dim intimations of it from the reminiscences of childhood; vague hopes of it in exalted moments; splendid guesses of it in ancient pages; faint analogies of it from the dawn of day, and the renovation of spring, and the quickened grain, and the butterfly shaking itself free of the enclosing chrysalis to wave its wings in the glories of summer light: all this might create a longing, the sense of some far-off possibility in a few chosen souls, but not for all the weary and suffering sons of humanity a permanent and ennobling conviction, a sure and certain hope. But Christ is risen, and we have it now; a thought to comfort us in the gloom of adversity, a belief to raise us into the high privilege of sons of God. They that are fallen asleep in Christ are not perished. Look into the Saviour’s empty and angel-haunted tomb; He hath burst for us the bonds of the prison house; He hath shattered at a touch the iron bars and brazen gates; He hath rifled the house of the spoiler, and torn away the serpent’s sting; “He is risen; He is not here.” They that sleep in all those narrow graves shall wake again, shall rise again. In innumerable myriads from the earth, and from the river, and from the rolling waves of the mighty sea, shall they start up at the sounding of that angel trumpet; from peaceful churchyards, from bloody battlefields, from the catacomb and from the pyramid, from the marble monument and the mountain cave, great and small, saint and prophet and apostle, and thronging multitudes of unknown martyrs and unrewarded heroes, in every age and every climate, on whose forehead was the Lamb’s seal-they shall come forth from the power of death and hell. This is the Christian’s hope, and thus we not only triumph over the enemy, but profit by him, wringing out of his curse a blessing, out of his prison a coronation and a home. (Archdeacon Farrar.)
Christ’s resurrection
Christ is the resurrection; therefore its source and spring, its author and finisher, in a sense in which no other can be. When He emerged from the tomb on the morning of the world’s great Sabbath, He brought life and immortality with Him, by which the pearls of the deep sea, before awaiting the plunge of the diver, the treasures, before lying in the dark mine, were by Him seized and brought up to the light of day. Life and immortality were brought to light by the gospel, and with this knowledge in our minds, we seem to stand by the Saviour’s broken sepulchre, just as a man stands upon the shelving brink of the precipice from which some friendly hand has snatched him, shuddering as he thinks of the awful death that he has only just escaped. Look, and see the place where the Lord lay, and tremble-but rejoice with trembling. Is the stone there yet? If it is, if the stone is not yet rolled away, if the grave clothes and spices yet shroud and embalm the corpse, then let the darkness come and blot out the sun, and bid a long, long good-night to all the world’s hopes of life, for existence is a feverish dream, and death shall be its ghastly but its welcome end. “But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that slept.” (W. M. Punshon, D. D.)
The triumph of good
As a noble sonata, whose melodies are broken with pathetic minors and clanging discords, ends in a burst of triumphant harmony, so the story of the life of Jesus, beset with sins and piteous with sorrows, is crowned at last with the glory of His exaltation. (C. M. Southgate.)
The absent corpse
When we wander through a graveyard and look at the tombstones, or go into the church and examine the old monuments, we see one heading to them all: “Hic jacet,” or “Here lies.” Then follows the name, with date of death, and perhaps some praise of the good qualities of the departed. But how totally different is the epitaph on the tomb of Jesus! It is not written in gold, nor cut in stone; it is spoken by the mouth of an angel, and it is the exact reverse of what is put on all other tombs: “He is not here!” (S. Baring Gould, M. A.)
The resurrection guarantees success to Christianity
During the years that followed the outbreak of the French revolution, and the revolt against Christianity which accompanied it, there was an extraordinary activity in some sections of French society directed to projecting a religion that might, it was hoped, take the place of Christianity. New philanthropic enthusiasms, new speculative enthusiasms, were quite the order of the day. On one occasion a projector of one of these schemes came to Talleyrand, who, you will remember, was a bishop who had turned sceptic, and so had devoted himself to polities; but whatever is to be said of him, he was possessed in a very remarkable degree of a keen perception of the proportion of things, and of what is and is not possible in this human world. Well, his visitor observed, by way of complaint to Talleyrand, how hard it was to start a new religion, even though its tenets and its efforts were obviously directed to promoting the social and personal improvement of mankind. “Surely,” said Talleyrand, with a fine smile, “surely it cannot be so difficult as you think.” “How so?” said his friend. “Why,” he replied, “the matter is simple; you have only to get yourself crucified, or anyhow put to death, and then, at your own time to rise from the dead, and you will have no difficulty.” (Canon Liddon.)