Magyar Egyház, 1982 (61. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1982-03-01 / 3-4. szám
MAGYAR £G/l7AZ 13. oldal bidding us men know and feel that the truths which Christ has taught us about God and about the soul are higher and deeper than any which are written on the face of nature. Christ has risen. “This is the day which the Lord hath made: let us rejoice and be glad in it.” n. But today’s festival is also significant as commemorating the beginning of an Undying Life. The Resurrection was not an isolated miracle, done and over, leaving things as they had been before. The Risen Christ is not like Lazarus; marked off from others by having visited the realms of death, but knowing that he must again ere long be a tenant of the grave. Christ rises for eternity: “Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more.” His Risen Body is made up of flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of man’s nature. But It has superadded qualities. It is so spiritual that It can pass through closed doors without collision or disturbance. It is beyond the reach of those causes which slowly or swiftly down our bodies to the dust. Throned in the heavens now, as during the forty days on earth, It is endowed with the beauty and glory of an eternal youth;—“Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more.” God loosed the pains of death because it was impossible that He should be holden of it. And therefore when He had paid the mighty debt which the human family, represented by because impersonated in Him, owed to the deeply-wronged Righteousness of God, Life resumed its suspended sway in Him as in its Prince and Fountain. “Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more.” Now observe how the perpetuity of the Life of the Risen Jesus is the guarantee of the perpetuity of the Christian Church. Alone among all forms of society which bind men together, the Church of Christ is insured against utter dissolution. When our Lord was born, the civilised world was almost entirely comprised within the Roman Empire. That vast social power might well have appeared, as it did appear to the men of our Lord’s day, destined to last for ever. Since then the Roman Empire has as completely vanished from the earth as if it never had been. Other kingdoms and dynasties have risen up and have in turn gone their way. Nor is there any warrant or probability that any one of the states or forms of civil government which exist at present will always last. And there are men who tell us that the Kingdom of Christ is no exception to the rule; that it too has seen its best days and is passing. We Christians know that they are wrong; that whatever else may happen, one thing is impossible; the complete effacement of the Church of Jesus Christ. And what is our reason for this confidence? It is because we Christians know that Christ’s Church, although having likeness to civil societies of men in her outward form and mien, is unlike them inwardly and really. She strikes her roots far and deep into the World Invisible. She draws strength from sources which cannot be tested by our political or social experience. Like her Lord, she has meat to eat that men know not of. For indeed she is endowed with the Presence of Christ’s Own Undying Life. “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” Christ’s superiority to the assaults of death is the secret of His Church’s immortality: our confidence in the perpetuity of the Church is only one form of our faith in the unfailing Life of the Risen Jesus. in. Lastly, the great event of this day reveals the secret, as it displays the model, of perseverance in the life of godliness. Christ risen from death, Who dieth no more, is the model of our new life in grace. I do not mean that absolute sinlessness is attainable by any Christian. “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." But at least faithfulness in our intentions; avoidance of known sources of danger; escape from presumptuous sins; innocence, as the Psalmist has it, of the great offence: these things are possible. And they are necessary. Lives which are made up of alternate recovery and relapse: recovery perhaps during Lent, and swift relapse after Easter; or even lives lived, as it were, with one foot in the grave, without any strong vitality, with feeble prayers, with half-indulged inclinations, with weakness which may be physical, but which a regenerate will should away with; lives risen from the dead, yet without any seeming promise of endurance, what would St. Paul say of them? “Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more.” Just as He left His tomb on Easter morning, once for all , so should the soul, once risen, be dead indeed unto sin. “The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of Man, and they hear shall live;” then, be well assured that you have great need to see that you persistently set your affections on things above; that you desire passionately to live as those who are alive from the dead, “yielding your members as instruments of righeousness unto God.” Depend on it, Christians, the Risen Life of Jesus tells us what our own new life should be. Not that God, having by His grace raised us from death, forces us whether we will or no to live on continuously. That great company of associated souls, which we call the Church, has indeed received from the King of kings a charter of perpetuity. But to no mere section of the Universal Body, and much more to no single soul on this side the grave, is it said that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against” it. Judas, after sharing that Divine companionship, may sell his Master if he wills to do so. Demas, after his friendship with St. Paul, may forsake him at pleasure, through love of this present world. The Galatians, among whom Christ has been evidently set forth crucified, may yet be bewitched by the fascinations of a plausible falsehood. Paul himself may for a moment tremble, lest having preached to others, he himself should be a castaway. No force is put upon us; no man is carried up to heaven mechanically if he prefers to go downwards, or even does not sincerely desire to ascend. God allows us to employ that freedom of choice, in which our peril and our dignity as men consists, against ourselves, against Himself, if we choose to do so. But how, you ask, can we rejoice in our Risen Lord, if we are so capable, in our weakness, of being untrue to His example? I answer, because that Life is the strength as well as the model of our own. “If the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from the dead shall likewise quicken your mortal bodies, by His Spirit that dwelleth in you.” The Risen Christ in us is “the hope of glory.” And God gives us His grace, not to withdraw it, but to continue it to us, if we will not resist Him and sin it away. “If any man love Me, My Father will love him, and We will come unto him, and make Our abode with him.” “He that eateth My Flesh, and drinketh My Blood, dwelleth in Me, and I in him.” “No man,” says our Lord of the lect, “is able to pluck them out of My Father’s hand.” “Who,” asks St. Paul, “shall separate us from the love of Christ?” Plainly God desires our salvation; He gives us in and for the sake of His Blessed Son, all necessary grace; but it is for us to say whether we will respond to His bounty. Pray today, brethren, then, in the spirit of this text, that at least you may persevere, in anything you have learnt of the life of God. Perseverance is a grace, just as much as faith, or hope, or charity. The secret strength of perseverance is a share in the Glorified Life of Jesus. Perseverance may be, it will be, won by prayer for union with our Risen Saviour. Say to yourselves with the Psalmist, “It is good for me to hold me fast by God.” Cling to the Risen Lord, by entreaties which twine themselves round His Person; by Sacraments, the revealed points of vital contact with His Human Nature; by obedience and works of mercy, through which, as He says Himself, you abide in His love. Invigorate your feeble life, again and again, by that Divine Manhood which, reigning on the throne of heaven, can never more sink into the grave; and then, not in your own strength, but in His, “likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
