Magyar Egyház, 1982 (61. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1982-03-01 / 3-4. szám

VAGYAK GGYtmi

12. oldal

MAGYAR

CHURCH

THE UNDYING ONE

“Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more.” —Romans 6:9

Easter Day is a day on which the best Christians are hardly in a mood for sermons. Their hearts are full of joy, and they come to church, as they would go to a wedding; to make their congratulations; to utter their hymns of joy and praise to the King of kings on the anniversary of His great victory. Their hearts say more to them than any fellow-man can possibly say; and much of what their hearts tell them cannot well be rendered into human language. They wish to be left alone with their joy: sermons, they say, are very well in seasons and on days of penitence: but when the heart is bursting with triumphant emotion, sermons either lag behind our feelings or are out of harmony with them. And for this kind of reason, it has been said that a sermon on Easter Day requires an apology.

It is not my business to dispute the existence of a state of mind such as this. There are Christians, no doubt, who in some sort, in varying degrees, even while here on earth, anticipate heaven. They know what may be known about invisible things; about God, about conscience, about the future. They enjoy not merely light, but love. They feel as angels feel rather than as men; and human voices or human experiences can do, for such as they are, little or nothing. We need not doubt that such Christians exist; but the immense'majority of us, you and I, are on a very different level. We are the children of time all over; at least as yet. We are entangled in difficulties, greater or less; we have to. battle with weakness in our wills and with darkness in our understandings. For us, too, in our measure, Easter is a day of joy: we catch the inspiration which moves higher and brighter souls around us; we keep pace, as we can, with the loftier feeling of the time. But, at least for us, it is a great help to have definite points to fall back upon as the reasons for our joy: and, with a view to this, we cannot do better than place ourselves under St. Paul’s guidance in those words which are so familiar to us from childhood, as forming part of the Easter anthem, “Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more."

In these words are two assertions which lie at the bottom of all Easter satisfaction. First, The reality of the Resurrection; “Christ being raised from the dead.” Secondly, The perpetuity of Christ’s Risen Life: “Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more.”

I.

The Resurrection then asserts a truth which is by no means always written legibly for all men on the face of nature. It tells us that the spiritual is higher than the material; that in this universe spirit counts for more than matter. There are no doubt abstract arguments which go to show that this is the case. But the Resurrection is a palpable fact, which assures us that the ordinary laws of animal existence may be altogether set aside in obedience to a higher spiritual interest. It was, we all know, no natural force like that of growth which raised our Lord Jesus Christ from His grave. And such a fact as this is worth much more than abstract arguments. It can always be fallen back upon, when we are in no mood for speculative thought; and it leaves less room for mistake or self-deception.

“Christ being raised from the dead.” The Resurrection is not merely an article of the Creed: it is a fact in human history.

Our Lord, as you know, was seen five times on the day that He rose from the dead. Mary Magdalene saw Him in the garden.

She saw Him again, with the other Mary and Salome, when He allowed them to hold Him by the Feet, and to worship Him. At a later hour in the day He appeared to Peter. In the afternoon He discovered Himself to Cleopas and another disciple who were walking on the Emmaus road. In the evening He was with the Apostles, excepting Thomas. He showed them His Hands and His Feet, as those of the Crucified; He ate before them; He gave them the power of remitting and retaining sins. And after this first day, six separate appearances are recorded; while it is implied that they were only a few of those which actually occurred. After the interval of a week, He appeared again to the Eleven. Thomas than was with them; and He convinced Thomas that He was really risen. On another occasion they saw Him on a mountain in Galilee. On another He was seen by five hundred persons, more than one half of whom were still living when St. Paul described the fact to the Corinthians. On another He appeared to St. Peter, St. Thomas, St. Bartholomew, St. James the Great, and St. John, with two others, on the shore of the lake of Tiberias. On another He had a private interview with St. James the Less. Once more, He was with all the Apostles at Jerusalem, before He led them out to Bethany, gave them His last promises and benediction, and went up to heaven before their eyes.

And when He was gone, His Apostles went forth to do and teach, no doubt, a great deal else, but especially, they went forth as “witnesses of His Resurrection.” That was a fact of which they were certain; they were prepared to attest its truth, if need were, with their blood. We learn from the Acts of the Apostles that the earliest Christian preaching was a constant assertion that Christ had really risen. The reality of His Resurrection was so certain that it emboldened and indeed forced His followers to address themselves to the conversion of the world. “We cannot but speak the things,” they said, “which we have seen and heard.”

This, then, is the happiness, which is bestowed on many a human mind by the fact of Christ’s Resurrection. It breaks down the iron wall of uniformity which goes so far to shut out God. It tells us that matter, and the orderly arrangement of matter, is not the governing principle of the universe. It assures us that matter is controlled by Mind; that there is a Being, a Will, to Which matter can offer no effective resistance; that He is not bond by the laws of the universe; that He is their master. God had said this before to men who had ears to hear and eyes to see. But He never said it so clearly as in the Resurrection of our Lord. If ever there was a case which might be expected to warrant summary interference with the common order of the world on the part of a moral God, here was one. When Jesus died on Calvary, the purest of lives seemed to the eye of sense to have ceased to be. The holiest of doctrines appeared to have died away upon the air, amid the blasphemies which raged at the foot of the Cross. Apart from the question who the Sufferer was, there was the question whether a righteous God did really reign on earth and in heaven. And the Resurrection was an answer to that question. It was the finger of God visibly thrust down amid the things of sense; disturbing their usual order; bidding matter bend itself to proclaim the supremacy of spirit; bidding brute human force, as well as physical order, own the superiority of goodness;