July 19, 1857
The passage: If we have been planted together in the likeness of Christ’s death, we shall also be in the likeness of his resurrection.
In the Collects we are often taught to speak of Christ taking our nature and suffering our death. That language is copied straight from St. Paul, and filled with his spirit — no one who studies his Epistles can dispute it. But Paul also uses another kind of language, in harmony with this but not to be confused with it. He speaks not only of Christ being made like us, but of us being made in his likeness. And he does not limit this, as we might expect, to saying we may be made holy like Christ here, or glorious like Christ hereafter. He speaks of our death being cast in the mold of his Death, of Christ as the only standard by which we can measure our own: “we have been planted together in the likeness of His Death.” We would badly reduce that phrase if we took it to mean only that death comes upon each of us as it came upon him — we already knew that death is a fact for every child of Adam; that needed no proof. What men needed to know was what this fact signified. It was as strange and monstrous as it was undeniable — the world’s great commonplace, yet each case a new variety of it, individualizing even while universal. Generalizing from many instances only took you further from its reality; you were closer to it watching one actual deathbed than reasoning about a thousand, and yet even meeting it face to face left the experience feeling imperfect. Men have always wanted to know what Death is, as they want to know what Life is, and have felt that no definition — however fine or divine, even from God’s own lips — could tell them.
I. “We are planted together in the likeness of His Death.” Does considering his Death lift the veil over our own? At first you would say no — there may be honor and glory in the record, but nothing I can connect to myself or others. Here is death with every aggravation, bodily and spiritual: without any sense of retribution deserved, involving inward agony, the sense of being forsaken by God. Can we — guilty as we are, so unlike his perfect innocence, passing so easily out of the world unlike his bodily anguish, feeling so little the want of a Father’s presence unlike him who cried “Why hast thou forsaken me?” — really be planted in the likeness of this death? Surely not. It may affect us infinitely by some divine decree, but how can we think of what befalls us as anything but an awful contrast to it?
This objection has two parts: the fearfulness of our Lord’s Death, and its perfect holiness and innocence.
As to the first, remember we are asking after the essential nature of what the whole human race has felt to be the curse from which every other curse comes and in which every other ends — asking to see it apart from the accidents that soften it for particular sufferers, whether through ignorance, mercy, or the fact that one person’s misery is not shared by another’s. A plague or a routed army kills its hundreds of thousands; each dies alone, and you cannot add up the separate experiences, yet every groan speaks part of the universal woe. Is not this one Person’s death a glimpse of death itself? Has not the conscience of Christendom felt that it is? You could not remove anything recorded in the Gospels or in the twenty-second Psalm without removing something that belongs to the very nature of death. The Gospels speak with intense simplicity — no wasted word, no comment, the stern facts alone. The Psalms give the inward history, so exact and human that it has spoken to thousands in every age of what they knew in themselves, all the more because they felt an infinite beyond into which they could only just glimpse. We cannot deny the truth of Paul’s words because his Death was one of concentrated human and divine sorrow — without that depth, it could not be the pattern of all other sorrow.
The second objection looks more decisive: one death gathers up all that is pure and holy, the other is the very mark of sin. Yet if we accept Scripture and the Church’s belief, we must feel that this difference was somehow overcome — that the Perfectly Holy bore sin, and that his Death made it possible for sinners to become holy. This belief has always gone with the belief that his Death was a voluntary sacrifice: there lies its holiness and its power. Death had always been felt as a dark necessity, submission to a power neither human nor divine yet inescapable. Good men had tried, and partly managed, to feel otherwise — giving themselves to God for life or death, especially in active service, sure that he alone was Lord. But something in the character of Death itself, faced directly, seemed to force a different view: it seemed a horrible separation, an abyss where God’s countenance did not reach. Our Lord’s Death is the one resolution of that contradiction. Only if Death can be seen at once as the most dreadful severing — from all creatures, and inwardly from God — and also as the entire, cheerful surrender of a child to a Father, is its dark contradiction explained and its sting drawn. Once this had been shown, it could be said to every creature: “Here is the likeness of your death — you have never truly seen it before, neither its horror nor its blessedness. Look for it here from now on, not in its scattered particular cases. The Cross alone interprets it. To examine each person’s own serpent-wound is as useless as trying to cure it that way; turn instead to the one Brazen Serpent, see the death of man translated into the death of the Son of God, and you know both the bite and its cure.” While we are absorbed in our own experience, magnifying our torments and our sin, hoping thereby to make amends or gain deliverance, we only deepen the contradiction and the evil; each new search for a solution makes the puzzle seem more hopeless. But believe this to be the true likeness of your death, and you will find in it the power to destroy the poison of death, which is selfishness. We have been planted together in this Death — it is no longer a solitary thing, but the center drawing the whole race into unity. The simplest, most childlike penitents have proved this deep teaching of Paul true for themselves: crushed by the sense of death and its evil within them, they have turned to the death on the Cross, and out of despair come to the bold conviction that the true likeness of what had seemed all darkness could be found in this clear light. What first seemed an astonishing paradox proved at last an undoubted truth — for there is no proof like the vanishing of confused, superstitious, selfish doubt from the heart; the discovery of real union with others where division seemed rooted; the melting of pride into childlike submission; the finding of a Father in whom is no darkness, where darkness had seemed absolute. A willing surrender of self, peaceful dependence, calm hope, sympathy with every suffering creature — these further attest that those who habitually turn to Christ’s Death as their own pattern do not follow a made-up fable. Every service, and the Eucharist above all, proclaims this same truth; if we deny it, the act becomes a mockery. Those who kneel at the altar are not a set of people divided by petty, competing interests, held together only by the common curse that will finally end those interests and end our connection with each other. This common Death — the Death of him who died for all — is the likeness in which we are planted; here is the bond of true human fellowship, the assurance that death cannot break the ties that hold us to each other, because the Love that formed them proved itself, in death, stronger than death.
II. So the Eucharist joins, as Paul’s words join, Death and Resurrection inseparably. We have been planted in the likeness of his Death; we shall be in the likeness of his Resurrection — one assertion grounds and guarantees the other. What is the likeness of his Resurrection? If Death is the division of man from man, of each man from himself, of the race from God, then Resurrection must be the reverse: each creature restored to unity with itself, with others, with God. If Death is a surrender to God like a child’s to a Father, Resurrection means that surrender has been accepted. He who felt forsaken rose again in the Father’s glory; he who prayed “let this cup pass from me” was not left in hell, nor did his flesh see corruption. He whom all his disciples deserted stood among them and said, “Peace be unto you: as my Father sent me, so send I you.” He who said “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” breathed on them and said, “Receive ye the Holy Spirit.” This proves that his union with the Father was not broken even as he poured out his soul in death; by that union his human soul and body were quickened, and he becomes the source of divine life to all creation. We cannot describe his Resurrection in Scripture’s own words without implying it is a resurrection for us too — that we are planted together in its likeness. So the Epistle for today grounds our Baptism on the Resurrection as well as the Death of Christ, adopting us into the meaning and power of both. Christ has died: we must reckon ourselves dead to sin. Christ is risen: we must reckon ourselves alive to God. We are not establishing a claim to some privilege — he has already proved the claim. Our faith does not create the privilege; we are only called to believe what is true. We do not plant ourselves in the likeness of his Death by an act of belief — we are planted in it already. What is asked of us is to acknowledge that fact: not to turn Death into an endless contradiction and lie, nor to make ourselves one, by insisting we will have no center, that we will each die a separate death and live — no, that is impossible, we cannot live a separate life, since life means union, fellowship, a common head, and to deny this is suicide. If we are willing to confess our share in the groaning, the Death, the common humanity; willing to offer ourselves up for death, believing a Father and not an enemy receives that offering, presented in the name of him who offered himself once for all — then the other gift, Resurrection, is already contained in this. Our souls cannot perish if his has not; our bodies cannot perish if he has brought his own back from the grave. As he had no life apart from his Father, we have none apart from his. The renewal of life in him, at its very source, was the renewal of all creation. We may rightly say that the bleakest winter carries the pledge of spring; that we cannot look into the heart of Death without finding there the certainty of a nobler birth; that nothing in this world lies outside the reach of Christ’s Cross and Passion, and therefore nothing is beyond the shadow of his Resurrection, or without the capacity for a glorious life.