Christ the Lord of Life and the Conqueror of Death for All Times

“Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ,”—1 Corinthians xv. 57.

St. Paul speaks in this chapter as if the resurrection of Christ were the victory over the grave. Was it impossible, then, for men, before the resurrection of Christ, to look beyond the grave? Were all the hopes of immortality which sages in the old world cherished, fallacious? Christian apologists have often said, that for men generally the hope did not exist at all; that the Jew was kept from it by Divine purpose; that the few Gentiles who entertained it, appealed to evidence which they must have felt themselves which, at all events, we know to be,—unsatisfactory. Nothing, they urge, but the reappearance of one who had been laid in the tomb could be an assurance to human beings that it was not to close for ever upon them.

I suspect, my brethren, that special pleaders for the Gospel generally do more harm to the Gospel than to its opponents. They are sadly tempted to suppress facts and to warp facts, if not to invent facts, and any suppression or warping must injure a true cause, and be offensive to a true God. That we may obtain a plausible defence of a principle, we continually misrepresent and distort the principle itself. The case before us is an example of what I mean. We have dwarfed the New Testament doctrine respecting our Lord’s resurrection, through our eagerness to disparage the condition and the expectations of those who lived before it. I think we shall understand much better how truly the victory over the grave is God’s gift in Christ, not an inherent right of our nature, if we do justice to that condition and to those expectations.

The Apostles unquestionably speak of our Lord’s resurrection as an unprecedented fact in the world’s history. But they say that its importance to human beings lay in this, that it declared Jesus to be the Son of God with power. It was an act retrospective and prospective. It revealed the Head of the human race. It revealed the relation of that human race, in the person of its Head, to the Father of All. That which was manifested to be true, when He Who had taken on Him our nature, and had died as we die, rose out of death because He could not possibly be holden of it, had been true always. Those who believed in Christ could not doubt that man was to learn his condition from Christ, that he could learn it only from Christ. As St. Paul states the question in two converse propositions: “If we do not rise, Christ is not risen”; if Christ is risen, then, “as in Adam all die, all in Christ will be made alive.” The evidence for the Resurrection, then, lay in all the history, in all the experiences and life of men, up to that hour. Fishermen and tent-makers could not establish it. If there was such a Person, such a Head of man, such a Son of God, as they said was denoted by this event, God would show that there was. If not, there was no Gospel.

To think then that we are honouring the Resurrection by dishonouring the expectations of immortality which men in the foregone ages had derived from one source or another, is surely monstrous. Supposing they were only the guesses of half-a-dozen earnest and thoughtful men, would these guesses be confounded and not established by the later discovery? Does any scientific man scoff at Galileo or Copernicus, because they had adopted a conclusion which Newton proved? If, for instance, it be true that all the arguments in Plato’s Phædo can be answered,—that a clever advocate may find holes in every one of them,—is not the question all the more interesting, why those arguments seemed so weighty to a man who was, to say the least, as acute a dialectician as his critics, as practised in the exposure of false and treacherous reasonings? Why was the existence of a Memory a sign to him that he did not only belong to the present, but to the past and future? Why did the alternations of light and darkness,—the succession of opposite conditions in human experience,—suggest the thought that what was called Death might be the entrance on another stage of Life? You can show that such evidence did not prove enough, or proved too much; any logician of his day could have done the same. But when you have won all the trophies which are due to the victors in school exercises, I must still ask: “How came these thoughts into this man’s mind? Are they not in yours, for all that you can detect their weakness? May they not point to some demonstration, if this is not one? At all events, ought not every one who supposes that such a demonstration has been made, to welcome every effort after it with thankfulness and joy?”

But the assumption with which I started is not a tenable one. It is not true that those who brought forward these arguments for immortality were opposing themselves to the belief of the rest of the world. They were trying to justify a belief which had expressed itself in every mythology, in every legend, against the unbelief which the falsehoods of those mythologies and legends, co-operating with natural appearances,—yes! and with very strong, if not the strongest, motives to the heart of man,—were producing in those about them and in themselves. The death of every flower, of every beast, of every man, was a broad, palpable argument addressed to the senses, which one might have supposed that no efforts of imagination or speculation could in the least have resisted. But there were other arguments as strong against making the effort. Sickness and pain did not merely bring death home to each person; they did not merely say, “Thou art under the same law with all these creatures about thee”; they took away the disposition to struggle with it; they were perpetual reasons for yielding to the Destroyer. To these were added other reasons stronger still. Was anything to be gained hereafter by not yielding to him? Was it not more terrible to a man, if he could not regard the threescore years and ten as the boundary of his pilgrimage? Might not the dim gulf beyond be infinitely more horrible and trackless than any the worst wilderness which he had traversed here? If he could “jump the life to come,” would it not be a quite infinite relief from the vagueness of expectation,—from the probability that whatever was worst in his condition here would be aggravated and deepened there?

There were, I say, all these excuses, all these motives, for men to accept the grave as their conqueror, not to dream of any conquest over it. But consider what this submission involved. If a man fairly abandoned the conflict with death, if he admitted its dominion to be absolute, could he merely jump the life to come? Must not he relinquish all effort to preserve the life that is? Must not the sense of a sword hanging over him which may descend at any moment, which must at some moment cut the thin thread altogether, cause him to regard all efforts of the physician to oppose the progress of disease, as very vain and desperate? Must not he come to consider all contests with the elements for the purpose of making existence more endurable, as strife with a tyrant who would have his way at last? Must not all thought about descendants, all provision for their well-being, appear ridiculous? I am forced to use language which you will at once feel to be improper on this ground, that it supposes a man to be giving up effort and foresight upon calculation. Whereas the creature I am supposing is incapable of calculation. It is a part of his calamity, of his barbarism, that he is. He cannot look before and after; in other words, he cannot exercise the attributes of a man. But why can he not? Just because he yields to the appearances which nature presents; just because he has no belief that life is stronger than death, and that there is another law for him than the law which binds natural things. And if no race of men, perhaps no man, has ever sunk quite to this level, though many races and many men have come very near it, this is because there has been in every man and in every race, some faith in a victory over the grave.

I have called this a faith. Do I mean that it is what we call a faith in the immortality of the soul? No, I admit at once that it never presented itself in that abstract notional shape to any people of the old world or of the new, to any nation of Pagans, Jews, Mahometans, Christians. Men believed that their life was sustained by some living Power, by some one mightier than themselves; from whom it had come originally; who had added to it whatever made it tolerable. According to the strength of their belief that they had such a Power or such powers on their side, was the strength of their resolution not to be crushed by the powers of death, in whatever form they appeared. With this help it was possible, it was worth while, to weed and plough the ground; it was possible and worth while to resist the elements, to turn them into ministers; it was possible and worth while to work for generations unborn; it was possible and worth while to live as members of families, as citizens, yes, and to give up life for the sake of the family and the city. No doubt all this was a defiance of nature, was evident mockery of what seemed its most stringent and irreversible edicts. But the man was confident that he could rise above these edicts, that he was meant to rise above them, that he was not a man if he succumbed to them. How it was he could not tell. He could only say, “There is a Being, or there are beings, prompting me, impelling me, not to be a slave, saying that I must fight against everything, be it what it may, which would make me a slave. I am yielding obedience to this higher government, I am claiming it as my ally, when I am refusing to confess death as my master, when I am framing all my acts on the principle that I am born to live.”

But then came in a terrible doubt, to some of the consequences of which I have alluded already: “May I count upon this alliance? Is this higher government which seems to set me upon these enterprises, indeed a friendly one? Has it no jealousy, no suspicion of me? May it not be employing me as its agent, and all the while be grudging any successes which I may win? Has it no reasonable complaints against me? May I not have been using the powers which it has entrusted to me unlawfully? May I not have been refusing the homage which I owe it? May it not after all be in conspiracy with the tyrant? May it not be identical with him? When I enter the unseen world, may I not find that every struggle I have been engaged in, every victory I have achieved, is to swell and aggravate my doom?”

Such questions each man, according to his own measure and quality, had to encounter. They presented themselves to the hero who was conscious of having desired to be a god; they presented themselves to the ordinary wayfarer who could not tell that he was not defying the God, when he sought the aid of the physician to keep off a disease. The physician appeared to him almost or quite divine; but was not that which he was driving out also divine? There was in the great man and in the poor man the sense of an evil which was his own, which deserved punishment, which would some day receive punishment. There was in the great man and in the poor man a perpetual alternation of fear and hope that the highest of all might be the inflicter of the punishment or the deliverer from it. And ultimately that doubt confounded itself with another,—Was he the author of the evil which men did, or the enemy of it?

The priests, in different nations, sustained the belief in deliverers and in punishers. They kept alive the sense of a communion between the visible and the invisible world. They kept alive the sense of wrongs done by the inhabitants of the visible world, which the inhabitants of the invisible world would avenge. As they reduced these thoughts more and more into a system, as they adapted them to different regions of the earth, and to different hopes and terrors in the minds of themselves and their disciples, as they began to sink the divinity in themselves, and half to believe that all divine wrath and divine deliverance was committed to their hands, the worship of that which was evil and destructive became the dominant worship, the worship of that which was good and helpful the accidental and the exceptional. So more and more the thought of immortality grew to be a terrible and a hateful one to men, while yet it lay upon them as an incubus which they could not throw off. One class of philosophers sought to relieve them of it by appealing to the evidence of nature in favour of the grave being the final conqueror. So far they might have succeeded with any whose consciences were not tormented with the recollection or the presence of guilt. They had another more difficult task to achieve. They had to persuade men that it was well to make the most of life, because it was to terminate so soon. But this phrase, “making the most of life,” when it was interpreted by this argument, could not mean what it had meant in the mouths of those who thought that life was to be a great struggle, a continual resistance to the powers of death. Least of all could it mean casting away present enjoyment for the sake of family, friends, country. It must soon, if not at once, translate itself into the formula used in this chapter, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” Therefore those philosophers who could not accept this as the solution of the Sphinx riddle, and yet were sure that the priests and mythologists had not solved it, were compelled to seek for another. They asked whether there were not evidences in the constitution of the world, and in the constitution of man, that man was more than an animal, and that whatever there was in him which was above the animal, was not doomed to the death of the animal. They maintained that that thing in him which thinks, believes, hopes, must belong to life. They were therefore asserting, not a natural immortality for themselves, but an immortality which belonged to them by rising above nature. They were, as I said, doing their best to vindicate the faith of their countrymen in a living Being, a source of life, and to separate this faith from the unbelief which turned that Being into an author of death. They did not, they could not, stop there. They felt that the Author of Life must be the author of all that was good in life, that He must be a Righteous Being. They did not, therefore, for an instant deny the doctrine of the mythologist, that He must punish wrong. They asserted it vehemently. But they asserted also that this punishment must be good, as He Who inflicts it is good. It could proceed from no lust of vengeance. It must be the assertion of eternal right against the wrong, the triumph of right over wrong.

There was, I think, a manifest weakness and deficiency in these thoughts and hopes. Something in man was found not to be animal: that something was to survive. Yes! and that something could be nothing else than himself. But was all that he had in common with the animals to perish? Was this body, so curiously and wonderfully fashioned, to be cast away as a poor, useless thing, when it had hardly acquired the use of any of its powers? So it appeared. The soul, it was said, alone can survive the grave. And whose soul? The soul of some wise man, who has been able to raise himself above the conditions by which ordinary men are vanquished? Again this seemed to be so. And yet it could not be so, if the evidence was derived from a fair examination of the difference between man as man and other creatures. Once more; the evil man hereafter would meet his punishment, the good his reward. Be it so. Was there, then, to be a nice arithmetic, determining whether this man had done a majority of good deeds or of evil? Was the reward or the punishment to be settled according to that calculation? The philosopher would have revolted at such a theory. It was like the vulgar sacerdotal huckstering which he wished to escape. It entirely interfered with his idea of a morality which consists in principles, not in acts, in the acknowledgment of a Right that is perfect and absolute. But how could the contradiction be avoided? Could there be any judgment of ordinary human beings which was one of inward principles, not chiefly or merely of outward acts?

Still I must ask, as I asked before, “Whence came such thoughts as these to any human beings, let there have been ever so many flaws in them? How was it that the legends of the Greek people breathed of immortality? How was it that sages who had felt the contradictions and the burden of these legends, held fast to the same expectation?” I find the answer in the Old Testament. There the God Who cannot be seen, Who has made man in His image, is set forth as the Teacher of a race which is represented as dull, animal, idolatrous. With every propensity to worship dead things, to become the mere tool and slave of nature, the Jew is made conscious of a calling to know a living God and to be His servant. Trusting in the God Who has called him, claiming to be His subject, the poor earthworm is capable of domestic life, of civic life; he can submit to laws; he can conquer giants; he can look forward to a distant future; he can anticipate a time when through his seed all the families of the earth shall be blessed. But the Scriptures show us another side to the picture. The Jew follows his taste and nature; he wishes to be like the people about him; he confounds God with that which he sees; he fancies God is like him in his dark, foul, cruel tendencies. His priests abet these delusions, are the great propagators and authors of them, hate every witness that God is indeed a Righteous God and a Deliverer. Then Prophets are sent to show him how he has sunk into a crawling insect again; how he has lost his position on earth in losing his faith in the God of Heaven; how impossible it is for him to be a faithful brother, husband, father, judge, soldier; how inevitably he has sold himself to oppressors. These Prophets show him how all punishments are sent him as calls to repentance; how each one of them is a voice from God, bidding the whole nation, bidding each man in it, forsake the lying gods that darken and debase those who trust in them, and return to the true God, the Deliverer.

If I believe these records, I believe that men would certainly sink under the dominion of death, and own death to be omnipotent, if God did not teach them the opposite lesson,—if He did not make them confess that life is mightier than death, and that they act, think, speak, because it is. I believe therefore that God, and God only, has imparted these same discoveries, in whatever degree they have been received, to the heart of every nation and of every man. I believe that all confusions which have mingled with these discoveries and have contradicted them, have, as the Scripture affirms and as profane history shows, proceeded from the unbelief of men in this Divine and continual teaching; from their determination to worship the creature instead of the Creator, dead things instead of Him Who liveth for ever, an Enemy of man instead of a Deliverer. I believe that this is the sin of Jew and Gentile, the sin of the world, the sin which has brought death into the world; that it is with this sin and death that the God of Life and Righteousness has been always fighting; that it is from this He has been always seeking to redeem our race. And therefore our Lord’s life on earth, as it is presented to us in the simple Gospel narratives, appears to me the most wonderful climax of this education. Throughout it is the history of a battle with the power of death, whether it is exerted over the body or the spirit of man. Throughout it is the history of a victory over the power of death, won not in His own name, but in the name of His Father. With calmness and majesty He simply bids sickness and disease, the inchoate forms of death, depart. He sets men free from death itself, treating it as an intruder into the Divine order. And then as calmly He accepts death. He claims no exemption from it on the ground of holiness, purity, sonship to God. He leaves the care of these to His Father. He is one with us. Death shall have all that it can have. Its utmost power shall be proved on Him. He pretends to no immortality apart from God. He has no trust in Nature. He trusts in His Father. And His Father owns the trust. He raises Him from the dead, not because He has severed Himself from men, but because He has made Himself one with them. His goodness in His Father’s eyes is not that He stands aloof from the sinners of the earth, but that he has borne their sins. He rises from the dead, not as a spirit, without flesh and bones, but with the body which was laid in the tomb. God has given the Man an entire victory over death, and him that had the power of death.

And so St. Paul’s words in the text interpret themselves to the Jews and Greeks in the Church of Corinth. He knows why death has had a sting for both, why the grave has claimed victory over both. A voice had spoken in the conscience of each Jew and Greek, “Thou hast sinned.” A Law, denouncing righteous judgment against transgression, had confirmed and deepened that voice. Death might bring the sinner face to face with the Judge from Whom this sentence had gone forth. Death must be dreadful, if to meet this Righteous Judge is terrible. St. Paul declares that the Righteous Judge has met His creature, has made peace with him, has shown that to be separate from Him is miserable, to be with Him blessedness. God, he says, Himself, coming to us in His dying Son, has taken away the sting of death for you, for me, for all. God Himself, raising His Son from the dead, has given a victory over the grave to you, to me, to all. The Jew had been taught that God’s will must be done, and that man must yield to it; the Greek had been shown that man has a will, and that it must shake off all fetters which impede its freedom. Jesus Christ dying to do His Father’s will, Jesus Christ rising because that will was accomplished in the emancipation of man from the chains which had bound him, enabled a Hebrew of the Hebrews to say to the inhabitants of the isthmus in which the Lords of the earth had sought by deeds of valour and prowess to exalt themselves into gods, “Thanks be to God, Who giveth us the victory!” From Him comes the triumph of that life which you thought He was crushing. It is not a triumph for a moment, but for ever. That which opposed itself as a hopeless barrier to the hero, has proved weak before the crucified Man.

But though these words of the Apostle illuminate the darkest passages of general history, penetrate into the cells and caverns where lonely thinkers had toiled and suffered in the old world, it is not for the sake of the past that I would use them chiefly to-day. They were written, indeed, for the consolation of those who were looking upon the tombs of their forefathers, and contemplating their unfinished works, their seemingly abortive struggles. But they were written still more for the times that were coming; they belong to us; we have need to ponder each one of them.

I. It is God Who giveth us the victory. We are in as much danger of fancying that He is not the God of Life, but of Death, that He is not fighting with us, but against us, that He is bent upon our destruction, as the Jews or Greeks were. The history of Christendom has proved that every dark conception of Him which prevailed among Pagans, may clothe itself in the forms and vestures of the New Dispensation, may justify itself by venerable traditions, may appeal as the devil did in our Lord’s Temptation—to the language of Scripture. Our own consciences tell us that it is so; they tell us why it is so. We know that we are as prone to be sensual and idolatrous as our forefathers who worshipped stocks and stones were, though our sensuality and idolatry may choose different forms from theirs. We know that we are as prone to be malicious and hateful as they were. We know that when we have become earthly and sensual, we think of God as earthly and sensual; that when we have become malicious and hateful, we think of God as hateful and malicious. And then we must persuade Him, as earthly and sensual creatures are persuaded, —as evil spirits are persuaded,—not to wreak His spite and rage upon us. Now, as of old, there will be religious teachers to foster these diseases of the natural heart, to treat the jaundiced likeness of God as a true likeness, to block up the passage to Him. And since such diseases and such corruptions lead to baseness, cowardice, heartlessness,—since they are the direct road to death and perdition for nations and men,—it is most needful that the old Gospel should be sounded in our ears—“God giveth us the victory. God is seen in Christ, and only in Him. God is now what He was when He raised His Son from the dead. You may arise and go to Him as your father. That is the only repentance for any sinful creature; that is the only way of casting away the slough of old habits, and rising up a new and right and renovated man.”

II. And next, it is most needful to recollect that the victory is a gift. I do not mean merely that the final victory over the grave is a gift. That too we may often forget. We may believe that we shall achieve our immortal happiness by some splendid exertions or faith of ours. We may think that it is to be won by a strife with the Divine Will, not by trust in it and submission to it. And we shall easily fall into this mistake if we do not look upon every preparatory victory of life over death as a gift of God. Each morning that we wake out of sleep, each power that we are able to exert over brute matter, each energy of the body, each return of health after sickness, each hard discovery, each power which the will exerts over the inclinations of our own flesh, each act of just government over other men, each influence we are able to put forth for making other men more wise or more free,—of this we must say “God giveth it”; this we must accept as the fruit and manifestation of His Will, as the pledge and foretaste of a final victory. Believe it to be so, young man, rejoicing in the days of thy youth, in the fulness and freshness of life; believe it to be so, weary pilgrim, struggling under the load of daily and increasing pain; God in each case is testifying, if thou wilt understand the testimony, that life in thee is stronger than death, that life in thee shall overcome death. Therefore give up thy life to Him, that He may use it as He knows best. Let Him have thy vigour, to turn it against the foes of thy country and of men. Let Him have thy feebleness, that His Fatherly love and sympathy, and the obedience that He wrought out in Christ by suffering, may shine forth in thee. Be sure that He has most various methods of manifesting the power of His Son’s Resurrection here; but that, if thou trustest in Him, and dost not faint, the end will be the same; all shall share alike in the victory.

III. And think that it is God Who giveth us the victory. Not some great and rare people, born with some special aptitude for good, with some special exemption from motions and inclinations to ill; but us who have fallen into ten thousand errors, us who are conscious of evils which we dare not speak of to a neighbour, us who are tempted continually to let the current carry us where it will, to make utter shipwreck. To retrieve ourselves we find impossible; circumstances, example, the pressure of the age, habits that have become part of us, forbid us to rise. But the Creator of heaven and earth commands us to rise. The hosts against us may be overwhelming; He is on our side.

IV. Still it is a victory. Immortality, as I have urged throughout this sermon, is not natural, if by natural is meant that which would befall us supposing we were not voluntary spiritual beings. It belongs to us only as voluntary spiritual beings. If we surrender that condition, we surrender our immortality, we take up our position as mortal. But we cannot surrender it; we feel and know that we cannot, even when we are trying most to do it, even when we are stooping to the deepest ignominy. And therefore let us not for a moment cease to connect Resurrection with faith, with hope; therefore with conflict. We cannot, if we connect Christ’s Resurrection with ours, if we judge of ours by His. He set His face as a flint. His garments were the garments of one who trode the winefat. It was an agony, though it was the agony of submission. His sweat was as great drops of blood, though the issue was, “Father, not my will, but Thine be done.” Therefore God gave Him the victory, the perfect victory of spirit and soul and body.

V. This solemn warning against the sloth which so easily besets us, this encouragement to believe that God’s Spirit is ever striving to shake it off, is suggested by the last words of the text, “Through Jesus Christ our Lord.” But we need these words also for other warnings and other encouragements. We need them to take away the conceit that the battle—though it must be fought by each one of us, though it must be won by each one of us—is a battle for some separate or selfish prize. Christ, the Head of our race, has entered into the holiest place, having obtained eternal Redemption for us. That holiest place is the presence of His Father; that eternal Redemption is from the bondage to our own selfish natures and to the spirit of selfishness, which made it impossible for us to have fellowship with God or fellowship with our brethren. If we think that we, by some work or some faith of ours, can enter into the presence of God, we do not enter through Jesus Christ our Lord; if we think that we have some redemption or some victory over the grave, which does not belong to our whole race, we do not receive that Redemption and that victory through Jesus Christ our Lord. He is the Redeemer of Mankind; He has won the Victory by stooping to the level of all. It is another redemption, another victory than His that we seek, if we would divide ourselves from any.

VI. This text then, brethren, is nothing else but the translation into words of the Easter Eucharist. “Thanks be to God,” the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper says, “Who giveth us the Victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” You came last Sunday to celebrate an accomplished act, a victory won. You came to give thanks that God had raised His Son, and so had raised our race, from death to life. You came to say that you, being a portion of this race, needed that life day by day, because you had a conflict day by day with the powers of death. You came to say that you knew you could only receive that life from God. You came to seek it through the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ our Lord. You came to confess that only as members of His Body, only by the power of His Holy Spirit, did you hope for victory over any the feeblest of your enemies; that as members of His body, by the power of His Spirit, you believe that the last enemy, that all enemies will be put under His feet, and therefore under yours.