First Sunday after Easter
April 11, 1858
“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 Christ’s resurrection were the victory over the grave. Was it then impossible for men before Christ to look beyond the grave? Were the hopes of immortality cherished by sages of the old world false hopes? 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 held it appealed to evidence they must have felt themselves, and we know, to be unsatisfactory. Nothing, they urge, but the reappearance of one who had lain in the tomb could assure human beings that death was not final.
I suspect that special pleaders for the Gospel generally do it more harm than its opponents do. They are tempted to suppress, warp, even invent facts, and this injures a true cause and offends a true God. To gain a plausible defence of a principle, we distort the principle itself. This is a case in point: we have dwarfed the New Testament doctrine of the resurrection through our eagerness to disparage what those before Christ expected. We will understand far better that victory over the grave is God’s gift in Christ, not an inherent right of our nature, if we do justice to those earlier expectations.
The Apostles certainly speak of the resurrection as unprecedented, but say its importance lay in this: it declared Jesus to be the Son of God with power. It was retrospective and prospective at once. It revealed the Head of the human race, and the race’s relation, in that Head, to the Father of All. What was shown true when He who bore our nature and died as we die rose because death could not hold Him, had been true always. Believers in Christ could not doubt that man learns his condition from Christ, and only from Christ. As Paul puts it in two converse propositions: if we do not rise, Christ is not risen; if Christ is risen, then as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. The evidence for the Resurrection lay in the whole history and experience of men up to that hour. Fishermen and tent-makers could not establish it themselves. If there was such a Person, such a Head, such a Son of God as this event denoted, God would show it; if not, there was no Gospel.
To think we honour the Resurrection by dishonouring the immortality-hopes men in earlier ages drew from various sources is monstrous. Suppose they were only the guesses of a few earnest, thoughtful men—are guesses discredited, rather than confirmed, by a later discovery agreeing with them? Does any scientist scoff at Galileo or Copernicus because Newton proved what they had guessed? If every argument in Plato’s Phædo can be answered, if a clever advocate can find holes in each one, is it not the more interesting question why those arguments seemed so weighty to as acute a reasoner as his critics? Why did the fact of Memory seem to him a sign that he belonged not only to the present but to past and future? Why did the alternation of light and darkness suggest that death might be entrance upon another stage of life? You can show the evidence proved too little or too much—any logician of his day could have done as much. But I must still ask: how did such thoughts arise in this man’s mind at all? Are they not in yours too, despite your seeing their weakness? May they not point toward some real demonstration, even if this is not one? And ought not anyone who believes such a demonstration has since been made, to welcome every earlier effort toward it with gladness?
But the assumption I began with will not hold. Those who argued for immortality were not opposing the belief of the rest of the world; they were defending a belief expressed in every mythology and legend against the unbelief which the falsehoods of those mythologies, together with natural appearances and very strong motives of the heart, were producing all around them and within themselves. The death of every flower, beast, and man was a plain argument to the senses that no imagination should have been able to resist. But other arguments worked just as strongly against the struggle to believe. Sickness and pain did not merely bring death home to each person as under a common law; they took away the very will to resist it, becoming perpetual reasons to yield. Stronger reasons still: was anything gained by not yielding? Was it not worse to think there was no boundary at threescore years and ten? Might the gulf beyond not be more horrible and trackless than any wilderness traversed here? Would it not be an infinite relief simply to leap into the life to come, rather than face the likely prospect that whatever was worst here would only be deepened there?
So there were every kind of excuse and motive for accepting the grave as conqueror rather than dreaming of conquering it. But consider what such surrender involved. If a man truly gave up the fight with death, admitting its absolute dominion, could he merely leap ahead to the next life? Would he not have to abandon all effort to preserve this one too? Would not the sense of a sword forever hanging over him make every effort of the physician against disease seem futile, every struggle against the elements mere useless strife with an eventual tyrant, every thought of children and provision for them absurd? I use language of “giving up,” though the person I describe is incapable of calculation at all—that incapacity is itself part of his calamity, his barbarism. He cannot look before and after; he cannot exercise the attributes of a man. Why not? Because he yields to nature’s appearances, having no belief that life is stronger than death, no belief in any law beyond nature’s own. If no race, perhaps no single man, has ever quite sunk to this level, though many have come close, it is because some faith in victory over the grave has always persisted in every man and every people.
I have called this a faith. Do I mean a faith in the immortality of the soul, in our abstract sense? No—it never appeared in that notional shape to any ancient or modern people, pagan, Jew, Muslim, or Christian. Men believed their life was sustained by some living Power, mightier than themselves, from whom it originally came and who added whatever made it bearable. The strength of their resolve not to be crushed by death, in whatever form, matched the strength of their belief that such a Power was on their side. With this help it was worth ploughing the ground, resisting the elements and turning them to service, working for generations unborn, living as members of families and cities, even giving up life for family or city. This defied nature’s apparent edicts—but the man was confident he could rise above them, was meant to rise above them, was not truly a man if he did not. He could not explain how; he could only say: “There is a Being, or beings, urging me not to be a slave, bidding me fight everything that would enslave me. I obey this higher power, claim it as my ally, when I refuse to accept death as master, when I act on the principle that I am born to live.”
But then came a terrible doubt: Can I count on this alliance? Is this higher power really friendly? Might it be jealous or suspicious of me, using me while grudging my successes? Does it have real complaints against me—have I misused its gifts, withheld its homage? Might it be in league with the tyrant death, even identical with him? When I enter the unseen world, might every struggle and victory only deepen my doom?
Every man, according to his measure, faced such questions—the hero who secretly wished to be a god, and the ordinary man who wondered whether seeking a physician’s help was itself defiance of God, since the disease too seemed divine. Great and small alike felt an evil in themselves that deserved and would someday meet punishment, and both felt the same alternation of fear and hope that the Highest might prove either avenger or deliverer. And ultimately that doubt merged into another: was he the author of the evil men did, or its enemy?
Priests in different nations sustained belief in deliverers and punishers, keeping alive the sense of communion between the visible and invisible worlds, and of wrongs the invisible world would avenge. As they systematized these ideas, adapting them to different peoples’ hopes and terrors, and as they began sinking their own divinity while believing divine wrath and deliverance lay in their own hands, worship of the evil and destructive became the dominant worship, and worship of the good and helpful the exception. So immortality grew to be a terrible, hateful thought men could not shake off. One school of philosophers tried to relieve them by appealing to nature’s evidence that the grave conquers finally—this worked well enough for those whose consciences were not tormented by guilt. Their harder task was persuading men to make the most of life because it ends so soon—but “making the most of life” on this reasoning could not mean what it meant to those who saw life as continual resistance to death; it could not mean sacrificing present pleasure for family, friends, or country. It had to collapse into “let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” So philosophers who rejected this answer, yet were sure the priests and mythologists hadn’t solved the riddle either, sought another. They asked whether the constitution of the world and of man showed that man was more than animal, and that what in him rose above the animal was not doomed to the animal’s death. The thinking, believing, hoping part of him, they held, belonged to life. So they claimed not a natural immortality but one earned by rising above nature. They tried to preserve their countrymen’s faith in a living Being, source of life, apart from the unbelief that made Him an author of death. They could not stop there: feeling the Author of Life must be author of all good in it, they upheld—even vehemently—the doctrine that He must punish wrong, but insisted this punishment must be good as He is good, not vengeance but the triumph of eternal right over wrong.
There was manifest weakness in these thoughts. Something in man was not animal, and would survive—and that something could be nothing but himself. But was all he shared with the animals to perish? Was this wonderfully made body to be discarded before it had hardly used its powers? So it seemed. Only the soul survives, they said—but whose soul? The wise man’s, who rose above ordinary defeat? That too seemed so, yet could not be so if the evidence came from a fair reading of what distinguishes man as man. And again: the evil man would meet punishment, the good, reward—but was there to be some fine arithmetic weighing good deeds against evil to settle it? The philosopher would recoil from such a theory, which resembled the vulgar priestly haggling he wished to escape, and which contradicted his idea of a morality of principles, not acts, judged by an absolute Right. Yet how avoid the contradiction? Could there be a judgment of ordinary human beings by inward principle rather than outward act?
Still I ask: where did such thoughts come from, however flawed? Why did Greek legend breathe of immortality? Why did sages who felt its contradictions and burdens still hold the same expectation? I find the answer in the Old Testament. There the invisible God who made man in His image is Teacher of a race depicted as dull, animal, idolatrous. Despite every tendency to worship dead things and be nature’s slave, the Jew is made conscious of a calling to know the living God and serve Him. Trusting that God, the lowly creature becomes capable of family and civic life, can keep laws, conquer giants, look to a distant future, anticipate blessing to all nations through his descendants. But Scripture shows the other side too: the Jew follows his own nature, wants to be like the peoples around him, confuses God with what he sees, imagines God shares his own dark, cruel tendencies. His priests encourage these delusions, hating any witness that God is righteous and a deliverer. Then Prophets are sent to show him he has sunk back into a crawling insect, that losing faith in the God of Heaven means losing his place on earth, that he cannot be a faithful brother, husband, father, judge, or soldier, and has inevitably sold himself to oppressors. The Prophets show that every punishment is a call to repentance, a divine voice bidding the nation and each man in it abandon the lying gods that debase their worshippers and return to the true God, the Deliverer.
If I believe these records, I believe men would certainly sink under death’s dominion, confessing it omnipotent, unless God taught them the opposite—that life is stronger than death, and that they act, think, and speak because it is so. I believe God alone has given this discovery, in whatever degree received, to every nation and every human heart. I believe all the confusions mingled with and contradicting it have come, as Scripture affirms and history shows, from men’s unbelief in this continual divine teaching—from their choosing to worship the creature instead of the Creator, dead things instead of Him who lives forever, an Enemy of man instead of a Deliverer. This is the sin of Jew and Gentile, the sin of the world, the sin that brought death into it; it is against this sin and death that the God of Life and Righteousness has always fought, seeking always to redeem our race. Our Lord’s earthly life, as the simple Gospels present it, is therefore the wonderful climax of this education. Throughout it is a history of battle with death’s power over body and spirit, and of victory won not in His own name but His Father’s. With calm majesty He simply bids sickness and disease—death’s early forms—depart, freeing men from death itself as an intruder into the divine order. Then just as calmly He accepts death Himself, claiming no exemption on the ground of holiness or sonship, leaving that to His Father. He is one with us; death shall have all it can have, its utmost power proved on Him. He claims no immortality apart from God, no trust in Nature, only trust in His Father—and the Father honours that trust, raising Him from the dead not because He had severed Himself from men but because He had made Himself one with them. His goodness in the Father’s eyes lies not in standing apart from sinners but in bearing their sins. He rises not as a bodiless spirit but with the very body laid in the tomb. God has given the Man an entire victory over death and him that had death’s power.
So Paul’s words in the text explain themselves to the Jews and Greeks of Corinth. He knows why death stung both, why the grave claimed victory over both. A voice in each conscience said, “You have sinned”; the Law, denouncing righteous judgment on transgression, confirmed it. Death might bring the sinner face to face with the Judge from whom that sentence came—dreadful, if meeting the Righteous Judge is terrible. Paul declares that the Righteous Judge has met His creature and made peace, showing that separation from Him is misery and union with Him blessedness. God Himself, coming to us in His dying Son, has taken away death’s sting for all; God Himself, raising His Son, has given all a victory over the grave. The Jew had been taught that God’s will must be done and man must yield to it; the Greek, that man has a will which must shake off every fetter. Christ dying to do His Father’s will, and rising because that will was accomplished in man’s emancipation, let a Hebrew of the Hebrews say to the people of the isthmus—where earthly lords sought by valour to make themselves gods—“Thanks be to God, who giveth us the victory!” From Him comes the triumph of the very life they thought He was crushing—not a momentary triumph, but an everlasting one. What seemed a hopeless barrier to the hero has proved weak before the crucified Man.
Though these words illuminate the darkest passages of history, reaching into the caverns where lonely thinkers of the old world toiled and suffered, it is not chiefly for the past that I use them today. They were written for the consolation of those looking upon their forefathers’ tombs and unfinished, seemingly failed struggles—but even more for the times to come; they belong to us, and we must ponder each one.
I. It is God who gives us the victory. We are as prone as Jews or Greeks were to imagine Him not the God of Life but of Death, fighting against us rather than with us, bent on our destruction. The history of Christendom shows that every dark pagan conception of God can clothe itself in New Testament forms, justify itself by tradition, even quote Scripture as the devil did at the Temptation. Our own consciences tell us why: we are as prone to sensuality and idolatry as our forefathers who worshipped stocks and stones, though in different forms, and as prone to malice and hatred. When we become earthly and sensual we think of God as earthly and sensual; when malicious, as malicious—and then we must appease Him as evil spirits are appeased, persuading Him not to vent His spite on us. As of old, there will be religious teachers who foster these diseases of the natural heart, treating the jaundiced likeness of God as the true one, blocking the way to Him. Since such corruption leads straight to baseness, cowardice, and death for nations and men, the old Gospel must be sounded: God gives us the victory. God is seen in Christ, and only in Him. God is now what He was when He raised His Son. You may arise and go to Him as your father—that is the only repentance for any sinner, the only way to cast off old habits and become a new and right man.
II. Next, the victory is a gift. Not only the final victory over the grave—though we forget that too, imagining we shall win immortal happiness by our own exertions or faith, by struggle against God’s will rather than trust and submission to it. We will fall into this error unless we see every preparatory victory of life over death, too, as God’s gift: each morning we wake, each power we exert over matter, each bodily energy, each return of health, each hard discovery, each power of will over fleshly inclination, each act of just government, each influence toward making others wiser or freer—of all this we must say, “God gives it,” accepting it as the fruit of His will and the pledge of final victory. Believe it, young man rejoicing in the fullness of life; believe it, weary pilgrim under increasing pain: God is testifying in each case that life in you is stronger than death and shall overcome it. So give your life to Him to use as He knows best—your vigour, to turn against the enemies of your country and of men; your feebleness, that His fatherly love and the obedience wrought in Christ through suffering may shine in you. His methods of showing the power of His Son’s Resurrection vary greatly, but if you trust Him and do not faint, the end is the same: all shall share alike in the victory.
III. And it is God who gives us the victory—not some rare people born with special aptitude for good, exempt from evil inclinations, but us, who have fallen into countless errors, who know evils we dare not confess to a neighbour, who are tempted continually to let the current carry us to shipwreck. We find it impossible to save ourselves; circumstances, example, the pressure of the age, ingrained habit forbid our rising. But the Creator of heaven and earth commands us to rise. The forces against us may be overwhelming; He is on our side.
IV. Still it is a victory. Immortality is not natural, if “natural” means what would befall us regardless of our being voluntary spiritual beings; it belongs to us only as such beings. Surrender that condition and we surrender our immortality, taking our place among mortal things. But we cannot surrender it—we know we cannot, even when trying hardest, even in deepest degradation. So let us never stop connecting Resurrection with faith, hope, and therefore conflict. We must judge our resurrection by His if we connect the two at all. He set His face like flint; His garments were like one who treads the winepress. It was agony, though the agony of submission; His sweat was like great drops of blood, though the outcome was “Father, not my will, but Thine be done.” Therefore God gave Him the victory—the perfect victory of spirit, soul, and body.
V. This warning against besetting sloth, and this encouragement that God’s Spirit is always striving to shake it off, comes from the text’s closing words, “through Jesus Christ our Lord.” We need these words also to remove the conceit that the battle, though each of us must fight and win it, is fought for some separate, selfish prize. Christ, Head of our race, has entered the holiest place, having obtained eternal Redemption for us. That holiest place is His Father’s presence; that Redemption is from bondage to our own selfish nature and to the spirit of selfishness that made fellowship with God and with our brethren impossible. If we think we can enter God’s presence by some work or faith of our own, we do not enter through Jesus Christ our Lord; if we think we have some redemption or victory over the grave that does not belong to our whole race, we do not receive it through Him. He is the Redeemer of Mankind, who won the Victory by stooping to the level of all; it is another redemption, another victory than His, that we seek if we try to separate ourselves from anyone.
VI. This text, then, is nothing but the Easter Eucharist put into words. “Thanks be to God,” says the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, “who giveth us the Victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Last Sunday you came to celebrate an accomplished victory—to give thanks that God had raised His Son, and so our race, from death to life. You came to say that you, being part of this race, need that life day by day, having a daily conflict with death’s powers. You came to say you could receive that life only from God, sought 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, do you hope for victory over even your feeblest enemies—believing that as members of His body, by His Spirit’s power, the last enemy, and all enemies, will be put under His feet, and therefore under yours.