The Resurrection a Power as Well as an Event

“The power of His resurrection.”—Philippians iii. 10.

The passage: Paul speaks of knowing “the power of His resurrection.”

I think many of you have felt, as I often have, a kind of disappointment in today’s Collect. It begins grandly, as an Easter prayer should: “Almighty God, Who through Thine only-begotten Son hast overcome death, and opened unto us the gate of everlasting life.” But what in the petition answers to this opening? Does it speak of visions of glory, or of fellowship with the spirits of just men made perfect, as we might expect if the barrier of death were really removed? Not at all. It asks only that, as God by His special grace puts good desires into our minds, so by His continual help we may bring them to good effect. Is this not a sudden and painful fall? In moments of strong feeling, when we have seen Easter as the greatest gift to the universe and the deepest comfort for private sorrow, have we not been indignant at being made to say words that seem to forget both? And when our logic is at work, are we not scandalized, since we demand logic in prayers as in everything else and see incoherence as a want of reverence to the God of order and truth, by what looks like a conclusion unrelated to its premises?

The more we love the Book that has taught us the possibility, nature and awfulness of prayer, the less we shall want to stifle such questions. With a famous poem or a work of art, it shows more trust in the author to admit what we have not yet learned to admire than to affect a vague worship because we think we ought. Sir Joshua Reynolds urges this on his pupils in his Lectures, and sets the example himself: when he first saw an Italian masterwork, he honestly owned he could not see why it had its great name. He waited for light, and it came. If divines did likewise, with the same fidelity to conscience and the same trust that what is good will in the end prove itself good, there is no telling how much uneasy scepticism about Scripture, and how much suppressed discontent with the Church’s ordinances and creeds, they would spare their disciples. They would often see in them what the painter saw in himself. What had seemed tame, cold and ungenial in the Bible story, or vague or too formal in the old Confession, would come out in its simplicity and power. It would be seen to have been dimmed by the artificial, showy things they had been looking at before, and it would compel the admiration they had refused to counterfeit.

Where that does not happen, and the perplexity or even dislike remains about some particular point, a habit of confidence and sympathy will still be formed. We will be convinced that what calls itself the Word of God or the Church of God does not ask to be propped up by human apologies; that it trusts itself to the Living God from whom it claims to come; and that it calls on His aid to awaken the conscience and reason of men, not to lull them deeper asleep.

I. I want us to see what this apparent bathos in the Collect means, because I suspect the framers of the prayer looked at the Resurrection from a point of view less familiar to us than it should be. We dwell on the fact of Christ’s Resurrection, on the evidences that establish it, and on the inferences from it. Paul also dwelt on the fact; it was the very ground of his Gospel. But he did not set out the evidences at length. Writing to the sceptical Greeks of Corinth, he mentions that Christ appeared to the eleven, to five hundred brethren, and to himself as one born out of due time, and says little about the credibility of the witnesses. If the Corinthians distrusted them, he took no pains to prove that they could not be deceived or could not mean to deceive. Inferences he did draw, in answering those who said the dead do not rise. But fact, evidences and inferences were all bound up with the idea in my text, “The Power of His Resurrection.” A few instances from his different letters, always from significant parts of them, will show this.

At the opening of Romans, declaring the message he has brought to Jews and Gentiles, he calls it the Gospel of God concerning His Son Jesus Christ, who was made of the seed of David according to the flesh and declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection of the dead. Read that Epistle carefully, setting this beside passages like “Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father” and “Death hath no more dominion over Him; for in that He died, He died unto sin once; in that He liveth, He liveth unto God,” and you will see that the Apostle always thought of the Resurrection as a manifestation of Christ’s Divine relation to the Father. It showed the Divine Life that dwelt in Him as the Son of God, and the Divine energy that sustained that life every hour, in weakness, in agony, on the cross and in the sepulchre.

Turn to the Corinthian letter, to the magnificent chapter we identify with our Burial Service. There the doctrine of a divine power appears in every sentence, almost every word: a power exercised by an eternal law, first in Christ as Head of the race, then in all its members. Take away this assertion of a power, inward, mysterious, seen only in its effects, yet orderly, uniform, and impossible to suspend without overturning the whole economy of the universe. Put in its place the announcement of the Resurrection merely as a great exception to the course of nature. Then the chapter loses its sublimity, and loses everything that has cheered any mourner or helped anyone endure life and death. Here is Paul’s evidence. You do not care to believe fishermen or a tentmaker? Why should you? And how could you, even if they had every outward demonstration, even if experience, tradition and mighty motives were not against them? The power is not in us but in the Resurrection itself. We believe that power is acting on the human spirit and enabling it to receive our proclamation: that Death is not part of the world’s order but of its disorder, and that it has been overcome, not by a hero exalted above human suffering, but by a Son of God who entered into all of it.

He speaks of this Power in Ephesians, again linking it to our Lord’s resurrection. He gives thanks for them without ceasing and prays that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give them the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him. He asks that the eyes of their understanding be enlightened, so that they may know the hope of His calling, the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe. That power is according to the working of His mighty power, which He wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and set Him at His right hand, far above every principality, power, might and dominion, and every name that is named. The energy that quickened Christ’s soul and body, made it impossible for death to hold Him, delivered Him from every bondage and raised Him to God’s right hand, is declared to be the very power working in us who believe. It opens the eyes of our understanding and reveals the hope of our calling. The words sound marvellous, and it is hard to connect them with the habits of thought and feeling among us, or with our religious or philosophical notions. But they stand written. Those who receive the New Testament as a divine authority cannot shrink from them or explain them away. And those who have not yet acknowledged it may seriously consider whether this message is at least in harmony with itself, and whether it would remove many discords in human life and experience if it could be accepted.

II. Those who wrote the prayers of our Liturgy certainly accepted it. They connected Easter Eve and Easter Day with Christian Baptism. They believed we are baptized into Christ’s death, buried with Him in baptism, and raised to new life through faith in the working of God who raised Him. In other words, they saw the Resurrection day as the New Birth-day of the world. It declared what man is according to the true law of his being, and what each man is bound to think of himself. A man may say that he carries about with him something evil, doomed, sold to death. He has no right to say that he is evil, accursed, doomed to death. He is to count himself, says Paul, “dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” He is to claim the condition of a redeemed creature, reclaimed from the dominion of death and declared to be under the law, the power, of the Resurrection. If we form any lower estimate of our condition, the Apostles, by their own admission, were false witnesses of God. They testified that He raised up Christ, whom He did not raise up, if this is not true of those whose nature He bore.

You see what must follow. Hebrews speaks of our being brought under the powers of the world to come: the influence and operation of the Kingdom of Heaven that Christ preached to the Jews, said had come near to them, and said was about to come with power among all nations. The whole history of Christendom is a confession of these powers and a continuous evidence of how real and mighty they have been. The superstitions that have defiled the Church and reproduced heathenism inside it did not spring from this confession. They sprang from minds and hearts that sensed a spiritual power, shrank from it, and so imagined it acting on them from outside, clothed in sensible shapes and idols. They sprang from the cowardice and dishonesty of priests who played with this unbelief, sanctioned it and catered to it, until they had peopled the world again with kindly and unkindly divinities. They led their followers to fancy that the Everlasting God, the Father of their spirits, is the enemy they most have to fear and guard against. The belief that He raised His Son from the dead, and in doing so raised us also, whom He created in Him to be His children, to fight His battles and do His will, has been turned into this horrible unbelief. It grows more horrible the more it takes the facts and doctrines of the Gospel into its service and makes them like itself. For would it not be better never to speak of Christ’s death, resurrection and ascension, if they only make the grave look more fearful and God’s presence less attractive? Should we not be silent about atonement and reconciliation, if by them we mean greater alienation from our Father in heaven and our brethren on earth?

III. But all the darkness mingled with the light, in the Church and in our hearts, has not put out the light in either. We read of the brave deeds Christian men have done in every age, the deeds that most improved the world, however the world despised them or punished their authors. Their own testimony is clear, and their errors and sins, whenever they took credit for their high impulses, confirm it. A power they could obey, but which would not obey their caprices, had been directing their counsels, kindling their energies and bringing forth their deeds. It was a power that did not appear in sudden gusts but worked evenly and tranquilly, conquering restlessness rather than causing it. It was life-giving and life-restoring. It was the same power, the Apostles teach us, that inspired the will and heart of Jesus at every moment and at last quickened the body He had given up to die. There has been a resurrection life and power in these men, in the nations they lived and died for, and in the Church into which God engrafted them. This alone has kept either from perishing, and has caused either to start again into vital energy after years, almost ages, of decay, bear fresh fruit, and pass from the dreariest winter into a joyous spring. We can explain the facts no other way. The power of His resurrection has been there. It is the very power that first moved on the face of the waters and has striven with men in all ages, reclaiming, civilizing and renewing. It is the power of the Word who was in the beginning, without whom nothing was made, whose Life was always the Light of men. But it is that power concentrated and manifested in the Word made flesh, proved stronger than death, the grave and Hell, and asserting its right over the will of man and over the creation of which man is lord.

IV. Do we not know, brethren, or should we not at least know, that this power has begotten in us desires that cannot be of the earth, because they raise us above it and tell us we did not spring from it? They cannot be from ourselves, because they make us feel we are not our own, and that to be shut up in self is torment. Such desires do visit us. They may be feeble, just the infant’s cry that proves them alive, and then they fall silent and seem to cease. Or if they live on, their life may be so painful and sickly, in so strange an atmosphere and among such ungenial companions, that we wish we could kill them, or hope they will die without our being guilty of it. But have they not a Parent to whom they are dear, who can and will take care of them? Is there no mark on them that assures us of a high and celestial origin? Believe it: theirs is no mortal or merely angelic Sire. He who raised Jesus from the dead is awakening and sustaining in you every desire to know the truth and be true, to resist the evil that would draw you into itself, to deliver others from it, and to drive it beyond the limits of God’s creation.

V. Is it then a low and grovelling prayer, unworthy of Easter and degrading to the victory won for us, to ask that He who by His special grace has put good desires into our minds will by His continual help bring them to good effect? Could you have a more wonderful or practical test of the triumph over death and the opening of the gate into life than this prayer gives you? Could any ecstatic language about departed spirits, or about the good things eye has not seen nor ear heard, let us as truly realize our communion with the one and actually share in the other? To be governed by Christ in all the movements of His being, in His purposes and their outcomes: is this not the freedom of the most glorified spirit? To be able to do what we long to do, our longings being first in accord with the divinest mind and prompted by the divinest inspiration: is this not a good beyond the grasp of eye and ear, answering the heart’s desires yet surpassing them all? And this, on the strength of Christ’s having overcome Death and opened the gate of Life, we are encouraged to ask. Because His risen Life is ours, we are to believe He will begin to answer at once and will answer completely hereafter.

Brethren, there is no bathos in the feeling of this prayer and no want of sequence in its logic. It does imply the stooping of king to subject, of Creator to creature, that is implied in every act of Christ’s life on earth: God in Christ conquering death for us, and by the same loving power conquering all that death in us which prevents us from acting out His gracious purposes. It disregards the chains by which the mere formal logician tries to keep words in the little dens where he has confined them. Death is not limited to body or to spirit; it is treated as the common enemy of both, from which the same Deliverer sets free first the nobler, then the lower. Each of us can find out for himself how much using this prayer helps us learn the mystery of death and life. During Lent, hearing of other men’s calamities or entering into trials of our own, thoughts will have been put into our minds, often perplexing to us: of some good we might do, some wrong we might redress, some disease that has penetrated our society, whose seeds we can see too clearly in ourselves, and which we might help to cure. We are too used, alas, to seeing such thoughts blossom and then fall before they ripen, or be nipped by frost just as they bud. Experience has made us callous to the sight, but it is unspeakably sad. Should we not strive earnestly not to help pave Hell with these half-formed, broken resolutions? Yet if the thoughts are merely our own, that is their ultimate destiny. But if whatever in them is not fantastic or frivolous comes from the power that wrought in Christ when it raised Him from the dead, may we not, shall we not, commit them to Him in full confidence that they are His and will be brought to good effect? They will bear fruit by which men shall be blessed, which God Himself will behold with delight and rejoice to gather in. We who preach must think with sorrow and shame of the words we have spoken, felt and known to be true, living and mighty, yet left as mere words that rise up to condemn us because our deeds answer them so ill. You who have heard those words ringing in your ears, sometimes in your consciences, and felt they might be seeds of life, remember how they dropped by the wayside and were quickly carried off you knew not where. Shall we not ask, each for himself and each for the other, that from now on the power of Christ’s Resurrection may be felt in our words and enter our hearts, so that men may see the good works that spring from them and glorify our Father in Heaven?