Easter Day
April 24, 1859
“The power of His resurrection.”—Philippians iii. 10.
I think many of you must have felt, as I often have, a kind of disappointment in the language of the Collect which we have been using to-day. It begins grandly, as we suppose an Easter prayer should begin: “Almighty God, Who through Thine only-begotten Son hast overcome death, and opened unto us the gate of everlasting life.” But what is there answering to this invocation in the words which form the substance of the petition? Do they speak of any visions of glory, such as the opening of that mysterious gate might have prepared us for?—of intercourse with spirits of just men made perfect, such as we might hope to enjoy if the barrier of death was really removed? Not at all. They simply ask the Almighty God, that “as by His special grace preventing us He does put into our minds good desires, so by His continual help we may bring the same to good effect.” Is not this a sudden and painful fall? In moments of strong, highly-braced feeling, when we have regarded Easter as offering at once the greatest gift to the universe and the deepest consolation for individual sorrow, have we not been indignant that we are required to utter words which appear to forget both? If, again, our logical understanding is at work, are we not scandalized (for we demand a logic in prayers as in all other compositions, and revolt at incoherency as implying a want of reverence to the God of order and truth), are we not scandalized, I say, by what looks like a conclusion that has no direct relation with the premises?
The more we love the Book by which we have been educated into a sense of the possibility, the nature, and the awfulness of prayer, the less shall we be disposed to stifle questions of this kind. In reading a famous poem, or in studying a work of art, it is far safer,—it shows a far greater trust in the author,—to confess to ourselves what there is in him which we have not learnt to admire, than to affect a vague and general worship because we suppose we ought to pay it. Sir Joshua Reynolds, in a noble passage of his Lectures, has enforced this duty upon his pupils, strengthening the exhortation by his own example. When he first looked upon an Italian masterwork, he had honesty to own to himself that he did not see how it had deserved its great name. He waited for light, and it came to him. If divines exercised the same wisdom—grounded on the same fidelity to the verdict of the conscience, and the same trust that what is good will at last prove itself to be good—it is not to be told from how much uneasy scepticism respecting the facts and lessons of Scripture, from how much discontent, dangerous because suppressed, respecting the ordinances and the creeds of the Church, they would save their disciples. Oftentimes they would see the very same change gradually taking place in them which our great painter describes in himself. That which had seemed to them tame, cold, ungenial in the Bible story,—vague or too definite and formal in the words of the old Confession,—would come forth in its simplicity and power; would be seen to have been dimmed in its lustre by the artificial, meretricious objects they had been previously contemplating; would compel the admiration which they had refused to counterfeit, sweeping away what opposed its entrance.
And where this is not the case, where the perplexity, even the dislike, remains in reference to this or that special point or passage, a habit of confidence and sympathy will be formed; a conviction that that which calls itself the Word of God or the Church of God, does not ask to be buttressed by human apologies, that it can trust itself to the Living God, from Whom it claims to proceed—that it invokes His aid to awaken the conscience and reason of men, not to throw them into deeper sleep.
I. I am especially anxious that we should consider what that apparent bathos in our Easter Collect means, because I suspect that, in reflecting upon it, we shall perceive that the framers of this prayer looked upon the Resurrection from a point of view which is not as familiar to us as it ought to be. We dwell upon the fact of Christ’s Resurrection; upon the evidences which establish it; upon the inferences which may be drawn from it. St. Paul also dwelt upon the fact. It was the very ground of his Gospel to mankind. The evidences for it he did not produce at any length. Writing to the sceptical Greeks of Corinth, he speaks of Christ’s appearing to the eleven,—to five thousand brethren,—to himself as one born out of due time; he says little about the credibility of their testimony. If the Corinthians distrusted them, he took no pains to prove that they might not be deceived themselves, or might not have a purpose of deceiving others. Inferences from Christ’s Resurrection he drew in answering those who said that the dead were not to rise. But Fact, Evidences, Inferences, were all inseparably bound up with the idea which is expressed in the words of the text, “The Power of His Resurrection.” Two or three instances taken from his different letters, and always from some significant, characteristic portions of them, will illustrate what I am saying.
In the opening of the Epistle to the Romans, where he is declaring the message which he has delivered to Jews and Gentiles, he affirms that it is 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.” If you read that Epistle carefully, comparing the passage I have just read with such as these:—“Like as Christ was raised from the dead in the glory of the Father;” “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,”—you will perceive, I am sure, that the Apostle always thought of the fact of the Resurrection as a manifestation of the Divine relation in which Christ stood to the Eternal Father; of the Divine Life which dwelt in Him because He was the Son of God; of the Divine energy which was every hour sustaining that life, and which, in weakness, agony, on the cross, in the sepulchre, sustained it still.
If you turn from this letter to that of which I spoke just now,—to that magnificent chapter of it which has become identified in our minds with our Burial Service,—you will find the doctrine of a divine power exercised first according to an eternal law in Christ as the Head of the race, then in all its members—coming forth in every sentence, I might say in every word. Take away this assertion of a power,—inward, mysterious, discernible to us only in its effects, but most orderly, uniform, incapable of being suspended without the subversion of the whole economy of the Universe, without the destruction of all its principles,—substitute for this assertion the announcement of the Resurrection merely as a great exception to the course of nature,—and that chapter loses not only all its sublimity, but all that has cheered the heart of any mourner, all that has given him strength to endure life and death. Here is St. Paul’s evidence. You do not care to believe fishermen or a tentmaker? Why should you? And how can you, even if they had all outward demonstrations of their story at hand, even if they had no experience, traditions, mighty motives against them? The power is not in us, but in the Resurrection itself. That power, we believe, is acting on the human spirit; that will enable it to receive our proclamation that Death is not part of the order of the world, but of its disorder; and that Death has been overcome, not by a hero who is exalted above the sufferings of men, but by a Son of God Who has entered into them all.
Of this Power he speaks in the Epistle to the Ephesians, where he again connects it with our Lord’s resurrection. “I cease not,” he says, “to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers; that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him; the eyes of your understanding being enlightened, that ye may know what is the hope of His calling, and what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of His power to us-ward who believe, 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 own right hand in heavenly places, far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come.” Here the power or energy which quickened the soul and the body of Jesus Christ, which made it impossible that He should be holden of death, which delivered Him from it and from every bondage, which raised Him to the right hand of God, is declared to be the selfsame power which works in us who believe—which opens the eyes of our understanding,—which reveals to us the hope of our calling. The words sound marvellous; it is difficult to bring them into the least connection with the habits of thought and feeling which prevail amongst us,—with our religious or our philosophical notions. But they stand written. Those who receive the New Testament as a divine authority cannot shrink from them,—must not explain them away. And those who have not yet acknowledged it may consider seriously whether this is not a message which is at least in harmony with itself, and which would remove many discords in human life and experience, if it could be accepted.
II. Assuredly those who wrote the prayers of which our Liturgy is composed did accept it. They connected Easter Eve and Easter Day with Christian Baptism. They believed that we are baptized into the death of Christ; that we are buried with Him in baptism; that we rise to a new life by faith of the operation of God, Who raised Him from death. In other words, they looked upon the Resurrection-day as the New Birth-day of the world; as that which declared what man is, according to the true law of his being; what each man is bound to think of himself. He has a right to speak of himself as carrying about with him that which is evil, doomed, sold to death. He has no right to say that he is evil, accursed, doomed to death. He is to count himself, so says St. Paul, “dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” He is to claim the condition of a redeemed creature; of one who has been reclaimed from the dominion of death; of one who has been declared to be under the law of the Resurrection; to be under the power of the Resurrection. If we are to form any other estimate of our condition than this, the Apostles, as they themselves say, were false witnesses of God; they testified of God that He raised up Christ, Whom He raised not up, if so be that this is not true concerning them whose nature He bore.
You see what must follow from this. The Epistle to the Hebrews speaks of our being brought under the powers of the world to come; under the influence and operation of that Kingdom of Heaven which Christ preached to the Jews; which He said had come nigh to them; which He said was about to come with power, not only among them, but among all nations. The whole history of Christendom is nothing but a confession of these powers,—nothing but a continuous evidence how real and mighty they have been. The superstitions which have defiled and disgraced the Christian Church, which have reproduced Heathendom in the midst of it, have not sprung from this confession. They have sprung from the sense of a spiritual power in minds and hearts which checked it, shrank from it, were unwilling to entertain it, and therefore were ready to conceive of it as acting upon them from without, as clothed in sensible shapes and idols. It has sprung from the cowardice and dishonesty of priests, who have played with this unbelief, have sanctioned it, have catered to it, till they have peopled the world afresh with a set of propitious and unpropitious divinities, and have led their votaries to fancy that the Everlasting God, the Father of their spirits, is the enemy whom they have most to fear, from whom they have most need to protect themselves. The belief that He raised His Son from the dead,—that in raising Him, He raised up us also, whom He had created in Him, to be His children, that we might fight His battles and work His will,—has been changed into this horrible and ghastly unbelief, which becomes the more horrible and ghastly, the more it adopts the facts and doctrines of the Gospel into its service and converts them into its likeness. For would it not be better never to speak of the death and resurrection and ascension of Christ, if these are only to make the grave look more fearful to us, and the presence of God less attractive? Should not we be silent about atonement and reconciliation, if we understand by them greater alienation from our Father in heaven, and our brethren upon earth?
III. But all the darkness which has mingled with the light in the Church and in our hearts has not sufficed to put out the light in either. And as we read of the brave deeds that have been done by Christian men in every age, of those deeds which have most improved the condition of the world, however the world may have despised them or punished the authors of them, we feel sure—their own testimony being clear on the point, their errors and sins, whenever they have taken credit to themselves for their high impulses and heroic intentions amply confirming it—that a power which they could obey, but which would not obey their caprices, has been determining their counsels, kindling their energies, bringing forth their deeds; that it has been a power not manifesting itself in sudden gusts, but working evenly and tranquilly, conquering restlessness, not causing it; that it has been a life-giving, life-restoring power; that it has been that power, and no other, which, as the Apostles teach us, was inspiring at every moment the will and heart of Jesus, and which quickened at last the body that He had given up to die. A resurrection life, a resurrection power there has been in these men,—there has been in the nations for which they lived and died,—in the Church into which God had engrafted them. This alone has prevented one or the other from perishing; this alone has been the cause of one or the other starting again into vital energy after years, almost ages, of decay; of their putting forth fresh fruits, and passing out of the dreariest winter into a joyous spring. We can explain the facts in no other way. The power of His resurrection has been there. It is that very power which first moved upon the face of the waters; that very power which has been striving with men in all ages, reclaiming, civilizing, renewing. It is the power of that Word Who was in the beginning, without Whom nothing was made that was made, Whose Life was always the Light of men. But it is that power concentrated and manifested in the Word made flesh; that power proved to be stronger than death, the grave, or Hell; that power asserting its right in and over the will of man, and over the creation of which man is the lord.
IV. And do we not know, brethren, each of us ought not we at least to know—that this power is that which has begotten in us desires that cannot be of the earth, because they raise us above the earth, and tell us we did not spring out of it; desires which cannot be from ourselves, because they make us feel that we are not our own, and that to be shut up in self is to be in torment? Such desires do visit us. Feeble they may be; they may just utter the infant’s cry which proves them to be alive, and then become silent, apparently ceasing to exist. Or if they live on, it may be that their life is so painful and sickly, in so strange an atmosphere, amidst such ungenial companions, that we wish we could kill them, or hope that they will die without our being stained by that guilt. 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 which assures us that they have a high and celestial origin? Oh, believe it, theirs is no mortal nor merely angelic Sire! He Who raised up Jesus from the dead is awakening and sustaining in you any one of these desires to know the truth and to be true; to resist the evil which would draw you into itself; to deliver others from it; to drive it beyond the limits of God’s creation.
V. And is it then a low and grovelling prayer, unworthy of the Easter season, degrading our thoughts of the victory that has been won for us and for mankind, that He Who, by His special grace preventing us, has put into our minds good desires, by His continual help will bring the same to good effect? Could you have a more wonderful, a more practical test than that which this prayer offers you, and enables you to apply, of the triumph over death, of the opening the new gate into life? Could any ecstatic language about the state of departed spirits, about the good things which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, enable us equally to realize our communion with the one, actually to participate in the other? To be governed by Christ in all the movements of His being, in all His purposes, in all the issues of these movements and purposes, is not this the freedom of the most glorified spirit? To be able to do what one longs to do,—our longings being first in accordance with the divinest mind, prompted by the divinest inspiration,—is not this a good thing beyond the grasp of eye and ear, answering to the desires of the heart, but surpassing them all? And this, on the strength of Christ having overcome Death and opened the gate of Life, we are encouraged to ask! And this petition, because His risen Life is ours, we are to believe that He will begin to answer at once—will answer completely hereafter!
Brethren, there is no bathos in the feeling of this prayer, no want of sequence in its logic. But it does imply that stooping of the king to the subject—of the Creator to the creature—which is implied in every act of Christ’s life on earth; God in Christ conquering death for us; God in Christ, by the selfsame loving power, conquering all that death in us which prevents us from acting out His gracious purposes. There is a disregard of those chains by which the mere formal logician tries to prevent words from escaping out of those little dens within which he has confined them. Death is not limited either to body or spirit. It is treated as the common enemy of both, from which the same Deliverer is setting first the nobler, then the inferior, free. And we may, each of us may, ascertain for himself how much the using of this prayer helps us in learning the mystery of death and of life. During the weeks of Lent, in which we have been hearing of the calamities of other men, or entering into trials of our own, there will have been thoughts put into our minds—often perplexing to ourselves—of some good we might do, some wrong we might redress, some disease that has penetrated into the vitals of our society—the seeds of which we can detect too clearly in ourselves—that we should be assisting to cure. We are too well used, alas! each of us, to see such thoughts in the blossom, and then to see them falling before they ripen further, or nipped by the frost just as they have budded. Experience has made us callous to such sights. But they are unspeakably sad. To help to pave Hell with these half-formed, broken resolutions—should we not strive earnestly that we may not do that? Yet if these thoughts are our own, that is their ultimate destiny. But if whatever is not fantastic or frivolous in them comes from that power which 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 that they shall be brought to good effect; that they shall bear fruit by which men shall be blessed, which God Himself will behold with delight, and will rejoice to gather in? If we who preach have to think with sorrow and shame of all the words we have spoken, which we felt and knew to be true and living and mighty, and yet which we suffered to remain mere words that must rise up to condemn us, because our deeds answer to them so ill; if you who have heard these words ringing in your ears, sometimes in your consciences, and have felt that they might be seeds of life, recollect also how they have dropped by the wayside and were speedily carried off you knew not whither—oh! shall not we ask, each for himself, each for the other, that henceforth the power of Christ’s Resurrection may be felt in our words,—may enter into our hearts,—that men may see the good works that spring out of them, and glorify our Father in Heaven?