NEVER AGAIN TO DIE

            When, a few weeks ago, I first read the lectionary scripture lessons for this morning, and discovered that the Epistle lesson was a continuation of Paul’s most extensive and systematic treatment on the subject of resurrection, my immediate thought was, to focus on that theme on a Sunday less than two weeks away from Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent is going to seem so out of place. We’re getting ready to enter the most self-examining and penitential season of the year, so why dwell on a celebrative scripture that we all associate with Easter? But a second and third thought brought me to the conclusion that perhaps reflecting on the end, the goal, the denomoit of the story, might better enable us to enter more fully into the Lenten themes, the sorrow and fear of modern life, to which the resurrection may be the only answer.

            This morning, I’d like us to ask the question: “What exactly is it that is good news in all these thoughts on Christ having been raised from the dead?”  Let me begin on a very elementary level.

            First, there is good news here had we nothing more to celebrate than the memory of a noble life. Let it be remembered that there were Christians in Corinth who trusted in Jesus supremely, but could not bring themselves to believe in resurrection. Which is why Paul asks the question: “Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead?” I can remember walking the cobblestone streets of Corinth on two different trips there, wondering where these non-believers hung out! But let’s give them credit: the good news for them was the memory of a noble life.

            Think about this man for a moment. His life grazes ours like a welcome benediction. There is no record that he ever made another sad. He seemed never to hurry and yet he was never late. He did not bow to the mighty or despise the poor. He consistently used his powers and gifts for good and positive ends. Jesus never used the gift of miracle regressively but always progressively. He did not turn wine to water or bread to stones. He did not visit a paralysis on Judas or blind Pontius Pilate. He did not wither the limbs of the officers who came that night to arrest him in the garden. He had an eye for the lilies of the field, an ear for God, and a hand for any in need.

            With nothing more than Jesus’ exemplary life to cling to, we could pray devotionally with John Baillie: “Forbid, O Father, that the difficulty of living well should ever tempt me to fall into any kind of heedlessness or despair. May I keep it ever in mind that this human life was once divinely lived and this world once nobly overcome, and this body of flesh, that now so sorely tries me, once was made into your perfect dwelling place.

            But that’s not all! There is good news here had we nothing more to celebrate than a noble life that had survived death! Is death the end of the road or is it a bend in the road? We wonder. We say in our more optimistic moments that God would not have given birds an instinct for the South had there been no Southern dimension. So, most of us live with our hunches and surmises. But, if HE survived the grave, then there is our hope.  Here is the good news. Jesus did more than survive death, he defeated and reversed it. He experienced death not somehow, but triumphantly.

            But that’s not all! This noble life raised from the dead destroyed the powers of the present age. We have overly personalized the meaning of Christ’ resurrection and largely missed its cosmic significance. It is all gathered for us, the individual and corporate meaning of his death and resurrection, in those assuring words that Paul wrote to the Christians in Colossae. Talk about seeing the death and resurrection as a colossal triumph, listen to two verses from Paul here: “When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.” What are these “principalities and powers?” Well, they have to do with the large, impersonal forces that would control our lives. Principalities and powers suggest that malevolent network which the NT refers to as “the mystery of iniquity.” The Bible has a way of understanding our human striving on a larger board than most of us project.

            Who are the principalities and powers? The state, the starts, the system: caste, class, color; frozen ideologies: either theological or political, anything that in a collective, abstract way moves in to dehumanize the people of the earth.

            The good news of Lent and Easter, or death and resurrection, is that Jesus made short work of the principalities and powers. Against them he was triumphant, and decisively so. Good Friday had flung some serious questions against that Syrian sky. As the Mennonite John Yoder put it, “There at the cross is the man who loves his enemies, the man whose righteousness is greater than that of the Pharisees, who being rich became poor, who gives his robe to those who took his cloak, who prays for those who despitefully use him.”

            The question that we ask in the presence of all that is whether such values belong to the essence of life, or form an exception that proves the rule. Is that the way life with a capital L is?  Loving, giving, serving, dying?  The resurrection was God’s resounding and unalterable “YES.”  It was not a battle that Jesus won, it was the WAR.

            Friends, the central claim of the NT is not the announcement that a new religion has come into the world. The central claim of the New Testament is the announcement of the birth of a New World and a New Humanity. That is why Paul later on this ringing passage on resurrection arrestingly declares Jesus as the last Adam. As in the old Adam all die, even so in the last Adam shall all be made alive.

            As a preparation for your Lenten experience, which in a way all begins with next Sunday’s Transfiguration of the Lord, give yourself the gift of meditating on Paul’s monumental chapter, I Cor. 15, reflecting on Christ in whom the old has passed away and the new has come.

            There is good news here had we nothing more to celebrate than the memory of a noble life.

            There is good news here had we nothing more to celebrate than a noble life that had survived death.

            There is good news here because this noble life raised from the dead destroyed the powers of the present age, and has made us and all things new. And for this celebration we say, thanks be to God.