[AI translation] The great Christian feasts such as Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, Pentecost are not only occasions to simply remember certain wonderful events of the past, but especially to be filled with the power of the Gospel again and again. This is especially important at Easter, when the resurrection of Jesus has released the powers of eternal life in this world. So the essence of our celebration today should be precisely what the Apostle Paul says in the Word we have just read, namely that we should know, or know again, even better, the power of Jesus' resurrection... Would that the Easter Word could now speak among us in such a way that we could truly know the power of His resurrection! There is nothing we need so much as this! Let us see!Can we imagine the extraordinary power that was at work in Jesus' resurrection? The Easter event is as unique and powerful an act of God as the creation of the world. We humans cannot create, we can only form something out of an existing material, for example a shapeless block of granite into a great statue of Moses, but we cannot make something out of nothing, only God can create! We are equally helpless in the face of death. Man can graft, graft and care for a tree branch, but we cannot even think of waiting for new spring buds on a broken, rotten branch, because we know that it is impossible anyway. But something similar happened at Easter: someone who really died, terribly, rose again. To prolong a dying life is humanly possible, but once death has occurred, everyone knows that there is no flaming love or medical science that can rekindle the fabric of extinguished life. Even the most fervently loving heart is forced to accept that it is impossible to change death once it has happened. And that is the impossible: it happened at Easter! The dead has risen! We cannot imagine the divine power, the unearthly energy that has broken death and snatched Jesus, the precious prey, out of it! Even more energy than the atomic fission is released in the resurrection of Jesus, because there was a death fission! There is a power even greater than death: the resurrection of Christ! Paul is right to desire to "know the power of the resurrection of Jesus"!
But let us stop here for a moment. The apostle Paul had an easier time of it than we do, because for him the fact that Christ had risen was not in doubt, but for us the problem begins with the question, did he really rise? "I would believe it if I knew," says the man of today. But all our scientific education, all our modern thinking, all our experience up to now, is against the news of the resurrection. How can this fact be made acceptable to thinking men? I remember very well that, even as a child, whenever I heard an Easter sermon, I wondered whether adults also believed that Jesus had really risen, or whether this was to be understood only symbolically. And perhaps now you too, who are used to me trying to bring the creation story closer to the modern mind, might expect me to give some modern explanation of the resurrection of Jesus, something that can be reconciled with modern culture. Well, there are undoubtedly many symbolic stories in the Bible, such as the case of Jonah with the cethall, where the important thing is not the historical authenticity, but what God wants to say through it. There are many descriptions that need to be peeled out of the elements of the old worldview to make them understandable to modern man, such as the whole prehistory. There are many miracles that can be explained rationally, but the news of Jesus' resurrection is not a symbol, not a myth to be simplified, not a poetic image, not a parable, but a reality! Not an idea, but an event that really happened!
I know that the world smiles at this, but let me say it unequivocally: I myself believe that Jesus really, truly rose from the dead on the third day after his crucifixion on Good Friday! Even if all human science, ideas, experience and possibilities say that it is unlikely, even impossible: it happened! That is the impossible! And how can this fact be made acceptable to the thinking man of today? Well, my brethren, simply by believing that this world is bigger than my human skull. There is much more in the world than I can comprehend. Look: the animal has some idea of the world, and so does the scientist. A scientist sees and knows much more about the phenomena of the world than a dog with his brain. But has the scientist reached the fullness of knowledge? Undoubtedly, we already know a great deal about the macrocosm and the microcosm, both physically and psychologically, and we are a little dizzy with this knowledge: we believe that only what we see, what we measure, only what we calculate is possible. Today's man is like the man who packed his suitcase: he threw everything in and a lot of things stuck out because they didn't all fit. And when he closed it, he cut around it with scissors and cut off everything that was sticking out of the edge. Well, I don't cut my mind around it, I don't cut off what sticks out, but I humbly acknowledge that the world is bigger and more than I can fit into my brain, and I especially acknowledge that Jesus is more than I am, more powerful than I can rationally explain, and the resurrection can be true even if I don't understand it!
The apostles did not understand it, nor did they explain it, nor did they want to believe it, but simply testified to the fact after they were convinced that it was true! It was as if they had said, when they spoke of it, "We do not understand it ourselves, but we have lived it." I can't prove it either, but I believe, I have experienced, that in Jesus something beyond human blessing has come into this world, in Jesus heavenly realities, divine energies have appeared here among us on earth, Jesus has really, truly risen! He did not rise from the dead in such a way that the stagnated blood circulation in his body was restarted and the stiffened muscles and dead nerves began to function again: the risen Jesus is not before and below death, but above it. It is a resurrection that goes beyond all medical, biological and scientific limits, and therefore cannot be scientifically proved or disproved. This resurrection is a miracle which cannot be explained, but before which one can only bow down! And here is the secret of knowledge! To know the power of Christ's resurrection is not so much a matter of the head as of the heart! As long as we do not practically accept the sovereignty of the risen Jesus over our lives because it is inconvenient for us, we will always find intellectual obstacles that keep us from believing in Him. But if we can give our old, unredeemed selves to Him as a sacrifice, then in this journey of personal surrender, the fact of Easter itself is revealed, and what we have been taught happens: we begin to know the power of Jesus' resurrection!
But why is this so important? Because without it, without the power of Jesus' resurrection, Christianity cannot be put into practice. There has never been a lack of world-saving ideas, of good and beautiful thoughts on this earth, but there has never been a lack of power to put them into practice. Every beautiful idea fails sooner or later because man is powerless to bring it about. He has not the strength. Well, Christianity is not only a beautiful idea, not only a good idea, but also an enterprise beyond our strength. If a man really wants to follow Jesus, he will soon find that he cannot. To live with the spirit of Christ, with love, humility, loyalty and service among people who are not Christlike in spirit and love is a superhuman task! Of course it is: it is a Christian life! A young man once said that Jesus was for him the most perfect man, an ideal worth following. His pastor, whom he was talking to, asked him: Well, do you follow him? He could not answer immediately. The pastor went on to say to him. Are you willing to put out of your life everything that is contrary to this ideal and are you willing to do everything according to what Jesus approves and recommends? The young man said, astonished, "That's impossible, I can't do that! Jesus has set the moral standard so high that it is impossible to reach it by human effort. And if it turned out, said the pastor, that Jesus was not only an ideal, but a living, personal, divine reality, would it not make you stronger and better if this Jesus lived with you and in you all the time?
Well, that's it! Jesus is not just an ideal, but a living reality, and the power of His resurrection can become a force from within. And therein lies the essence of faith in the risen Christ. For the resurrection of Jesus is not only a miracle that happened once upon a time, in Him, to Him, but also a beginning, the beginning of a total transformation of our human lives. Jesus took away the power of death and made life triumphant. And being with Christ transforms us into people in whom the power of death has already been overcome by the power of resurrection. Through faith in the risen Christ, the powers of eternity are poured into our earthly life, into our temporal being. To believe in the resurrection of Christ is to enter into a dimension of God and his world with special powers, where Jesus is Lord, where Jesus is victorious even over the powers of death!
Do you think that the resurrection would have happened just so that we could have a pleasant spring celebration every year? No! But so that, by the power of the resurrection that is also poured out in us, we can set out on the journey of overcoming our own strength, to which the Lord has called us! Dare to believe that the power of the resurrection of Christ is sufficient for what your own human ability and good intentions are not enough! What makes the Christian life interesting is that it constantly confronts us with insoluble problems, but what makes it great is that these problems are always solved by Christ! In a way, the Christian believer is like those women who wondered who would roll the stone from the tomb's mouth for them, because they had no strength to do so. And lo, when they got there, the stone was already rolled away. God intervened by His power!
We too often wonder, when the difficulties, problems, tasks of life loom up before us: alas, how will I get through them, who will roll this dreadful obstacle out of my way? And when you get there, you are amazed to see that the stone has already been rolled away. Can't you obey God, can't you live a Christian life, can't you overcome your sin within yourself, can't you suffer with patience, bear burdens, love your enemies and forgive? Of course not! Me neither! But even so, just start on that particular narrow road, and along the way, you will find that an invisible, powerful Helper will go before you and roll away the stone! This is the power of His resurrection, which will even help you through death in due time!
There is an incredible news going around the world today: Jesus is risen! Do you know what this has to do with us today? That we can live a more beautiful, fuller, more meaningful, more Christian, more Christlike life with Him, and then die with Him, and live forever - with Him! So let us sing:
We fall on our faces before you,
And we ask, sweet surety:
Share in thy death
And thy resurrection
In the precious merits,
In sweet fruits.
Act with your Holy Spirit,
With your infinite merit,
That we may live a new life,
To rise at last from the dust
To everlasting happiness
And immortality.
(Canto 348, verses 4-5)
Amen
Date: 22 April 1962 Easter
Lesson
Mk 16,1-8