[AI translation] From old documents we know how seriously the early Christian churches took the Easter event. From the moment they became convinced of the reality of the resurrection, they could hardly recover from their joyful amazement. Every day they came together, every day they re-told each other of the great joy, every day they celebrated Easter. Even later, when the institutional order of the church began to take shape, every Sunday was for them a feast of the risen and living Christ. The problem today is not that we have only one Easter celebration a year, but that the whole Easter gospel itself has become spiritually truncated and obscured for us. An Easter congregation today is very much like that small group of women who, on Easter morning, approached the tomb of Christ with devout, pious feelings, but dejected, disappointed, sad. They lacked not goodness, nor even fervour, but, like those pious women, Easter faith, its triumph and joy! That sorrowful little group of pilgrims did not believe, nor did they expect, that what Jesus had told them in advance could be true. For them, Jesus was just a precious memory, even though He was no longer in the tomb: He was risen! Our whole way of life shows that we do not really believe in the reality of the risen and living Jesus. We celebrate Easter without Easter faith! But Jesus is risen, and Jesus is alive! Oh, that we might be strengthened in this joyful faith by the message that first announced the mystery of the resurrection to the world: "Why do you seek the Living One among the dead? He is not here, but is risen!"The first Word of Easter sounds like a gentle rebuke: "Why do you seek the living among the dead? This question seems to remind the mourning women to think, who are they looking for? How can they best describe the Jesus who, before his death, wandered with them from one place to another, teaching, comforting and healing people everywhere? Indeed, it is the word that fits him: LIVE ! He was the only one truly alive in a dying world. He was the light of life, the bread of life, the fountain of life, the way, the truth and the life! For these pious women had seen and experienced all this, how could they forget, even for a moment, this power of the Lord to overcome death and sin? What spiritual ignorance is manifested in bringing her herbs and ointments, as if such a powerful One could have been possessed by death forever. "Why seek ye the Living among the dead?" For then you have misjudged the Christ whom you followed, whom you loved, to whom you clung!
Do you sense in this the reproach with which God wants to clarify our faith, the very essence of our faith, our confused concepts of faith? It is as if he were saying that if we do not believe in the reality of the risen, living Christ, then it is not worth much if we believe as much as we do in the reality of Christ who lived before he died! After all, everything that Jesus taught and did while on this earth gains its divine legitimacy in the resurrection. The authentic seal that the Prince and Fountain of Life really walked among us, that God really became man in him, that every word of the Word really lives and lives, that he really died for our sins, that Jesus really is our Saviour, not just a great man with special powers!
If you hold dear the Jesus of whom the Gospels speak, whose word soothes and comforts you, whom you want to follow, whose blood was shed on Calvary, who calls the weary to Himself and promises them rest, who embraces sinners and proclaims forgiveness to them, then understand that all this without faith in His risen reality is indeed an illusion! A pious memory, a reverent feeling, a bygone past! "Why seek ye the living among the dead?" Feel the reproach: God is telling you that you should not behave in a despondent, hopeless, powerless way, as if you wanted to count Jesus among the great dead of mankind! He is not one of the famous men who gave the world one of the many religions! There have been many poets, thinkers, rulers on earth whose memory is venerated by mankind, many great spirits have tried to pour into mankind a new faith, a new hope, a new love. The influence of many great men is still felt today, their spirits live on, but only a handful of dust remains of them in a grave somewhere - where else can we look for them but among the dead? But Jesus Christ is not among the great dead. To speak of Jesus only in the past tense is a complete misunderstanding! He was not once, but is, he did not live once, but lives, today and forever! In the words of Matthew two thousand years ago or Luke the Evangelist, he speaks to us today! And his word, through generations and millennia, is always a redemptive, creative word!
"Why do you seek the Living among the dead?" Such is the rebuke that comes out of this question: why do you live and behave as if the Christianity you represent, that you profess, were merely the spiritual legacy of a great one long dead? Know that Christianity is the true, the ever-fresh, shining radiance of a Living One! A Living One who, though He has passed into a higher form of life, yet continues to work on earth by His Spirit so personally that "where two or three are gathered together in His name, there He is present among them." As the light cannot be separated from the sun, so Christianity cannot be separated from the living Christ! Christianity is not a cult of the dead, but a manifestation of the power of the living Christ. For at its centre is not a tomb somewhere, but the risen, ever-living Christ himself!
"He is not here, for he is risen", says the angel to the astonished women staring into the empty tomb. For it is something that contradicts all the laws of nature as yet known and established! Can modern man believe it? - I do not want to explain the miracle of the resurrection, because it is absolutely inexplicable. But if one's faith is hindered by scientific concerns, let me refer to a very simple phenomenon. Look: what happens when I raise my arm like this? It is that, despite the force of gravity pulling the molecules that make up my arm downwards, they still go upwards. This upward movement of the molecules is produced from a naturalistic point of view without any visible cause, because the "will" that creates it is invisible. So, from a natural scientific point of view, the rise of the claw is a miracle. The dimension from which this lever is moved is unknown to physics and chemistry. Of course, no one sees it as a miracle, because everyone is used to such things happening, and everyone knows that there is a human self behind the phenomenon. So, in fact, this movement is not in contradiction with the laws of nature, it is just that somewhere in the whole of the causes there is a cause at work which is of a different quality from the physical causes and yet has an effect on the physical.Is it not conceivable, then, that God can enter the natural world from a dimension which is unimaginable to us, without suspending the laws of nature? I know that this is not an explanation for the Easter miracle, but if we believe in God, we can also believe that His will, His power, can produce miracles that are inexplicable to us. And His central miracle is precisely the resurrection of Christ as the victory of His redemptive will over death! So there, on Easter morning, it happened literally, physically, what the angel proclaimed to the trembling women: "He is not here, for He is risen!" "Why seek ye the Living among the dead?"
But where then do we look for the risen Christ? How? By faith! I know, the world smiles when we say that we seek by faith one who is invisible. But just think, not so long ago, they would have laughed at anyone who claimed that the movements of ships and planes can be observed even when normal visibility conditions are unfavourable or impossible for the most powerful binoculars, for example in fog or darkness! And today, what cannot be seen with the naked eye or binoculars can be seen quite clearly with a special device: radar. Where the human eye is not enough, where it cannot reach, radar makes it possible for ships to enter and leave the harbour in the thickest fog. The glorious person of Jesus Christ is not visible to the human eye. Rather, we see the difficulties of life, the worries, the temptations that surround us, the darkness of death towards which we are heading. How unspeakably poor is the man who tries to find his way in this earthly world without the radar of faith! And how rich is he who, through the thick fog that descends upon him, directs this mysterious but real radar of his soul to the Living One, the Lord, the Saviour, the Easter message of God, and through him to Jesus Christ!
And so, by seeking Him in faith, you will find Him. For example, here at the Lord's Table, forgiveness of sins is proclaimed, that Jesus died for your sins and rose again for your justification. Without faith, all this sounds like pious human talk, but with that certain spiritual radar you see beyond the visible and suddenly you sense that Someone, a living power, has actually absolved you of your sins. So you find Him in the forgiveness He lifts you up with. Or, for example, you hear the Word: "I am with you always, even to the end of the world". Without faith, this is also an empty word, but if you accept it by faith, you will suddenly find that no journey of life is so difficult, no sacrifice so great, no burden so heavy, no depth so deep, no temptation so insurmountable that you cannot take it in confidence. So you will find Him in the strength you receive from Him. Or, for example, your bodily eyes see the open grave that swallows up all the living, but by faith you see beyond it, beyond the thickest fog of death, and there, beyond it, you see the open door of the opened heaven. Yes, for Easter faith, even the terrifying reality of death is lost. Or, for example, you hear the Easter angel's command to those astonished women: Go quickly and tell His disciples that He is alive! Since then this command has been broadened in this way: Tell the whole world that Jesus lives! Tell him Jesus is alive! And you know, the wonderful thing is that when we turn the radar of our faith on the Living One, and so seek to obey Him, we see His living reality reflected in our love, in our service, in our joy, in the way we suffer, in the way we receive our regrets, in the way we carry our burdens, in the way we go about our daily work. All at once we are lifted up in spirit: Christ is alive! That is how those women met him!
Brothers and sisters, the early Christians celebrated Easter every day in communion with the living Christ. Let not our Easter be lost on this day. Tomorrow is Easter too, but not a feast day in the usual way. Well, for us, may tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, every weekday be Easter! It is not wrong that we do not celebrate the feast here in the church, in fact: it is even more pleasing to God if we show the living reality of Jesus Christ, the power of his love out in the world, among people, proclaiming it with our lives. So if we live a truly Easter faith. If this Easter worship of ours now does not continue tomorrow and the day after in a life proclaiming the reality of the Resurrection, then we have only been looking for the Living One among the dead, no matter how much we have talked and sung here about the Risen One!
So let us pray together:
Jesus, help me in this,
Help me to live more holy,
And that I may not come to judgment,
Raise me up to new life.
The power of your soul
The fountain of new life;
To let me be a living person:
By thy spirit live in me.
(Canto 347, verse 5)
Amen
Date: 1 April 1956 Easter.