I am alive, and you will live too!

[What is striking about this statement of Jesus that I have just read is that he said it before Easter. That is, when he was fully aware of all the horrors, death, hell, damnation that awaited him on Calvary, when he was preparing his disciples for his death. Then he said, "I live and you shall live".Do you see the power of divine consciousness in this? The certainty that Jesus will break through death, and then He will be truly with His own in His true, living reality! Even the disciples only understood the meaning of this revelation when Jesus had already risen from the dead and appeared to them alive, powerful, victorious! Then they marvelled at him with exultant amazement: behold, he is alive! From that moment on they began to live differently! My brothers and sisters, no greater joy, no greater encouragement, no greater triumph of strength can God give us today than this declaration of Jesus: 'I am alive, you shall live too'! In this short sentence is the secret of Easter!
It contains, above all, the joyful good news that Jesus is alive! Yes, Jesus lives! But it would be good if you did not hear this now with the complacent familiarity with which one usually hears a sermon, but if you felt the dynamism, the astonishment and the joy of this declaration that Jesus is alive! Let me try to illustrate with an absurd analogy: I once read excerpts from the funeral of Lajos Kossuth. The deep, moving sadness with which the Hungarian people accompanied their great hero of freedom on his last journey was touching. The sobbing masses felt that they could almost bury their most sacred wish, their dearest dream and their hope for the future with the great leader. The flag-bearer of the Old Honvédek in Debrecen tearfully threw the bullet-ridden 48th flag onto the coffin. Imagine what would have happened if someone had shouted to this mourning, hopeless crowd: 'Kossuth lives! He is not dead! Younger and stronger than ever! How much new optimism, new plans, new hope, joy, enthusiasm would have flooded their souls all at once! How the sad mourning procession would have turned into a jubilant triumph! If this news had been true, if this had happened. But even if someone had tried to spread the news, they would have known at once that such a miracle could never happen to a man!
Well, brothers and sisters, this miracle happened to Jesus! A lot of people - the apostle Paul speaks of more than five hundred (cf. 1 Cor 15:6) - who had lost all hope and will to live on Good Friday, despairing to see what had happened to Jesus: he had been killed, heard on the third day the incredible news: Jesus is alive! From one to the other, trembling, doubting, hoping, Jesus is alive! But he is dead! He is really dead! And yet he is alive! This one saw him, that one saw him, they met him, they talked to him, they had dinner with him, they heard his voice. He appeared to them! Not a dream, not a fantasy, not a hallucination. It is him, in his visible, audible, tangible, living reality! They are convinced, no doubt about it: Jesus is alive! He is risen indeed!
I know that many people doubt, perhaps even deny, the reality of this news, but do not think that this is the modern age! It is not! The denial of the resurrection began on Easter morning. Already then an organized counter-propaganda was launched that it was all a hoax, a sham of the disciples. The body was stolen - that's what they wanted the world to believe. There have always been, and still are, people who say: death is death! Once swallowed up by the grave, it is over, no more! Indeed: death is the final horizon of human power, wisdom and possibility. There all ends! But that is why the Easter gospel is so great, that Jesus is alive, that he is risen! Incredible, unimaginable, improbable, even impossible, it is true: Jesus is alive!
I cannot prove to you, my brothers and sisters, that the disciples' testimony of the resurrection is really authentic, although there are certainly facts that even the most incredulous historian cannot ignore. For example, it is a fact that the whole New Testament is nothing but the testimony of eyewitnesses to the risen Jesus. For the story of his birth, the story of his life, was written because he rose from the dead! If it had not been for an extraordinary event on Easter morning, the world would not know much about the master carpenter of Nazareth, who was executed in exactly the same way as thousands of his contemporaries! Then the world would have been on its way. The movement around him would have died out long ago. It is an undoubted fact that faith in the Risen Christ was and remains to this day the lifeblood of the Christian Church, giving Christians the unheard-of strength to stand by Him through persecution, accusation, suspicion, martyrdom and torture. Faith in the risen, living Jesus is the only thing that has kept Christianity alive and well for two millennia, and it is still alive today, despite so much hardship, persecution, counter-propaganda and even the infidelity of its own members throughout the world! Something extraordinary must have happened there on Easter morning! For a dead man cannot give life, only one who is alive!
Well then, I proclaim to you again with full conviction that Jesus is alive! I said I can't prove it, but I don't have to! Jesus Himself convinces man of this sublime fact! For what is so wonderful about His resurrection is that through the resurrection the Christ of the past becomes the living reality of the eternal present today. By the resurrection, the historical person of Jesus on earth becomes the supra-historical reality of the Christ of faith! The resurrection means that the two thousand years of distance between past and present is gone, and the Jesus we know from the Bible becomes one with us.
Risen: that is to say, Jesus crosses the intervening centuries and millennia, enters here, stops among us and says in the proclamation: 'I live, you shall live too'! It is said of great men that they live after death. But we know what such a speech means: that the memory of that person lives on, or his teaching, or his spirituality, his thinking, lives on in his works. But where is he himself now? Well, that is not how Jesus lives! Not only do the ideas and teachings of Jesus live on, but He Himself lives on in person, in reality, in fact! He lives in such a way that you can be addressed and He can address you! So He does not live somewhere in the heavens far away, but He lives right here with you, around you. Has He never told you that He is alive? Well, now He is! He says it, not me! And if anyone listens with faith, he will hear, I am alive!
You know, my brothers and sisters, this is so poignantly significant because it means that death is no longer the almighty master of the world. Someone has conquered it. Then there, at Easter, a new world era began. One in which death has lost its power. Death: what a terrible reality! The fear of it settles in all our lives! All human life is nothing but a desperate struggle against death. What man would not give for his life! If death as a problem could once be eliminated from the life of mankind, how much anguish and sadness would disappear from this world at once! How good, beautiful and joyful our lives would then be! But let us think not only of the death that ends life on earth, but also of the little death that is always at work in this world. The one that we always run into as a power, a force that destroys things, that spoils friendship, kindness, loyalty, love, so that one is always disappointed in everything, so that nothing is as it should be.
There is nothing in this world that is truly intact, intact. No joy, no sorrow, not a single thought, not even the best. Everything's been eaten away by death, nothing's really beautiful. This is death! And the fact that we're used to it, that we can't change it. That's the world: everyone lies, everyone pretends, everyone is afraid! And death is that I can't be what I should be. And I'm not even fighting for it anymore, I've resigned myself to it. That's death! And this death, the little death and the big death, Jesus conquered. I am alive!" is the triumphant Easter message, and you will live too, he adds. It is as if the risen Lord were embracing his own, and snatching them out of the power of death, and overcoming death! "I live, you shall live also"! It is like the ringing of the alarm clock in the morning, shaking us out of our sleep: Wake up, a new day has dawned upon you! New opportunities! It is only an illusion that things are as they are, unchangeable, unchangeable, insurmountable. There is another reality, another power: the reign of Christ that has conquered death.
Let us believe in His power, His victory! Not in our own possibilities and abilities, but in His! Let us believe, in spite of everything, that Jesus, as the first of us, has conquered death! Let us dare to face the struggles and problems of life with this faith! Let us dare to enter into the things of life with the thought that Jesus is the victor, even if we see nothing of it! Then life becomes truly wonderful! I know someone who escaped the problems of life into the intoxication of alcohol. He got addicted to the drink and couldn't get rid of it. A believing brother asked: Which is the more powerful? Is the sin of your addiction or the power of the risen Jesus? Do you know what the result was? New life! What seemed impossible has happened! Completely liberated! A young believing girl, after much hesitation, went to her parents, who were almost divorced, and asked them. Here again, the miracle happened, that this father and mother knelt before the Lord and began a new life. These are extraordinary times. It is well known that the development of weapons technology has brought us to the point where the preservation or destruction of all human life on earth is in human hands. In these extraordinary times, truly extraordinary tasks await every human being, especially the followers of Christ. Today the world situation raises the question: Which do you think is greater: the weight of the tasks that await you as Christian people, or the power of the risen Christ? "I live, you shall live" - the Easter wake-up call! Dare to rise, awake from your sleep of death! This does not mean that it will be easier for you, but that you will truly live! You'll have new strength, new courage, new will to live!
And even to death! Because this encouragement that you will "live" is true even in the face of great death! For it is also overcome by the fact that Jesus lives! Since Jesus died and rose from the dead, our death is only a shadow of the real death! And the shadow may frighten, but it can no longer harm! What then? This is the question that has always intrigued the human imagination. Well, suffice it to say that Jesus said: 'you will live'! Nothing more can be said, since we lack the concepts to imagine that other dimension of a glorious world! What concepts could the mole have for the glitter of the illuminated Kingdom Hall's dome? But that is enough: "you will live too"!
So not only will our memory live on for a while, not only will we live on in the letters we write and which loving hearts will keep, not only will we live on a photograph on someone's desk, not only will our name be preserved on a tombstone, but we ourselves will live! "You will live too!" says Jesus. It's not someone else, it's you! So it will be me and you who will live after death, not someone else! Even after death, we will retain our individuality, our distinctive form of personality! Our conscious existence! Our identity with our former life on earth! It is all in the fact that "you will live too".
May God grant that today you and I may join the ranks of people who have death behind them and life ahead of them! For Jesus himself has told them the great and liberating good news: "I am alive, you shall live too!"
Amen
Date: 14 April 1963, Easter.