[AI translation] My Christian Brothers and Sisters! Easter is the greatest feast of Christianity. That the martyrdom of Good Friday, the apparent ugly end of the life of Jesus Christ, was not the triumph of Satan and the failure of the work of redemption, but the reverse: the most glorious victory over all evil powers. This became a reality at Easter, and the resurrection will convince everyone of this.Without Easter, Good Friday is indeed a defeat, a tragic failure that should be hidden, concealed from the people, hidden away, not constantly brought up and proclaimed again and again. Without the resurrection, all talk of the cross is indeed foolishness, as the educated Greeks smilingly judged it. But it would be the greatest folly not only to the thinking mind, but also to the believing soul, for as the apostle Paul writes in one place to the church at Corinth, "If Christ be not risen, our preaching is vain, and your faith is vain, because you are yet in your sins.
(1) But that Easter tomb, opened and empty, means that Jesus made perfect satisfaction for us before God for all our sins, so to speak: he paid for us to the justice of God the last penny of all that we owed, and God accepted this payment, this substitutionary satisfaction.
The resurrection of Jesus further convinces us that the triumph over sin and death that Christianity so happily teaches is not simply an illusion, an idea, a wishful thinking or a doctrine, but a serious reality with power and authority.
The resurrection of Jesus is a surety-revelation from God that the promise of God concerning the victory over sin and death is true and amen, - a surety which proves in a visible way that, behold, there is deliverance from the embracing arms of sin and death, not only for Jesus, but for all who belong to Him. What Jesus said to Mary, weeping for her sister, is true word for word: I am the resurrection and the life, if anyone believes in me he will never die.
This alone shows that Christ's resurrection is the foundation of the whole Christian creed, the underpinning of all those precious truths that make the Christian life so comforting and happy. With the resurrection of Christ, then, the whole Christian mother church, the whole Christian creed, the whole Christian life, stands or falls.
At this point, I think, my brothers and sisters, a faint shadow of doubt creeps involuntarily into the souls of many thinking people: is Jesus really risen? It is worth looking deeper into this question, because so much depends on it, or I would say everything depends on it.
For my faith, there is no doubt, because I take it much more for granted that Jesus rose than that he died. It is not a miracle that He rose again, for He is God, He is the resurrection and the life itself, it is a far greater miracle that this Life could die.
But beyond that, Scripture as a historical document is also full of evidence. Let us look at one such proof more closely on today's feast. Their doubt is both evidence and consolation for us in the face of the Easter fact.
No matter how much we study the Scriptures, nowhere in them do we find how Jesus was resurrected. This glorious fact itself is mentioned countless times, the crucified and resurrected Jesus is always mentioned, but the question "how?", which is of particular interest to the inquirer, is not explained in the Bible.
We do not know the details of Christ's resurrection any more than, for example, we know the details of his death on the cross. There we find a precise description of how Jesus was crucified, what his last words were, who surrounded him on the cross and with what fervour. His death was witnessed by a whole crowd of people. But how he rose from the sheets, how he came out of the tomb, no one saw. Neither the armed guards, whom the chief priests had sent to guard the tomb, could witness the most glorious scene, -not even the glad tidings, for the appearance of the angel frightened them to death, -nor the holy women, who came to the tomb early in the morning, at sunrise, for they found only the empty tomb before them.
The reunion of the glorified soul of Jesus with his dead body, that is, the moment of the resurrection, is surely one of those works of God which man cannot endure, for he would be blinded by this radiance of heavenly glory.
If the moment of resurrection was not witnessed, the risen Christ was! He who appeared like a madman ran to all his acquaintances to announce the great event. It is with no little astonishment that we read in the Gospel accounts of the disbelief with which the disciples received the news of Jesus' resurrection.
One might almost say that the enemies of Jesus, the chief priests and the scribes, were the only ones who immediately gave credence to the resurrection as soon as they heard it, - even though they themselves had not seen the risen Jesus, and were so eager to justify themselves that they tried to make people believe that the whole resurrection was a fable, because only the disciples had stolen the body of Christ in order to make the world believe it. It is interesting to note the Gospel's comment on this, according to which this rumour has spread among the Jews to this day.
Is it not strange that the disciples who had spent three years in the night with their Master, who heard him say that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of the chief priests, that they would kill him, but that he would rise again on the third day, these disciples lamented most desperately, and several times in succession, when a group of disciples heard from some witness that Jesus was alive, they simply did not believe him. Does it not shake our faith in the resurrection that even Jesus' most immediate circle of disciples disbelieve the news of the resurrection?
My brothers and sisters, I feel that this disbelief on the part of the disciples, not only does not weaken, but on the contrary, confirms and proves the authenticity of the Easter fact. Behold, if the fact of the resurrection had not been true, it could have been proved, because there were those who brought a lawsuit against it.
I am grateful to these doubting disciples, because then no one can say that the resurrection was a fraud. It cannot be said that everyone was so under the influence of the pain of Good Friday that the pain would have driven the disciples out of their minds and they would have fallen prey to some sick infatuation, and their encounter with the risen Christ would have been a mere vision, a vision.
It cannot be said that, under the influence of the events and surprises of the last days, no one raised the question of reason, for, lo and behold, they were raised by all who had ever heard the incredible news of the resurrection. On hearing the Easter news, the first thought of every disciple was that it could not be. It was only when the risen Christ appeared to them here and there that they all began to believe in the miracle of the resurrection, and when they could see for themselves the reality of the Easter fact.
My brothers and sisters, we can only rejoice that the disciples were such unbelievers, because if they had not been, they could easily have been accused of being enthusiasts and dreamers whose testimony cannot be accepted as a historically authentic document. But if a doubter is convinced of the truth of something, his testimony can then be accepted without any reservation.
Imagine the power of the apostle Thomas' preaching about the risen Jesus when he could argue against the doubters: 'I myself was an unbeliever, not only I did not believe what others said, but I could not believe with my own eyes that Jesus had risen, but when he showed me the place of the wounds, I fell on my knees before him and worshipped my risen Lord.
This is what the apostle Paul argued and influenced everywhere he went, saying that he was an unbeliever and now he believes because he has seen the risen Jesus. From the beginning, the apostles and the whole Christian mother church have staked their whole lives on this one truth, that Jesus Christ is risen.
My brethren, I know well that the utterly unbelieving could not be persuaded today by such reasoning, but we who believe are pleased to support our faith by arguments which we may have thought hitherto weakened our faith, but behold, they strengthen it - that is, by the unbelief of the disciples.
(2) This unbelief of the disciples not only proves, but comforts us against our own unbelief. Our unbelief in the resurrection of Jesus was different from that of the disciples. We believe them, the witnesses, that Jesus rose from the dead. We believe that Jesus is alive. And not just in the same way that we say, for example, that John Arany is alive.
Arany is 'alive' in the works he wrote, in the literary society that bears his name, in the streets and squares that bear his name in the various cities. But he himself is dead, long dead! We know that Jesus lives in a different way from John Arany. John Calvin is also 'alive', alive in his immortal works and in the church into which his followers have gathered, but his unmarked tomb is somewhere in a cemetery in Geneva - and Jesus has no tomb anywhere.
We know all this very well, and we will even take it upon ourselves to believe it from long ago, yet I must say, my brothers and sisters, that our faith in the risen Christ is often not true. It is not our words and our profession of faith, but our lives that are the refutation of our faith in the resurrection of Christ.
This is especially manifest at the most painful point in our lives, at the time of death in our families. I, who have attended hundreds of funerals in my profession, have found that a very small percentage of people can mourn in a Christian way, with a Christian spirit.
In most cases, we are so overcome by the pain of mourning that it is as if we had never heard of the glorification of the soul, the resurrection of the body, the possibility of seeing again, in short, the Easter victory of Christ over death. In the event of a death, the grief of Good Friday is so overwhelming that we see and hear almost nothing of the consolation of the Easter victory. In vain do we hear the resurrection proclaimed, but we continue to brood and mourn as those who have no hope.
Yet Easter means that we do not lay our heads down to sleep in the tomb, nor do our loved ones sleep there, for just as Jesus' tomb was empty on Easter morning, so ours will be empty on the last day of the resurrection. It is then up to God, who created the world out of nothing, to decide how this will be possible - we can safely believe that as it was possible for Jesus, so it will be possible for us.
The refutation of the resurrection of Christ is our life, even when we cling to this earth with all our heart and soul. We arrange our life on this earth as if it were the only thing we held for certain. Many people even worship God, worship God, only because they feel that it is part of their state of physical and spiritual well-being and peace of mind here on earth.
Notice how we quite involuntarily consider someone, whether ourselves or others, to be fortunate and rich: in an earthly, physical, material sense! If we are prosperous, it is because of prosperity; if we are miserable, it is because of misery that we forget the great truth that 'we have no city to stay in, but we seek the future'. All this earthly life is but a trivially short preparation for the far more perfect and far richer life that will follow us after our grave.
The greatest refutation of the resurrection of Christ is ultimately our spiritual life, our Christian life. If unbelievers were to ask us now why we celebrate and we were to tell them, announce to them, that it is because Jesus has risen, would they believe us?
I am afraid that if those people knew our daily lives, they would be as unbelieving as the disciples were when they heard the first Easter news and say: we don't believe you because it is not visible in your lives. But that is what a serious acceptance of Christ's resurrection would mean for us, that people would see the risen Jesus Christ manifested in our lives, in our speech, in our thoughts, in our emotions, in our good deeds.
His disciples of two thousand years ago doubted it, refused to believe it, but under the influence of the evidence they became all the more fully and perfectly convinced, and proclaimed to the end that their Master was alive because he had risen.
It is a consolation to us, the disciples of Jesus today, who, though we believe, yet refute His resurrection with our lives: our refutation may yet become a happy certainty, our lives may yet proclaim unmistakably that Christ is risen.
O Lord, grant that the faith of our Saviour's glorious resurrection may descend from our minds into our hearts!
Amen.
Date: 9 April 1939 (Easter).
Lesson
Mk 16,1-8