[There is something of a great exultant, liberated feeling, as if freed from heavy pressure, in the way the apostle Paul cries out at the end of his letter to the Corinthians, "Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through Jesus Christ our Lord." (1 Cor 15:57) Especially when we know that in the preceding verses he speaks of hell, sin and death, the darkest powers of human destiny, but, however terrifying the terrors of this world, "Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through Jesus Christ our Lord." This unheard-of triumph, this unspeakable victory, over which the Apostle Paul rejoices, is proclaimed at Easter, this joyous feast of Christianity! We have worn out the big words so much that they are beginning to mean the opposite of what we want them to mean. Jubilee, victory, triumph: today they are as empty sounds as the rolling of a tram in the street. But if there is triumph, if there is victory in the world, it is Easter! In fact, there is only one real victory, only one real triumph in the world: the one that was made manifest at the dawn of Easter by the Risen Christ! If, in the light of God's Holy Spirit, we understand what the triumph is that is given through Christ, we will be able to give thanks for it with the same liberated exultation that the Apostle Paul does in the Word that we read.
So Easter speaks of victories that are hard to even think about! The very fact that he is risen: a great triumph beyond all understanding. The problem is that we accept the news that Jesus is risen with the boredom of familiarity. But if we could only think about it, if we could only live ourselves in the situation then and there, what it meant: it would shake our souls. According to the Easter story, when the women heard the incomprehensible news that Jesus was not in the tomb but had risen from the dead, they were overcome by fear and dreaminess. No wonder! Imagine if such a thing happened to one of us. He would go with a flower in his hand to the cemetery in Wolfs Cross, to the familiar, familiar grave, and as soon as he arrived he would notice that the grave had been opened, it was empty, there was no body in it, but instead he would be greeted by some angelic being with such incomprehensible words: "The one you are looking for is risen, he is not here, here is the place where he was laid! To say that one would be overcome with fear and dreaminess at such news is an understatement. It would be much more than that: a terror like that which seized Moses near the burning bush, from which the Lord Himself spoke to him, or like that which trembled in the soul of the prophet Isaiah, when he stood before the throne of the Lord in a vision and cried out, "Woe is me, I am lost!... for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts" (Isa 6:5) To hear the Passover message is to know with a holy trembling that God is here! To go down to the open tomb is to dream with inner fear, "Woe is me, I am lost ... for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!"
On Good Friday, when they had already crucified the Lord, one of the Pharisees or scribes cried out to Jesus, with a loud voice: "If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross!" (Mt 27,40b) The crowd, too, liked this mocking remark, picked it up and continued to shout, "Now show that you are the Son of God, come down from the cross, and then we will believe you! Oh, how the mockery would have been silent around him, how the whole miserable crowd would have fallen on their knees before him! Oh, what a victory it would have been over his enemies! But the Lord did not perform this miracle, because He wanted to give a more eloquent, more powerful proof of His triumph than the empty cross. He wanted a greater divine miracle than the empty cross to testify to His divine power: namely, the tomb left empty on the third day!
He was resurrected: not awakened, as it were, from a deep sleep, or from some great stupor of stupor, no - but raised from the dead. The one who died, really and finally died, rose from the dead! Not only did he come to life again, as the dead Lazarus did at the word of Christ, but the dead body became a glorified body, passed through death, passed through it, rose again! Unbelievable? Of course it is, but that is the incredible thing that happened at Easter! The resurrection means that something happened here that cannot be included in the scope of human understanding, that cannot be confined to the world of human concepts, that cannot be grasped by human reason and expressed in human words, but only acknowledged with awe and dreamy wonder, that God has acted here! The resurrection is a divine act, a free act of God, just as creation is: there He created the world out of nothing, here He created life out of death.
Someone once said that the word "impossible" was written twice over the tomb of Christ! One impossible was written by man, the other by God! It is impossible, man says, for anyone to rise from the dead. But God also said an impossible thing in the Bible: it was impossible for him to keep him from dying (Acts 2,24b). Do you feel yet any of the heaven-over-earth triumph of which the apostle Paul exults?! It cannot be explained or understood, but only to bow down before it and give thanks, as the apostle does: "thanks be to God, who gives us the triumph through Jesus Christ our Lord"! When the apostle Paul speaks here of triumph, of victory won by Christ, he is speaking in the immediately preceding verses of death, sin and hell. It is over these dark powers that Easter means victory. Here, then, human speech becomes quite stammering. For what do we know about death? Death in the Bible is not just a physical process - the fact of dying - but much more than that: it is a state and a place! Death as a state: a state of separation from God, a form of existence that is the opposite of eternal life, the absence of peaceful, happy eternal life, a broken relationship with God, a state of falling out of Paradise. In short, it is eternal death, damnation. So death as a state is as much as damnation! Death and sin go together. As Paul says, the sting of death is sin. It is through sin that that deadly poison, that damnation, enters into the life of mankind, yours and mine! And it is on this death that Jesus triumphed! And He did it by holding Himself out in front of that particular sting to pierce His holy body, to inject all the poison of damnation into His person. The sting of death has burst into Christ, it has torn Him open, so that Paul cries out, almost in agitation, "Death, where is your sting?" Who would defend himself against a wasp if its sting were torn out? O thanks be to God, a thousand thanks be to God, who has given us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!
But death is not only a state, it is also a place! The most horrible prison from which there is no escape. Neither our body nor our soul has any ability to escape from this prison. Human life is a life surrounded on all sides by death, locked in the prison of death! Human destiny is destiny locked in eternal death according to the Scriptures! The Letter to the Hebrews refers to the world of death being under the power of Satan: "Therefore, since children are of flesh and blood, he also likewise became partaker of them, that through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver those who through fear of death are captives for life. (Heb 2,14-15) Yes, symbolically, Satan holds the key to this prison, holding in captivity to the fear of death all who are alive! What then happened from Good Friday to Easter, during the time that Jesus himself was in the headquarters of death, in the underworld? He descended into hell, and this is a mystery that again cannot be expressed in human words. In any case, He Himself once said, "How shall a man enter into the house of the mighty and rob him of his treasures, but by first binding the ruler, and then robbing his house." (Mt 12:29) The Lord was speaking of Himself here. He is the one who entered the house of the mighty one, entered Satan's dwelling place, hell, broke in and won some unspeakable victory there, for once afterwards, when he was risen, he appeared in his glory to the apostle John, saying to him, "I am he that liveth, though I were dead, and behold, I am alive for ever and ever Amen, and have the keys of hell and of death!" (Rev 1:18) Can the prison, the key to which is in the hands of the risen Jesus Christ, mean perdition, can it despair? He opens and He closes this dreadful door. How can He not open it for those for whom He entered the realm of death? For those who are Christ's, death is now a door-opening: the opening of the prison gates to life! "I have the keys of hell and of death!" In this, faith in Jesus can even do such foolhardiness as to cry out, almost mockingly, with Paul: "Hell! Where is your triumph?" For, "Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through Jesus Christ our Lord".
And that's not all. The Scriptures tell us even more secrets about Christ's triumph on Easter. The Bible often speaks of this visible world being surrounded by an invisible world, and in that invisible world all kinds of creatures swarm around, all kinds of demonic forces and powers with which the children of God are at war. Paul's warning also refers to this: 'Put on the whole armour of God, that you may be able to stand against all the wiles of the devil. For our wrestling is not against blood and flesh, but against principalities, against powers, against the judges of the darkness of this life, against the spirits of wickedness in high places" - that is, against the invisible world. Practically all of us are familiar with these powers, for we have so much trouble with them. These are what we used to call the god of money, mammon; the power of blood; the power of hate; the demon of revenge; the devil of all kinds of passions; the spirit of a thousand evils, and so on ad infinitum, all of which are personal evil powers in the invisible world surrounding life on earth! But it is only that these are spoken of in the Bible, that we may see the triumph of the flesh over these still greater: "And what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of the mighty working of His mighty power, which He showed in Christ when He raised Him from the dead, and seated Him at His right hand in heaven. Over all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in the world to come." (Eph 1:19-21) Or as Colossians says, "Disarming principalities and powers, He made them a show of boldness, having triumphed over them in it." (Col 2:15) There is nothing more to be said to this than what the apostle Paul says: "Thanks be to God, who gives us the triumph through Jesus Christ our Lord!"
Behold, all this is the victory of Christ in the Paschal victory! And if you believe in the risen, triumphant Christ, then you have a big piece of His Easter victory! Because to believe in Christ's victory is also to not believe in Satan's victory, to not believe in the victory of death and hell, to not believe in the triumph of principalities, powers, evil spirits! To believe in the victory of Christ is to have the spell of all other evil powers broken for me!
I have read somewhere that far to the east, in India, there are people with mysterious powers who can, by certain spells, corrupt the life of another person from great distances. All such a man has to do is look his enemy in the eye once and he is on his way to certain death. He is under the spell, which slowly withers his body and soul. Once such a man, exhausted and almost dying, went to the missionary to have the killing spell removed. The missionary said to him: "Stand on the rock and shout three times loudly into the air that I do not believe in the corruption! The man summoned up all his remaining strength and shouted three times, "I don't believe in the hex! And suddenly he felt as if he had come back from the grave.
This is what the apostle Paul did when he cried out to the defeated enemy, "Death, where is your sting? Hell, where is your victory?" And that is what you can do whenever you have a battle with one of Christ's defeated enemies: death, hell, or Satan's various powers! For the victory is not theirs, but Christ's! Even if you lose a battle and fall to one of them, the victory is Christ's! We have seen battles won and still lost the war! Well, here it is the other way around: Christ's people can lose battles and still win the war! Into all your battles against Satan, and finally into your last battle: against death, you can go boldly with this great Easter exultation and assurance, "Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through Jesus Christ our Lord!"
Amen
Date: 9 April 1950 (Easter)
Lesson
Mk 16,1-8