[AI translation] My Christian Brothers and Sisters!I once had a conversation with a great thinker about death and the problem of what comes after. My interlocutor pointed out that it was in fact the only important question in the world: politics, art, domestic concerns, and all the other things that preoccupy us all, all dwarf this question which concerns and interests us as persons.
We know nothing so definitely about ourselves as that we will one day die. Death is our inevitable fate. And we cannot even reassure ourselves that it is far away, because it is so close to us at every moment that it can come and stand in our way at any moment. But we also feel that death is not the end of our existence. From our eternal human instinct comes the feeling that there is something after death, and that for us the real existence begins, of which these few years on earth are only a preliminary, a preparatory occasion of shorter or longer duration. If only what comes after death were not so indefinite, so uncertain, the question of death would immediately be more reassuring!
Once, in a village church, someone was singing very fervently and loudly one of our beautiful hymns, the first verse of which ends: 'I feel that eternal life, already on this earth, has become mine'. After the service, the pastor came up to him and asked, "Son of God, you sang with such faith as if you had full assurance of eternal life. "Well, please," said the man, "there is no way of knowing! 'It is to be feared that many men have such a confused uncertainty in their souls, and are therefore reluctant to think of what is after death. Let us now try to dispel this gloom by the light of Christ's resurrection!
Before we want to look beyond death, we must first see clearly the question of death itself. Before talking about the resurrection, we must hear and understand another terrible, dark word: death! The darkness and the horror of this word is softened by man's attempts to take it lightly, to embellish it with soothing explanations and theories, to mask its seriousness with human philosophy. Thus man has invented for his own comfort that death is only a beautiful dream, from which the soul awakes in the next world, happy and smiling. A balloon or tunnel that connects earth to the afterlife. A boat of the underworld, on which the soul is beautifully carried through to eternity. In fact, the instinct to escape from death has led man to develop the theory of the immortality of the soul, according to which the soul does not perish with death, nor is it captured by death. Thus the soul, in the knowledge of its immortality, can even despise death!
Well, as much as many people would like it to be so, I am forced to say that all this is a fiction, a hoax on the part of the man who fears death. The very miracle of Easter shows that the question of death is not so simple. Let us try to understand the word death as the Bible understands it. The word means much more in Scripture than physical death. When we speak of death, we do not mean the physical process of physical death. Let us think of death as a state, a way of life. It is a form of existence separated from God, from eternal life, the opposite of eternal life, the absence of eternal life, and therefore nothing other than damnation itself. Didn't God say in Paradise to the first human couple, "You shall eat of every tree of the garden. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, eat not thereof: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Genesis 2:17 And they did eat, but they did not die bodily that day immediately, nor the next day, nor did they live on the earth for a few hundred years after that. But from the time they sinned, their relationship with God was corrupted, and they were cast out of Paradise, out of the happy state of His nearness, of eternal life.
This corrupted relationship, this separation from eternal life, this sinful state they were in, this is death! Since then, all human life, all human destiny, has been nothing but existence in a state of death. As the Scripture says of sinful man, "being alive, he is dead" 1 Timothy 5:6, and that "your name is called living, and you are dead." Rev3,1. You are alive because you move, speak, weep or laugh, breathe, eat-drink, think - but you are dead, i.e. all your bodily functioning is done in a state of death, in an existence outside of Paradise, separated from eternal life. Already when you were born, you were born into the state of death. Those sins, eclipses, physical and spiritual ills that you discover in yourself, these are the testimonies of your living in the world of death, these are the dead spots on you. When you die physically and physically, the reign of death will be complete. Then you will be hopelessly, irredeemably, eternally immersed in the state of death. This is how seriously God takes sin: because this state of death is the punishment, the consequence, God's answer to sin, God's judgment upon us.
But is not the soul immortal?" cries the protest within you against the hard truth. Of course the soul is alive, or rather, it exists after it has been laid in the grave, personally and consciously. But that is the question, where and in what state does it continue to exist? In the state of eternal life, or in the state of eternal death?
We can see from the parable of the rich man and Lazarus that the rich man's soul was not destroyed at the moment of death, but continued to live, but in a state of eternal death! And our human life, that is, our life in body and soul, from Paradise onwards, is a life destined to death, a life locked in the prison of death, from which there is no escape by any effort! Even our soul, however different the soul may be from the body, has no faculty or quality with which it can rise from the state of death by its own power. The human fate is the most comfortless, the most hopeless, the most miserable, because it means a fate of eternal death, of being imprisoned in the prison of eternal damnation.
Or rather, the most hopelessly miserable human fate would be if God had abandoned man. "But Christ rose from the dead, and became the Son of those who had fallen asleep." 1 Cor 15:20 - the triumphant Easter gospel. After the emphasis on the fatal seriousness of death, we understand what a tremendous divine fact the miracle of Easter, the resurrection of Jesus, was. The earthly person of Jesus Christ is itself a divine miracle, for His God-man person, in this human world of death, was a piece of the divine world, of eternal life.
In some miraculous and incomprehensible way, God implanted, implanted in this prison of our sinful human life, surrounded on all sides by death, the germ of eternal life: conceived by the Holy Spirit, in a virgin-born little child, the messenger of the reality of life beyond the reality of death appeared among us. That is why Jesus could say, pointing to himself, "The kingdom of heaven is at hand. This germ of eternal life grew up in this state of death, and on Good Friday He Himself bumped fatally into the prison wall of death, but He did not crush it as we do, but broke through it, made a breach, opened it, like a seed sprouting from the crust of the earth, rose from the dead, and by His resurrection opened the way, the possibility, from death to life.
You have heard, haven't you, that a tiny seed of an oak tree or some other plant, once it starts to germinate, inexplicably exerts such unheard-of force that it can shatter the stone slab that is pressed against it and burst through the gap into the earth. Then the stalk of this sprouting plant is the link between the world below the stone slab and the world above it. The only way that the organic matter trapped under the stone slab can escape from this prison is for it to be absorbed into the body of the plant through the plant's roots, and the life current in the plant to propel it up into the light of day. Christ, the germ of eternal life, planted himself in the earth, in our human life, assumed the fate of being condemned to death, but the divine life force in him broke the granite wall of our crypt fate: he rose from the dead, and thus established a vital link between earth and heaven, death and life.
His resurrected and living person is the only way, mode and possibility from the state of death to life. But only for those who are absorbed by faith in His person, who are caught up in the current of His life that connects heaven and earth. This is what is meant by "But Christ is risen from the dead, and they that slept are become asleep". Christ's resurrection alone is the bridge by which, through faith, we too can pass from death to eternal life, to true immortality. That is why Jesus says: "I am the resurrection and the life: he who believes in me, though he die, yet lives." Jn11,25.
It is precisely Jesus' resurrection that shows how death is so ultimately serious: behold, He, the second person of the Trinitarian God, had to enter death in person, otherwise without Him our prison would have remained closed forever. It is good to be disillusioned by the resurrection of Christ from all other things, theories, trust in ourselves, spiritualism, occult ideas, which promise victory over death and the happiness of life after death apart from Christ.
Think about it: would such a great thing have been necessary: the death and resurrection of the Son of God, if this matter could have been resolved without Him? Now let us understand how right our fundamental doctrine is: "If Christ be not risen, then our preaching is vain, but your faith is vain." 1 Cor 15:14. All our fine theories, philosophies, dreams, and even our faith are vain - even if we move mountains with them - but we cannot break through the granite wall of death with them. Indeed, if Christ has not been raised, "we are more miserable than all men" 1 Cor 15:19, that is to say, our human destiny is the most hopeless, the most miserable destiny! But Christ is risen, and in Him and through Him the process of deliverance from death has already begun. In Him, the overcoming of death by the resurrection has already begun, and therefore we can believe that the same process that began in Jesus continues in those who have fallen asleep in Him.
So what about after death? Without Christ, the state of death that began at birth is already complete and final. In Christ and through Christ, there is a resurrection from death to life, first for the soul and then, on the last day, for the body! So there is eternal life after death, but only in the same way that, for example, a rich man in America has a great fortune, but I can only share in it if I am closely related to him. If I have nothing to do with that rich gentleman, I shall have nothing to do with his fortune, even if I want to! There is eternal life after death, immense riches and untold happiness, but you can only hope for it if you have a relationship with Christ here on earth, you belong to Him, you are His, and He is yours! If you are so connected to Christ that by faith in Him you really feel - even know - that eternal life is already yours on this earth!
However much we may live in the world of death, we are now reached by the root of the risen Christ on earth, and may yet be absorbed into His living body, the community of believers in Him, whom He will bring with Him from death to eternal life. But at the moment of bodily death, that possibility also comes to an end. Whoever has not been absorbed into Christ by faith by that time will sink into the depths of the state of eternal death, where the roots of the germ of eternal life do not penetrate. Make haste, therefore, for you do not know how long you have! What happens to you after death depends on your relationship with Christ. If you have already become His on earth, then the promise of the Lord of the Resurrection applies to you: you will never die.
Amen
Date: 6 April 1947.
Lesson
Lk 24,1-12