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‘But God raised Him from the dead.’
Act_13:30
I. Its glory.—It has been first the glory. To those of us who have been sounding or hearing the call of the Father all through Lent to our consciences, our wills, our hearts, our bodies, and our minds, and have been facing every week the cries of despair from human souls in sorrow, the bitter questionings from doubters, and the deep-drawn sighs from the suffering, there has been all the time one thing which we have been wanting—Where was the proof that the Father was victoriously strong? What we have been waiting for all through Lent, knowing of course it was coming, but looking forward to it as the keystone of our arch, the backbone of our justification of God, the crowning chapter in our story, was this great cry which, rang out by these first Apostles, rings through heaven and earth to-day, ‘God raised Him from the dead’! And this is our glory to-day. There is no service in the year quite like the Easter Eucharist, and this is the spring of all the exultation—Jesus was not left to die by God, unrecognised and unjustified; He was not left with all His promises unfulfilled and all the hopes that He had raised blasted. God let the foes do their very worst; He let them come in like a flood and seem to sweep Jesus away; but, just when the triumph seemed complete, there was God’s opportunity, and in the teeth of everything, in the face of the unbelief of to-day as much as of the malignity of two thousand years ago, God raised Him from the dead. And ‘now above the sky He’s King, Alleluia!’ and we echo on earth the triumph song of heaven, ‘Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive glory and honour and power, for Thou wast slain and hast redeemed us unto God by Thy blood’; and then, turning to God the Father, we pay the same glory to Him, ‘Glory be to Thee, O God Most High.’ ‘We praise Thee, we bless Thee, we worship Thee, we glorify Thee, we give thanks unto Thee for Thy great glory, O Lord God, heavenly King, God the Father Almighty.’ So the great Eucharist rolls on.
II. Its comfort.—It is also our comfort. The world wants comfort—it wants comfort in its sorrow, and it wants comfort in its struggle with sin. It is only, perhaps, those brought daily into contact with sorrow who realise at all what the sorrows of a great city are—the young wife that dies before the end of the first year of married life; the brother, loved and trusted by mother and sisters, who suddenly falls ill with fever with his regiment and passes away; the mother who has taken to drink; the widow’s only child entrapped and betrayed by a wicked man; the wife whose husband is untrue to her; and the thousands of souls heart-broken with a sense of unforgiven sin—here is a tangled story of sorrow and sin. What has the Easter refrain to say to sorrow and sin? ‘God raised Him from the dead,’ but what does that matter? It matters everything. It is the one ground for certainty, my brother, that you will see that young wife again. Jesus has her safe in His keeping, and you will find her safe with Him in Paradise; it is the one justification for thinking—and, therefore, beware of those who would belittle it and explain it away—that God will also raise that young brother from the grave. ‘Thy brother shall rise again.’ Yes, but why? Only because Jesus can say, ‘He that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and he that liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.’ Again, it is the one chance that that mother may yet break the chain of drink—if God raised Jesus from the dead and broke the chains of death, He may yet break the chains of that terrible habit and raise her from what is worse than death. It is the one standing proof for that outraged child that villainy will not triumph for ever, and that ‘the poor shall not always be forgotten, and the patient abiding of the meek shall not perish for ever’; and as for the penitent sinner, if God raised Jesus from the dead, then the strength of His absolution must avail to sweep away the sins of the whole world. Wherefore lift up the hands that hang down and the feeble knees; if Jesus lay still in the grave, if there was no empty tomb, I have no comfort for you, no certainty of reunion with those you love, no triumphant expectation of the righting of wrongs, no ground for hoping for freedom from sin, no pledge of absolution. But lift up your heads on Easter Day. He was not left in the tomb! Lo! see the place where the Lord lay. ‘God raised Him from the dead.’
III. Its hope.—And, once again, if it is the spring of our glory and the source of our comfort, the truth of Easter Day is also the fountain of our hope—our hope, that is, for this poor humanity which, with all its faults, we know and love so well. We are full of hopes to-day of what may happen; we see visions and dream dreams, and long to make the world a better place for the children than it has been for us, and sweep away this isolation between class and class, and revive the latent religion in the apparently non-religious multitude, and give every man a decent home, and every child a real chance of life, and drive out the drink curse and the gambling curse and the sweating den, and make the whole round world again—
‘Bound with gold chains about the feet of God.’
And we shall find it hard enough to do it with all the faith which we may have in every revealed truth of the Christian Faith, but we shall never do it unless God raised Jesus from the dead. If the Incarnation, as Mr. Gladstone once said, ‘is the one central hope of our poor, wayward race,’ it is so only because the Incarnation was crowned by the Resurrection. And it is only in the power of a Risen Christ, Who careth ever for His people, to Whom all power has been given in heaven and in earth, and Who, however slowly He works, never fails, that there lies the hope of a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.
Bishop A. F. Winnington-Ingram.