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‘If the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by His Spirit that dwelleth in you.’
Rom_8:11
I. Easter surprise.—We must never get accustomed to the surprise of it; it is one of the many advantages of keeping Lent, as the Church directs that the sudden change from the gloom of Lent, and the darkness of Good Friday to the white flowers and the ringing hymns of Easter keeps alive in us the glad sense of surprise. ‘Ye have a watch, make it as sure as you can,’ has a grim irony in the light of what had happened on Easter Day, and yet all evidence and all probability was on the side of those who thought that they had seen the last of Jesus Christ.
II. Easter triumph.—But if the shock of glad surprise is the first emotion at Easter, the next is a sense of glorious triumph; the more unselfishly we entered into our Lord’s sufferings on Good Friday, with the more completeness do we fling ourselves into His triumph on Easter Day. It seems at first almost too good to be true; every foe is not merely defeated, but annihilated. With death broken to pieces and sin beaten from its stronghold, what wonder if the mere human agents were forgotten, and that the old hymn of triumph is repeated as one of the Easter Lessons—‘Sing unto the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously. The horse and his rider hath He cast into the sea!’
III. Easter hope.—But if surprise and triumph burst out in every hymn and culminate in the great Eucharist which we celebrate to-day, we must not forget the hope. This is your answer, all you who ask questions about God’s power to save, God’s power to redeem, God’s power to raise from the dead—‘Easter, Easter, Easter’ is our answer. ‘If the Spirit Which raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, then He that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by His Spirit which dwelleth in you.’
IV. Easter assurance.—And notice how beautifully this Easter message follows upon and crowns the message of Lent. ‘Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts.’
(a) Has the Holy Spirit convicted of sin? Has He led us on from step to step, from penitence to confession, from confession to absolution, from absolution to service, from service to power? Has He dwelt in us and made our bodies temples of the Holy Ghost? Has He shown Himself the Comforter?—and all these things we have seen that He does—then stand still to-day and see His final triumph, and His pledge of all that final triumph means. If it was ‘through the Eternal Spirit’ that Christ offered Himself without spot to God, so also that same Eternal Spirit crowned His glorious work on Easter Day, by some share which we dare not attempt to define, in raising Him from the dead. While we rightly think most of Christ Himself on Easter Day, we must not forget that the ‘Lord and Giver of Life,’ the Spirit of Life from God which entered into the two witnesses in the Book of Revelation, that same loving, unselfish, glorious Spirit, shared with the Father and the Son the triumph of Easter Day.
(b) Then notice what an answer it gives to you who ‘through fear of death spend all your lifetime subject to bondage.’ Lift up your heads, ye dying; you cannot really die, for ‘if the Spirit of Him Which raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, then He Which raised up Christ Jesus shall also quicken your mortal bodies.’ He has given what St. Paul calls the ‘earnest of the Spirit’ in your hearts, and the presence of the Spirit in your hearts is an earnest that when your natural bodies die they shall be quickened into spiritual bodies. Let no difficult speculations, no haunting doubts, no attempts to be wise above that which is written, move you from this solid certainty of Easter Day—that when your time comes to die, and that tired body—which perhaps now contains in it the seed of the disease which shall one day lay it low—lies still in death, then the Holy Spirit into which you were baptized, by Whom you were confirmed, Who has disciplined you, and taught you, and empowered you, and led you all your lifelong unto that day, has yet one more loving office to discharge for that body which has been His temple so long—He will raise it from the dead.
(c) And if the dying are to lift up their heads, then lift up your heads, ye mourners. ‘What has happened to your dead?’ you ask this morning. ‘They were here with you last Easter,’ you say, ‘joining in the Easter hymns, and looking with you at the Easter flowers.’ What has happened to them? A beautiful thing! ‘The loving Spirit has led them forth into the land of righteousness.’ It was just what they had prayed for in the Psalms time after time: ‘May Thy loving Spirit lead me forth into the land of righteousness.’ And He took them at their word, and escorted them forth to be with Christ for ever.
(d) But most of all is Easter a happy day for the contrite and the humble. There are many who have found out their sinfulness and confessed their sins this Lent, but ‘can they preserve? can they go on from strength to strength?’ That is their terrible doubt, and the Easter message rings back to them with marvellous comfort, ‘He that raised up Jesus from the dead shall raise you also up by Jesus to newness of life’; ‘He that hath begun a good work in you shall perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.’
I plead, then, with one and all of you here, enter fully into the glad surprise, the triumph, and the hope of Easter Day. We are dying men and women, it is true; we are chastened, it is true, by pain and suffering; we are sorrowful often as we lose our dear ones; we are poor, and often have a struggle to make our living; we have nothing in ourselves to encourage us to hope, but we have the Spirit; we have the Spirit of Him Who raised Jesus from the dead, and that makes all the difference.
Bishop A. F. Winnington-Ingram.