An Easter Sermon

“And He laid His right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am He that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.” — EEV. i. 17, 18.

THERE is only one subject for to-day. Upon this morning when the grave was broken and Jesus Christ arose, His resurrection with all that it means for us must claim our thoughts. Instinctively the minds of all men turn that way. I think that many men who could not help hesitating if you asked them whether they really believed in the historical fact of Christ’s arising from the dead, and men whose whole habit of thought is material, bound up with forces that the eye and hand can measure, still feel a certain sense of exaltation, the leaping of some unknown spiritual possibility when Easter morning opens on the earth. It is something that mortal men have been able even to imagine an immortality, and to find pleasure in telling one another that one at least of all the billions who have died and been buried has broken through the tomb and lived upon the earth again. I am sure that many men, blindly believing, who could tell little of what the Resurrection really means, have yet got at the heart of its meaning this morning in a sense of freedom and openness, of the largeness of life and the liveness of God, which they have not felt, perhaps, since last Easter Day. Easter is remarkable for this, that it seems to take the most stupendous thoughts and through the familiar personality of Jesus bring them to men’s apprehension and affection. “Christ is arisen!” “Christ is arisen!” Men say to one another. “Arisen!” Do we know what that means? The one invincible power of the world conquered! The one inevitable fate of man avoided! Death tasted and then laid aside like a cup that the lips would not drink! The most inexorable of natural laws, as we call them, broken through! Life and divinity claiming their preeminence! These are stupendous thoughts. And yet our souls are holding them to-day. The very children have taken these stupendous thoughts into their simple minds. They have been made real to us through the personal experience of Christ whom we love, and they have been translated by our own instincts and the prophecies of our own needs. It is to those who have gone up the path to the empty tomb full of love for Jesus that the great truth of His resurrection has been shown, and their own truest longings have been made beautiful and clear. Just as these flowers have taken the infinite and mysterious forces of nature, and put them into these clear shapes of visible beauty, so Easter, the flower of the year, takes the immeasurable truths of life and immortality, and holds them to us in a beauty that we all can see and love.

I have taken for my Easter text the account which Christ gives of Himself after His resurrection and ascension. It is evident to any thoughtful reader of the Gospels that, with all their joy in their risen Lord, the disciples were in a strange bewilderment and puzzle all the time that they were with Him. They loved Him just as much as ever, but they could not seem to lay hold of Him as they used to when He walked with them and talked with them, and they were first learning of His nature and His love. After His resurrection He eludea them. Their hearts burned within them in His company, but He went and came in strange, mysterious ways. They pondered His mystical and subtle words, and always seemed to be trying to find out fully what this Lord of theirs who had arisen from the dead really was. Evidently He was something more than they had thought Him when they followed Him in Galilee. And all the Christian world, since, has echoed their loving curiosity, and longed to know more of the conqueror of death and the Saviour of the world. It is good for us to have this passage in the Revelation, in which Christ speaks, and declares Himself, “I am He that liveth, and was dead; and behold I am alive for evermore; and have the keys of hell and of death.” Let us try to see some thing of the meaning of that sublime self-description of the risen Christ. See what Christ says of Himself then. First, “I am He that liveth.” That word, “liveth,” is a word of continuous, perpetual life. It describes the eternal existence which has no beginning and no end; which, considered in its purity and perfectness, has no present and no past, but one eternal and unbroken present, — one eternal now. It is the “I Am” of the Jehovah who spoke to Moses. “He that liveth” is the Living One; He whose life is The Life, complete in itself, and including all other lives within itself. My dear friends, if anything has come to us to make us feel what a fragmentary thing our human life is, I think there is no greater knowledge for us to win than that the life of one ho loves us as Christ loves us is an eternal life, with the continuance and the unchangeableness of eternity. See how we alter; how we make plans and finish them, or give them up; how we slip on from one stage of our career into another; how past, present, and future are forever confusing our existence; how we die, and others come on in our places to run through the same mystery and bewilderment of change that we have run. How our heads ache and our hearts ache with it all some times. “Is this living?” we exclaim. “This is merely touching upon life. Is it living? Is it not like the touching of an insect on the surface of a river that is hundreds of miles long? His wing just brushes it at one point in its long course, and ruffles it for a second, and then is gone again, and that is all he has to do with it. And that is all we have to do with life. Is this living?” And then there comes this voice from Christ: “I am He that liveth,” He declares — continuous, eternal life. There is a large, long life that is not transitory. When we know that, then, just as the children’s lives set them selves into the life of their father which seems to them really eternal; j ust as the leaves coming and going, growing and dropping, find their reason and consistency in the long, unchanging life of the tree on which they grow; so our lives find their place in this long, unchanging life of Christ, and lose the vexation of their own ever-shifting pasts and futures in the perpetual present of His being. It is the thought of an eternal God that really gives consistency to the fragmentary lives of men, the fragmentary history of the world. A Christ that liveth redeems and rescues into His eternity the broken, temporary lives and works of His disciples.

That is the first thing, then. This Christ is He that liveth. But then go on. See what a wonderful thinp comes next. “I am He that liveth, and was dead.” We do not begin to know how wonderful that is. Remembei the eternally living, the very life of all lives. And yet into that life of lives death has come, — as an episode, an incident. I do not speak now of the immense provocation, the immense love that brought so strange a thing as the submission to death on the part of the Ever-living One. I speak only of this, that when death came to Him it was seen to be not the end of life, but only an event in life. It did not close His being, but it was only an experience which that being underwent. That spiritual existence which had been going on forever, on which the short existences of men had been strung into consistency, now came and submitted itself to that which men had always been submitting to. And lo! instead of being what men had feared it was, what men had hardly dared to hope that it was not, the putting out of life, it was seen to be only the changing of the circumstances of life, without any real power over the real principle of life; any more power than the cloud has over the sun that it obscures; or than the ocean has over the bubble of air that it buries fathoms deep, but whose buoyant nature it cannot destroy, nor hinder it from struggling towards and sometime reaching to the surface of the watery mass that covers it. That was the wonder of Christ’s death. As He drew near to it He himself trembled. It was an experience of all His creation, but He had never felt it. To His humanity, His assumed flesh, it seemed terrible. Gethsemane bears witness how terrible it seemed. But He passed into it for love of us

And as He came out from it He declared its nature. “It is an experience of life, not an end of life. Life goes on through it and comes out unharmed. Look at ine. I am He that liveth, and was dead!”

But this is not all. Still the description goes on and unfolds itself. “He that liveth, and was dead,” Christ says, “and behold I am alive for evermore.” This existence after death is special, and different. It is not a mere reassertion of what had been already included in His great word, “I am He that liveth.” It is something added. It is an assurance that in the continued life which has once passed through the experience of death there is something new, another sympathy, the only one which before could have been lacking with his brethren whose lot it is to die, and so a helpfulness to them which could not otherwise have been, even in His perfect love. This new life, — the life that has conquered death by tasting it, which has enriched itself with a before unknown sym pathy with men whose lives are forever tending towards and at last all going down into the darkness of the grave, — this life stretches on and out forever. It is to know no ending. So long as there are men living and dying, so long above them and around them there shall be the Christ, the God-man, who liveth, and was dead, and is alive for evermore.

And now think what that great self-description of the Saviour means, and what it is to us. What do we need, we men? Ah, the happiest and most satisfied lives among us have had some glimpses into the depths of their own unsatisfactoriness; and the most eager and earnest, and th*1 sick and the suffering, live in the consciousness of their deep wants all the time. Here are we poor waifs upon the earth, — here with our fragments of existence, — here with the mystery of our beginning and the half-understood purpose of our being here at all; and dark, clear, inevitable before all of us there is looming up the mighty wall of death. In through its narrow door every one of the millions who has lived has passed. Up to that same door every one of us is walking. Each throbbing second is a footfall that brings us up a little nearer. And beyond? Not one of those we have seen enter has come back to tell us what there is beyond, to tell us that there really is any such beyond as that at which our resolute, unreasonable vitality guesses and hopes in spite of all the darkness. This is man’s life. Just think of it. And then, as you sit thinking of his fragmentariness, his certainty of death, his doubt about a future, let this voice come to you, a voice clear with personality, and sweet and strong with love: “I am He that liveth, and was dead; and am alive for evermore.” “He that liveth!” And at once your fragment of life falls into its place in the eternity of life that is bridged by His being. “He that was dead!” And at once death changes from the terrible end of life into a most mysterious but no longer terrible experience of life. “He that is alive for evermore!” And not merely there is a future beyond the grave, but it is inhabited by One who speaks to us, who went there by the way that we must go, who sees us and can help us as we make our way along, and will receive us when we come there. Is not all changed? The devils of discontent, despair, selfishness, sensuality, how they are scattered before that voice, really heard, of the risen and everlasting Christ. He stands before the door of His tomb and speaks, and these dark forms that have enchained the souls and fettered the activities of men fall on their faces, like the Roman soldiers, who in the gray dawn of the morning saw Him come forth from the tomb of the Arimathean, and trembled with fright, and knew that their day was over, and that the prisoner they thought was dead was indeed too strong for them to keep. Would God I could make you hear that voice on this Easter morning!

And yet we have not finished all our Lord’s description of Himself, though we have been led on to anticipate in part what He has still to say. We have talked thus far only of Christ’s resurrection. We have not spoken of the resurrection of His disciples which He makes clear and certain by His own. But see how He goes on: “I am He that liveth, and was dead; and behold I am alive for evermore. And I have the keys of hell and of death.” Hell of course means just Hades, that unseen place, that place of departed spirits in which our creed expresses its belief. Christ then, having experienced death, has the keys of death to open its meaning, and to guide the way through it for those who are to die like Him. It is because He died that He holds the keys of death. Can we not understand that? Do we not know how any soul that has passed through a great experience holds the keys of that experience, so that as He sees another coming up to it just as ignorantly and fearfully as he came, he can run up to this new-comer and open the door for him, show him on what side this experience is best entered, lead him through the dark passages of it where he could not easily find his way alone, and at last bring him out into the splendor of the light beyond. I am tempted to stop and think of this with you for a moment, by the way, for this is what binds men’s lives most closely and most vitally together. Suppose you have had a life of great sorrow. Or, suppose you have had some one great sorrow in your life. It is not a mere supposition. I look into your faces and I know how true it is of many and many of you, my people. Well, you have suffered, and come through your suffering into the light. And as you stand there looking back, who is it that comes up the road where you remember to have walked years back, when you were a boy, the road that led you to your suffering? You look, and lo! another light and careless heart is coming, singing, up the road by which you came. You know where the road leads to, but he has not yet caught sight of the trial that blocks it. Suddenly he comes in sight of that trial, and starts back. He stands in fright. He trembles. He is ready to run. “Father, save me from it,” you hear him cry. What can you do for him? If you are wise and willing, you go down and meet him, and you hold out before him, in some sympathetic act or word, the key of your experience. “Let me show jou,” you say, “not because I am any greater or better than you, but only because the Father led me there first. Let me show you the way into, the way through, and the way out of this sorrow which you cannot escape. Into it by perfect submission; through it with implicit obedience; out of it into purified passions and entire love.” He sees the key in your hand. He sees the experience in your face, and so he trusts you. How useless it is to go to any brother without the key, — without the experience of that which he has got to meet. He thanks us and turns away. Who are we that we should guide him? It is so with temptation. It is so with repentance. They who have undergone and overcome stand with their keys to open the portals of life’s great emergencies to their brethren. The wondrous power of experience! And see how beautiful and ennobling this makes our sorrows and temptations. Every stroke of sor row that issues into light and joy is God putting into your hand the key of that sorrow to unlock it for all the poor souls whom you may see approaching it, through all your future life. It is a noble thing to take that key and use it. There are no nobler lives on earth than those of men and women who have passed through many experiences of many sorts, and who now go about with calm and happy and sober faces, holding their keys, some golden and some iron, and

finding their joy in opening the gates of these experiences to younger souls, and sending them into them full of intelligence and hope and trust. Such lives, I think, we may all pray to grow into as we grow older, and pass through more and more of the experiences of life.

And now this is just exactly what Jesus does for us by His resurrection. Having the keys of death and hell, He comes to us as we are drawing near to death, and He opens the doors on both sides of it, and lets us look through it, and shows us immortality. Now you see we have passed over from Himself to us. Not merely He lives forever, but so shall we; for us, too, death shall be not an end, but an experience; and beyond it for us, just as for Him, stretches immortality. Because He lives, we shall live also.

And now shall we try to tell to one another what it :s to be immortal, and to know it; what it is to have death broken down so that life stretches out beyond it, the same life as this, opening, expanding, but forever the same essentially; just as to Him that always liveth the life that He liveth evermore is the same after the death on Calvary, though with some entrance of something — some new knowledge, and the sympathy of a new experience — that was not there before? This is certainly what I want to tell on Easter Day to all these men and women who are thinking tenderly and longingly of their own dead; perhaps thinking fearfully of their own death to day. But, as I try, I am rejoiced indeed that there is so much in the everlasting associations of the day to speak to you what I know I must fail to speak. But let me try.

And first of all I think of the immense and noble freedom from many of the most trying and vexatious of our temptations which comes to a man to whom the curtain has been lifted and the vail rent in twain. Let me fancy myself a man who has no vision beyond this world. Let me bow myself down, and shut myself in, until all the thought of my life stops sharp and short there at the grave. 1 am going to work along here, till when? perhaps till to-morrow morning, perhaps till fifty years nence: what matters it? Certainly for a very minute of time, and then it will be all over; what I do I must not only begin, I must finish here and now. All my desires, those deep, deep wishes that are in my soul because I am a man, the desire to accomplish something, the desire to please, the desire to discover and display myself, — all oE them good desires, all of them parts of my humanity, — they must all be satisfied before the curtain falls or they can never find satisfaction, for that falling of the curtain is the end of all. What a coward I become! What a poor, timid, limited, temporary thing! I must attempt nothing so large that I cannot finish it before the sun goes down. I must desire nothing that this life cannot bestow. If I want to please, whom shall I please? Only these cramped and crippled and half-judging men about me, to whom I must degrade myself to win their honor. If I want to make myself known, I must take this crude self which I am now, and hold it up and make that self known, for it is “now or never,” since the end may come it once. How superficial, restless, impatient! what a slave I come to be! Where is my independence? How the world has me down and treads on me! — treads me into the dust and mire of the present, since I know no future world into which I can lift myself up and run away. And now beside me all the time there is another man, and the difference between him and me is this, that he believes in immortality. Somehow he has got hold of the truth of resurrection. To him, death is a jar, a break, a deep mysterious change, but not the end of life. I know that men may claim to believe that, and yet live on like dogs. Men may claim to believe that, and yet be slaves and cowards. But this man really believes it; and see what it does for him. See how free it makes him. How it breaks his tyrannies! He can undertake works of self-culture, or the development of truth, far, far too vast for the earthly life of any Methuselah to finish, and yet smile calmly and work on when men tell him that he will die before his work is done. Die! Shall not the sculptor sleep a hundred times before the statue he begins to-day is finished, and wake a hundred times more, ready for his work, bringing with a hundred new mornings to his work the strength and the visions that have come to him in his slumber? He can desire to please, and yet be perfectly patient as he waits for a “well done” that will fall on his ears out of divine lips when this world and its shows are over. He can desire to show himself, and yet live in obscurity content, sure that some day — what does it matter when to him who has eternity to live in? — God will call him, and bid men see in him the work of love and grace. Can you picture the independence of a man like that? What are my temptations to him-? How he walks over them with feet that follow his far-seeing sight like a man that strides with his firm steps and far-off sight and never sees the pebble in the path behind which a crawling insect is blocked and hindered. Sometimes when one is travelling through a foreign country it happens that he stops a day or two, a week or two, in some small village, where everything is local, which has little communication with the outside world; where the people are born and

grow up, and grow old and die without thinking of leaving their little nest among the mountains. The traveller shares for a little while their local life, shuts himself in to their limitations. But all the while he is freer than they are; he is not tyrannized over by the small prescriptions and petty standards that are despots to them. He knows of, and belongs to, a larger world. He is kept free by the sense of the world beyond the mountains, from which he came and to which he is going back again. And so when a man, strong in the conviction of immortality, really counts himself a stranger and a pilgrim among the multitudes who know no home, no world but this, then he is free among them; free from the worldly tyrannies that bind them; free from their temptations to be cowardly and mean. The wall of death, beyond which they never look, is to him only a mountain that can be crossed, from whose top he shall see eternity, where he belongs. This is the freedom of the best childhood and the best old age, these two ends of life in which the sense of immortality is realest and most true.

How good it would be for us if this bright Easter Day could show us immortality and so set some of us free. There are some things that you are afraid to do, some right word you are afraid to speak, some wasteful or wicked habit you are afraid to give up, some self-culture that you are afraid to undertake, some attempt to be useful in some little enterprising way from which you shrink out of a feeble fear of what people will say about it, out of a fear of the little world. You would get rid of that fear instantly if you realized your immortality and stood in the midst of the great world of your eternal life, as the mists that have hung thick and damp in the valleys scatter and are lost as soon as they struggle up into the free air above the hill-tops. What is there in scorn or criticism, that dies the day it is born, that can terrify, however it may pain, the man who is to live forever? He is free. He has entered into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

And so, again, the whole position of duty is elevated by the thought, the knowledge of immortality. Duty is a vast power and needs a vast world to work in. I do not deny, God forbid! I love to watch the power of duty woi’king in a man who is unable to believe that the life he lives is any more than an insect’s life. It is a dogged stoical thing, but there is something that makes us love it with a love that is all the tenderer because it is so melancholy, in the stout resolve that says, “I do not dare to think that I shall live after this life is over, and it may be over with the next breath I draw, but nevertheless, all blind and useless as it seems, I will not do what my conscience calls a wrong thing, and I will do what my conscience says is right, while I am here upon the earth.” There is something beautiful about that, but how sad and dark it is. It is a resolution for rare souls. Who ever dreams that the whole race could begin to live on an impulse of duty as frigid and austere as that? But now let Christ come to that brave man, holding the keys of death and hell. Oh, brave man, do not be so in love with your own bravery as to insist upon the hard stoical iuty that knows no future, when He opens before you the spiritual future that really belongs to every dutiful deed, and shows you a world in which these hard seeds that you are sowing now will bear their fruit. It seems to me that this day is a day for strong and cheerful resolutions, because it is a day when, with the spiritual world open before us, we can all catch sight of the destiny of duty, — of how, some time or other, every good habit is to conquer and every good deed wear its crown. Come, take that task of yours which you have been hesitating before, and shirking and walking around and around, and on this Easter Day lift it up and do it. It is your duty, That which sounds hard and cold on other days ought to sound warm and inspiring to-day. For to day we can see that duty is worth while. Duty is the one thing on earth that is so vital that it can go through death and come to glory. Duty is the one seed that has such life in it that it can lie as long as God will in the mummy hand of death, and yet be ready any moment to start into new growth in the new soil where He shall set it. So let us all consecrate our Easter Day by resolutely taking up some new duty which we know we ought to do. We bind ourselves so by a new chain to eternity, to the eternity of Him who, for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at God’s right hand.

I had wanted to speak again of the new life that is given to friendship, to all our best relations to one an other by the power of immortality. But I must not dwell on this or much besides. To speak about immortality is like speaking about life. There is nothing that it does not touch. I think that the two things above all others that have made men in all ages believe in immortality, apart, so far as we know, from any revelation save that which is written in the human heart, have been the broken lives and the broken friendships of the world. Men could not believe that this young life, broken off so suddenly, was done forever. It suggested its own continuance. And when they had been growing into sympathy with some rich and true soul for years, and were just catching sight of new immense regions in him that were still to be comprehended, it was impossible for them to stand by his coffin and think that it was all over. Instinctively friendship triumphed over the grave. Love was too strong for death! And yet, what terrible misgivings! Perhaps there is no more I Perhaps it is all over! Until, to the soul standing with all its questionings before the door of the tomb, He who liveth and was dead came as He came to Martha, and holding out the key of death, said the great final conclusive words, “Thy brother shall rise again.” Men’s souls leaped to that word because they wanted to believe it, and had not dared wholly to believe it till He showed them that it was true. And now if we believe in Him, we do believe it, and death is really changed to us, and the dwad are really living by the assurance of the living Christ. It is a beautiful connection, one whose mysterious beauty we are always learning more and more, that the deeper our spiritual experience of Christ becomes, the more our soul’s life really hangs on His life as its savior and continual friend, the more real becomes to us the unquenched life of those who have gone from us to be with Him. In those moments when Christ is most real to me, when He lives in the centre of my desires and I am resting most heavily upon His help, in those moments I am surest that the dead are not lost, that those whom this Christ in whom I trust has taken He is keeping. The more He lives to me the more they live. I want to make you feel this power of the living Christ to-day. Another year has gone from us since last Easter and taken its dead with it. Out of your families and out of this parish family of ours they have gone. Your hearts are telling them over as I speak. The little child and the tired old man. The brave and hopeful boys and girls carrying their hope and courage and aspiration into other worlds, and leaving behind them memories in which the beauty and the dearness and the pride, struggle with the sadness till we cannot separate them or tell which is the greatest. The young mother has left her children. The husband has left the wife. The wife has gone down the dark way before the husband. The bright and sunny friend whom many knew, and whom all who knew him loved for his kind heart and ready charity and cheerful temper and patient spirit and constant unselfishness and simple faith. All these have gone from us to the world of God. As I wrote this I turned to our parish book, and looked down the list, and it was indeed a long one. The old and the young, their deaths stood written there together like the mingled graves in a graveyard. There were more old than young, and yet the young were not few. But as I read and thought of Easter Day, I could not think that they were gone. On the first Easter Day the graves were opened, and the dead came forth and went into the holy city, and were seen of many. If the city of our heart is holy with the presence of a living Christ, then the dear dead will

come to us and we shall know they are not dead but living, and bless Him who has been their Redeemer, and rejoice in the work that they are doing for Him in His perfect world, and press on joyously towards our own redemption, not fearing even the grave, since by its side stands He whom we know and love, who has the keys of death and hell.

A living Christ, dear friends! the old, ever new, ever blessed Easter truth! He liveth; He was dead; He is alive for evermore. Oh that everything dead and formal might go out of our creed, out of our life, out of our heart to-day. He is alive! Do you believe it? What are you dreary for, O mourner? what are you hesitating for, O worker? what are you fearing death for, O man? Oh, if we could only lift up our heads and live with Him; live new lives, high lives, lives of hope and love and holiness, to which death should be nothing but the breaking away of the last cloud, and the letting of the life out to its completion.

May God give us some such blessing for our Easter Pay.