March 23^rd, 2008, Easter Day,  23^rd, 2008, All Souls' Episcopal Church

Death hath no more dominion over Him.
Romans 6:9

            The Holy Feast of Easter is the Church’s chief celebration of the glorious resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Every Sunday is a celebration of the Easter Victory, which is why we worship on the first day of the week, the day of the resurrection.  It is why our churches are oriented in such a way as we face East during our worship, the direction of the rising sun.  And yet, this is that chief feast and festival in which we focus our attention specifically and joyfully on the Easter message.  It is a message of victory, a message of faith, and a message of hope.

            The message of Easter is that our Lord Jesus was victorious over death.  Let us be quite clear on this point, because it is important.  Jesus did not come back from beyond the grave as some sort of ghost or disembodied spirit.  He was not merely a memory living on in the hearts of his friends.  He did not simply return to this life as if He had been resuscitated after three days.  He did not cheat death or escape death.  He conquered death in resurrection. With a resurrected body, He emerged from the tomb of death.  He visited with His disciples.  He ate and drank with His friends.  In this resurrection, nothing of his bodily existence was lost to Him except its earthly limitations. After forty days, He ascended to Heaven, transcending this created order, and one day, all of creation itself shall be made perfect in a resurrection of its own.

            Our Lord Jesus is the victorious Christ.  He lived a perfect human life among us.  He offered His perfect human life for us.  As both priest and victim, He atoned for us, once and for all.  On the cross of Good Friday, He suffered and died for us, and on that cross, He proclaimed, “it is finished.”  What a phrase He uttered!  “It is finished.”  He wasn’t simply saying that His suffering was over, although that was a part of it.  He was also saying it was complete; it was all accomplished.  As a great artist must finally look upon his masterpiece, carefully put down his artistic tools, and announce that the work is done, so He proclaimed, “It is finished.”  He had accomplished all that He had set out to do, for us and for our salvation.  His resurrection was the joyful proclamation and unveiling of the completed work of His having achieved salvation for us; of His having won for us the victory.

            This proclamation of Christ’s Easter victory is for us a message of faith.  Because of the good news of the resurrection, we live in this world as it is, but trust that there shall be so much more.  In this faith, we refuse to see ourselves and others as the prisoners of fate or the victims of time.  In light of this faith, we refuse to be held captive by the past, be it our past or anybody else’s, because we strive to move forward to the high calling that is ours in Christ.  In the courage which this faith inspires, we will not settle for what is, but always consider what can be; we do not define ourselves or others by the darkness of our doubts, by the sins which so easily beset us, or by the faults and failings we all know, because we believe and we have faith in the risen and reigning Son of God who promises to make all things new.

            We believe what the Scriptures proclaim – that there shall be a new heaven and a new earth.  Our Easter faith teaches us that just as our Lord Jesus Christ conquered death in His resurrection, so we too shall be resurrected on a day when death itself is swallowed up in victory.  This is the faith which led Saint Paul to announce: Oh death, where is thy sting; Oh grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law. But, thanks be to God who has given us the victory in our Lord Jesus Christ.

            The Message of Easter is a message of hope.  On that Friday afternoon outside the walls of Jerusalem where our Lord suffered and died on the cross, the world was a very dark place.  The cross of Christ, where love and sorrow meet, seemed to those who witnessed the crucifixion, as a hopeless place full of nothing but emptiness, bitterness, and despair.  Most of us, from time to time, have endured our own lesser Calvary at a time and in a place where the darkness of that time overshadowed us, and the pain seemed more than we could bear.

      On Easter Day, the risen Christ had not forgotten Calvary.  There was no pretense that the cross had not happened.  He carried the wounds of His crucifixion. However, those wounds were the signs of sacrificial love which He carried on His resurrected body. He had not escaped suffering, He had transformed it.  His wounds were the sure and certain signs of love which gave strength to those who doubted.  His wounds became emblems of victory.  His wounds bear testimony that there is no place so dark that it cannot be illumined by the light of the Easter Gospel; that there is no soul too broken for grace to restore; that all our sorrow shall one day, in the risen Christ. be turned to joy.  It is this Easter victory, this Easter faith, and this Easter joy which makes the hymn we sing forever, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.