Yet another Easter sermon! This sermon was, oddly enough, prompted by my “leisure reading”—a book called “Hope Against Hope”; the author: Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam who died in a Soviet prison camp in 1938. The book made me think... about a lonely, “anonymous” death in a prison camp; about the untold suffering of the countless “unknown” in this world who never “got [or get] a break”; unhappy lives that end in unhappy deaths, lives that are as fully and richly known to themselves as mine is to me but seem to go unrecognized, unshared... or even if shared and cherished, as Mandelstam’s was with his wife and friends, to be coldly, criminally dispensed with by such an evil as Stalin. The intense and intensely personal passage of death, the question of its meaning, and what it means to whom, and how all of that played out in the death of Jesus Christ as much as any other human being... and how that continued to “play out” right into resurrection... that’s the train of thought, more or less, that yielded the following sermon, which I delivered in my church during the Easter season (not on Easter itself, as I was home sick that day).
[A language note: several times in the sermon I refer to Jesus’ “final word” on the cross, but that doesn’t quite work in English, of course, where it’s three words: “It is finished”. In Russian (and, if memory serves, in the original Greek of the scriptures) it really is expressed with just one word. The Russian word is “sovershilos”, the past tense of a verb meaning (much as the Greek verb it translates) to perfect, bring to completion, commit (e.g., a crime), carry out, perform (e.g., like a duty). The final “s” in “sovershilos” is a suffix that makes the word reflexive (or “passive” if that makes more sense); thus, “it” is completed/finished. Finally, there’s no need in Russian (or the Greek) to literally express “it” here, so a result the whole thought is expressed in just one word. I will continue to refer to Jesus’ “final word” in this sermon, even though it is actually three words in English. But now you know why.]
Also, I am quite aware that the following phrase, “...poorest, last remaining inhabitant of a deserted village” is loaded with contradiction/tautology: if you’re the only person in a village then you’re obviously the poorest, not to mention the richest, one there, and if you're still there, then the village is manifestly not “deserted”, at least not entirely. So be it. Cut me a break and take the sentence on the level of what it means to say rather than the “mathematical” exactitude of its logic – thanks! “Poorest” means “very poor”, as in “poorest person imaginable”, and “deserted” here implies, of course, “by everybody except you”.
Finally, for an Easter sermon, it may seem to focus a lot on death, but then... what would resurrection be without death?
“I was dead and, behold, I am alive forever and ever!” (Rev. 1:18)
The psalmist says, “I lift up my eyes to the hills— where does my help come from?” (Ps. 121:1) That’s fine, but what if you can no longer lift your eyes to the hills, or to heaven, because death has closed your eyes? What then? Moreover, what if you died rejected, abandoned, cursed by this world? What does it mean then to “lift your eyes to the hills”?
One day the eyes of a man known as Jesus of Nazareth closed in death. There was no life left in them; they were lifeless matter, just like stone. In this, Jesus was the same as every other descendant of Adam who ever died. He left his body utterly dead... and the word “dead” doesn’t mean “almost alive”; it doesn’t mean “potentially alive”; the word “dead” signifies non-living matter, no different in that sense from stones, or air, or the paper the pages of my Bible are made from. Jesus died, and the body he left was cold matter; those eyes were no more organs of sight then than the hair on our heads of the pebbles on the seashore.
But what happened? Jesus opened those eyes. Imagine. Eyes that had been dead—no longer eyes, even—opened at the instant of glorious resurrection power. And everything in Jesus—his body, his hands, his heart, his mind, his spirit, his eyes—all was Life. And I think... could it be, maybe at the moment, those lips that had been dead and now were become Life, pronounced anew that final word: “It is finished”?
Who knows? It’s possible! Because “It is finished” doesn’t only mean “It’s over”; it can also mean “all is begun”. When all your preparations for a dinner, for example, are finished, that's when everything can begin! Life itself testifies that when all it finished, then all is begun; there is no ending without a new beginning. Only when the earthly life of Christ ended on the cross—“It is finished!”—only then could the resurrection of Christ also be “finished”—carried out and done. And only then did everything begin for you and me: (read 1 Peter 1:3).
Christ’s resurrection is the source of a new birth for us all. Only that life which had never been before—the life of the resurrected Christ, the life shining through eyes that once closed in death—only that life gives new birth. For a new birth must come from a new source.
“And in God’s great mercy, he has given us new birth into a living hope”—‘living’ because Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ and Son of God, is now alive forever—“through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”
“From the dead.” All was lost, and all in this world on which it was possible to hope, was dead. And then, and only then, God gave birth to living hope in Jesus, who was dead but now is alive forever and ever. The resurrected Christ is the source, the eternally new source, of eternally new life.
Jesus’ resurrection is the birth of a new birth for us all. Without that resurrection our new birth would never have been born in Him. But there would never have been a resurrection if not for that death. Before those eyes could open anew in glory, they had to close in the universal loss of death.
I say “universal loss of death” because, having become Man, God embraced the death that belongs to all people, the death that awaits each of us from the moment of birth, the death that, for each of us, exists uniquely and separately and makes each of us solitary before God. There’s a paradox for you: death is the ultimately personal experience that is everbody's experience. That’s the paradox: each of us has to go through what no one can go through... except “me”—in this case, each of us being a “Me”. Though all people die, only one person can die his own death, and as far as that goes we’re all equal. No matter who you are: an emperor or the poorest, last remaining inhabitant of a deserted village dying in utter obscurity; no matter who you are, how you lived, who’s nearby—if anyone at all!—the very last experience of life you experience alone, alone before God. At the moment, the moment of departure, no labels, no roles in life define you. You aren’t Mom or Dad, you’re not a boss, you’re not a doctor, not a friend or enemy, not rich or poor, not a husband, not a wife—you’re just you, the “you” you were from the very moment of your birth: you, departing, not on the shoulders of your friends but by yourself, alone. And no matter how much those around you may love you, just as those last faithful few who stood by the cross to the very end loved Jesus, all the same the ultimate moment of departure, the moment of passage, belongs to you alone. And in that we are all the same; you could be a concentration camp prisoner or the most powerful dictator, but in that we are all the same. Death is the personal, singular instance of meeting eternity. It closes the eyes of each one separately, singularly, and God knows the death of each one singularly.
In order to fully embrace what we all go through, Christ had to embrace what only He alone could go through, that is, the personal, unique, singular death of one human being—His. He had to close his eyes, too, in death’s ultimate alienation from this world. When Christ took his final breath on the cross, he tasted to the absolute last drop what it means to be a human being come to life’s end.
There’s the depths of divine love for you. Dying his own human death, which no one else could die, God became like all humans who must die their own human death, including the most anonymous, friendless, forgotten child of Adam there is right now somewhere on the Earth—and at any time, I think, there is someone somewhere on Earth who fits that description. And now the death of such a so-called “nobody” shakes the entire universe because, now, that death, precisely in its uniqueness, is like the death of the Only-Begotten Son of God, like the death of God Become Man. And so Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus God’s Son, Jesus Christ, made the personal death of each of us an occasion for hope. Why? Because He opened His eyes again.
(Read 1 Peter 1:3 again.)
“I was dead, but am alive forevermore....”
Very long ago, a man named Abraham left his house, his country, his motherland, his heritage, his gods, his past and, yes, his future as he had always understood it. He left all this at the summons of the one living God, for whose sake he was ready to be a wanderer and alien in this world. And at just an age—75 years old—when a person has every right to expect that life’s tempo will decelerate, that the time for new adventures has passed, it so happens that at just that age God calls him out—literally, out of everything familiar to him, to go who-knew-where.
In the 13th chapter of Genesis, starting from verse 8, we read (read 8-13).
Abraham had already left his country and come to the land where the Canaanites and Perizzites lived, where there were plenty of dangers and threats. Here he is, already at a rather advanced age. He has no son to leave an inheritance to, and now he’s even conceded to his nephew, who took for himself the best part of the land. So here stands Abraham, in essence with no future. We could understand it if he said to himself, “How did I wind up here? What am I doing here? Why did I come here? What sense is there at all in my life now? What was it all for? Did God really need me to come and close my eyes in death here instead of Haran? What’s the difference? In any case, this is the end of my story.”
But Abraham had faith. One day he accepted God’s revelation, in which the promise was spoken: (read Genesis 12:1-3).
And here at last it is done, finished. Abraham stands on the promised land. But he’s still an alien, foreign, nobody in this land, and to all appearances his life is approaching its conclusion; it seems to be the end, over, finished. Yes, he did once accept God’s promise, but it’s totally unimaginable at this point where that promise could take him further. And precisely at that moment the Lord God speaks to Abraham: (read 13:14-18).
“Lift up your eyes... and rise. Walk through the length and width of the land, for I will give it to you.”
That’s the power of a new birth into a living hope. That’s the power of the divine might of resurrection: Lift up your eyes, Abraham. Lift up your eyes, Son of God. Lift up your eyes, every child of God redeemed by the holy blood of the Lamb. Lift up your eyes and rise. Walk through the length and width of the land, for I am giving it to you.
That is hope reborn, when all earthly hope has failed you: “I was dead but now I am alive forevermore”, says the One who took our mortality upon Himself, Jesus Christ.
“All authority in heaven and earth are given to me,” says the One who was rejected and killed, Jesus Christ, Whom God the Father exalted, giving Him the Name that is above every other Name.
“I am coming soon!”, says the Glorified One, the eternal Son of God who once cried out in the tortures of the cross, “It is finished!”
“I lift my eyes to the hills: where will my help come from?”, asks the psalmist. “My help is from the Lord who made heaven and earth.” And the One sitting on the throne said, “Behold, I am creating all things new.”
Blessed be God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in his great mercy has given us birth into a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. “Into a living hope!” “Death, where is thy sting? Grave, where is thy victory?”
It is finished.
