Life Wins

Propers: The Resurrection of Our Lord, A.D. 2017 A

Homily:

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Life wins.

I know it doesn’t seem that way. Every night on the news it’s earthquakes and famine, wars and rumors of wars. Sometimes I feel I should wait until our children go to bed before listening to what’s happened in the world in the last 24 hours. We all have relatives who’ve been victims of warfare, crime, and disease. We all dread that hard diagnosis; we all dread that call in the middle of the night. It seems as though death has full and firm command of this world. It seems as though death always has the final say.

But it does not. And today is our proof of that.

We are taught by the world at large that life is an aberration, even an illusion. We are taught that we are but an unlikely yet inevitable series of biochemical reactions winding our way inexorably down into entropy, death, and decay. The universe itself is collapsing into disorder. It’s all just a matter of time. From darkness we came and to darkness we return. In the meantime, eat, drink, and be merry!—order that stuff on your Amazon wish list—for tomorrow we die.

But then along comes Jesus, who offers to us an entirely different view of humanity, of the universe itself, and we begin to wonder if perhaps we haven’t got it all backwards. Perhaps we’re seeing all of reality upside-down. Death is not a thing, Jesus says. It has no substance, no reality of its own. Death is merely a lack of life, just as darkness is a lack of light and cold the lack of heat. You have been in exile, all of you, lo these many years, He tells us. You have drifted far from the Light and Life and Love of God, and I have come to you now in this final hour, at this end of the age, that you may have life and have it abundantly!

And He taught us such strange things, wondrous things. He taught us of God’s love for the wicked, His forgiveness of the sinner, His desire to enfold us forever in joy. And He told us that we were more than what we wear, more than what we eat. He spoke truth to power, criticizing the abuses of religion and the state. But He did so without rancor, without malice, without hate, offering forgiveness and new life even to those who opposed Him, even to those who despised Him.

It was as though, in Jesus, we could finally see what a human being looks like who is truly alive: a Man beyond violence, beyond hatred, beyond even death. And we could see—we could all see!—that there was more to Him than just a Man. There was something within Him truly divine, as though God now walked the earth.

But enough of this nonsense, the powerful proclaimed. Things were getting out of hand; time to reassert the status quo. Prelates and prefects alike bowed their heads together in tried-and-true stratagem, hiring one half the poor to kill off the other. Purchasing the services of a spy at bargain bottom price, they seized this Jesus—one in a long line of would-be messiahs who dared to shake their fists at Rome—and ran Him by night through a series of trumped-up show trials, before publicly torturing Him, mocking Him, and executing Him in the most grotesquely efficient and humiliating manner available at the time.

Mind you, this all happened 2000 years ago and half a world away, but it rather sounds like something we’d see on those news programs from which I try to hide my children. Crucifixion, then as now, was a deliberate demonstration of political power: a visceral example of the strong doing what they will and the weak suffering what they must. It was death by social media, a viral video for all to see.

And that was that, they thought. The true gods had reasserted their sovereignty: the gods of wealth and power and realpolitik: the same gods who strut about today in all their finery down Washington and Wall Street. Because those are the things that have the final say in our society, don’t they? Violence and consumption and ultimately death. Use people; love things. Such is the way of the modern world, just as it was for the ancient one. And if some rabbi or guru or flowerchild rises up above the pliant masses to preach a gospel of love, let him have his say—so long as you cut him back down to size when all is said and done. Helps to remind people who’s really in charge.

But then the Third Day comes, and the damnedest thing happens. The dead man gets up. And this changes everything forever.

Imagine a world, brothers and sisters, in which violence does not have the final say, a world wherein problems cannot be solved simply by throwing death at them. Imagine a world in which light and life and joy are the eternal reality rather than the fleeting exception. Imagine a world in which you do not have to hate anyone—no one at all! This is not a fantasy. Rather, this is the natural state of our now-fallen world. When Jesus rises from the dead, His vision is validated, His witness proved true!

All the powers of sin and death and hell, all the wounds of the lash and thorns and nails and spear, all the cunning calculations of our captains of industry, the gears of empire lubricated by the viscera of all the people over whom they roll—all of that fails. All of it is laid bare as a fraud, a bald-faced lie. All the assumptions and limitations that hedged in our ingrown understanding of the world and of our place in it have burst asunder! And before us now stretches the infinite horizon of what God actually wills for us to become.

Nothing is impossible once death has been thrown down! Christ has broken the grave! And we are now set loose.

Our community lost people this week: friends, family, loved ones. Everybody here has someone to grieve. But because of this day, this Resurrection, we know that the grave has not the final say. The tomb is burst asunder! For Jesus Christ is Risen this day, the Firstborn of the Dead! He has triumphed over sin, death, and hell, and swung wide the gates of the Kingdom of God to all of humankind!

His Resurrection heralds our own resurrection, for He is the Firstfruits of the Harvest that shall one day come in full. On that day, Christ shall dry every tear, heal every wound, and raise every mother’s son from the loamy earth of the grave. Then shall every prayer be answered, and God at last be all in all. Then there shall be no more shadows, no more lying, no more death. Only life, in infinite abundance, forever. The sorrows of this broken world will evaporate like shadows before the sun.

This is the day that the whole world turned. On this glorious Easter morning, at the Rising of the Son of God, our world ceased its long, slow slouch toward oblivion and death, and instead has begun rising, ever rising, always rising toward the glory that is God and Man made One in Christ. Today, life wins.

You are not your job. You are not your clothes or your bank account or your diet. You are not whoever you voted for in the last election. You are not your vacation. You are not the person you pretend be on Facebook. You are none other than the beloved child of Almighty God, claimed by Jesus, bought with a price. Your destiny is eternal, your glory unimaginable, and your life immortal. You are free.

Now go and give witness to the world that death has no dominion here.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.