The Last Enemy

MyIdentityCrisis

Propers: The Resurrection of Our Lord, A.D. 2019 C

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.

We have never believed that death is the end. Never.

The earliest civilizations on earth—Egypt, China, Mesopotamia—were built around the conviction that death as we experience it is unnatural, an opponent to be overcome, a trial to be endured, a tyrant who must be subdued. And that once we do, once we overcome death, then real life can begin. Not this half-life here below, forever hedged in by age, disease, and the limits of time, but life as it ought to be, as it was meant to be: blissful, eternal, selfless and superabundant.

Even Neanderthals buried their dead with grave goods, with things they knew and loved and would need in the life to come, the life beyond the grave, beyond death. And this cannot be written off as wishful thinking, as some quirk of evolutionary psychology. There is no obvious survival benefit in being restless with this world. Rather it speaks to the deepest part of our being, the most human convictions of the soul.

The Germans call it weltshmerz, world-pain, and it is this ubiquitous and uniquely human anxiety that life as we know it is not as it should be, not as it was intended to be. Something has gone wrong. And that something is death. We do everything we can to overcome it. We write books, build monuments, pass on our names to our children. And yet we know that this will not be enough.

We know that whatever we do, whatever we leave behind, will be ground into dust by the inexorable wheel of time. All our meaning rendered meaningless. All our values rendered valueless. And this is wrong. We know that it’s wrong. We know, in a place deep within us, that the world has been broken and must be set right. And so, in every language, in every culture, in every philosophy and faith and religion, we have longed for a Savior, someone to deliver us from this body of death, while the whole of Creation groans in pangs of labor, awaiting deliverance, awaiting new birth.

And that is what is born today. A New Creation. A New Beginning. When Christ bursts forth from the spiced Tomb, this is not some isolated miracle significant only to the tiny circle of His disciples and apostles. Rather, that Tomb is the womb of new birth for all of humanity, all of Creation. At last, the most ancient of our longings has come to fruition. At last, the first, greatest, and final enemy of our race has been overcome.

And this conquest has been wrought not with violence, not with fire and steel and sword as we had so often dreamed, but through a love so deep and so broad and so infinite in scope that it has swallowed up forever sin and death and hell, filling hades to bursting with the Life and the Breath and the Blood of God, the One God, the True God, who made and sustains and redeems all peoples and all things, in whom we all live and move and have our being. This is the God who proclaimed our forgiveness even as we were murdering Him on the Cross. For nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Today we are liberated from anxiety, fear, and despair, liberated from world-pain and the wheel of time. No longer are our actions meaningless. No longer are children buried with no hope to rise. This is our Passover from death unto life, from darkness to light, from the horrors of the rough-hewn bloody Cross to the glories of the shattering of the Tomb. Christ has died for all people and all things, conquering death by death, and He is Risen in glory with the liberated dead resplendent in His train.

Whatever enslaves you, whatever oppresses you—grief, anxiety, fear, death, cancer, loss, scarcity, addiction—all the devils, all the horrors, all the brokenness of humankind, all of it is conquered with the Rising of God’s Son. Not in that the ailments of the world have vanished; not in that we no longer suffer under crosses of our own; but in that these things have been unmasked as ephemeral, as temporary, as ultimately powerless because they will one and all pass away; they will fall to the earth and be buried, while we will rise remade in Christ to shine in joy and glory and life everlasting in the indiscriminate superabundance of God’s outpouring love.

Christ is the firstfruits of the feast to come. His Resurrection heralds our own, the great Restoration at the End of the Age, when Christ hands over the Kingdom to the Father, and God at last shall be All in All. Then shall there be no more suffering, no more tears, no more godawful tragic loss. And the last enemy to be destroyed is death.

All the world is saved to today. All the longings, all the dreams, of all of humankind are fulfilled in this one perfect Man who is Emmanuel, God-With-Us. And it is our job, our duty, our joy to go and proclaim and to witness in word and in deed that Christ is Risen—Alleluia!—and as surely as He is Risen, we too shall arise.

And so we feed the hungry, and so we cure the sick, and so we clothe the naked and house the homeless and forgive the sinner and rebuke the wicked in love, all the while proclaiming, in defiance of death and hell, that the world is here made new; that wherever is Christ, there is the New Creation; that hell is harrowed, death is dying, and life outlives it all.

Now is the Resurrection of the dead. Now is Sunday for all of time. Now is Easter.

And the world shall never be the same.

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

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