Easter 2008

 

“He’s alive!” cries the Roman centurion in Charles Rann Kennedy’s play The Terrible Meek.  “I can’t kill him.  All the empires can’t kill him.”

Christ is ever rising again.  Day by day men seek to bury him under the debris of history or embalm him in creed and phrase and definition or confine him within the walls of churches and institutions or smother him under a load of the cares and riches and pleasures of this life or stab him to death with the daggers of their sins.  But always he rises, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the fires of selfishness and carelessness in which we allow his power over our lives to be destroyed.  Ever and again he is lifted up out of the common things of life, a vindication of his life and a triumph over the powers that put him to death, and all men are drawn to him as irresistibly as the earth is held in its orbit around the sun.  The empty tomb opens before the world, telling us it is God who still has the last word, not ourselves; that on Easter Day life looks forward, onward, upward, God-ward.

 

It is not possible—they cannot

          Take my Lord away;

He lives, you see, within my heart

          And this is Easter day.

Though men may turn their backs to him

          And mock at every turn—

They only take themselves away

          When his great love they spurn.

 

Friend, let these words be trumpeted from now even forevermore: He is risen!  He is risen, indeed!