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tion and strained every fiber to ac complish one thing, and one thing only: To bear witness that Christ died and rose again. Died a genuine death, and rose a living person with a corporeal body. Doubting Thomas put his hand into His wounds to make sure. The disciples were not wise men, neither philosophers nor scien tists, but simple folks; and lowly ones at that—fishermen, publicans, sinners. They would neither argue, nor ex plain, nor even preach. They merely came forward as eye-witnesses to testify to the indisputable fact of resurrection. Is resurrection possible? The ques tion was raised even by some. Chris tians in the time of Saint Paul. He devoted a whole chapter in his first epistle to the Corinthians to estab lish its historicity and to elucidate its vital importance to the whole move ment of Christian faith. To my mind, however, the problem should be put the other way around. The question is not whether Christ’s resurrection as a fact is historically intelligible, but rather whether his tory itself is intelligible without ac cepting it as a fact. We must accomodate explanations to facts, not facts to explanations. It seems unreasonable to acquiesce to the thesis that matter can lose its reality — matter being what our senses accept as the standard of reality, which has substance and weight, and which by all that we can conceive just cannot under any circumstances lose its materialistic reality, is yet capable of losing that reality. Yet the fact of the atomic bomb obliges us to accept it. We can no more explain how matter can lose its space-time materiality and become pure energy than we can explain how the dead can live again.
Having cleared ' this intellectual hurdle, we are now perhaps better attuned to Christ’s call: “ Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.” But what is the voice that we hear this moment? The message today is simply this: 1 am the resur rection and the life. Christ said this to Martha when He was about to raise Lazarus from the dead. His voice rings down the ages with in creasing reverberation. But there is a difference between resurrection and restoration of life. Lazarus was re stored to life. But he did not ascend to heaven as Christ did. He had to die his natural death again and wait for his turn like all the rest of us at the last day. Until that day, Christ’s resurrection remains the resurrection. It is UNIQUE. Important as His resurrection is to us as an historic fact, it is immeasur ably more so as a living fact. God is the God of the living, not the dead. We shall greatly err if we should miss the present tense in: “ I am the resurrection.” Paul explains it in these words: “ Like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.” Obviously newness of life consists of freedom from sin, for he goes on to say: “He that is dead is fre ed from sin.” Paul was not speaking of the freedom from sin after the last day. He was speaking of the here and now. We have in this Holy Week at least two cases of sinners who walked in newness of life. One was the re pentant thief who was crucified with Christ and the other Mary Magda lene. It -is surprising that the thief should have had more faith than any of the chosen Twelve or their close associates. But that was the fact. He believed that Christ would come to
His kingdom, and begged to be re membered. Whereupon Christ said to him, “ Verily I say unto thee, today shalt thou be with me in paradise.” There suspended on the cross, he walked in newness of life right from perdition to paradise. The first mortal eye that saw the risen Christ did not belong to any one who had led a blameless life. It was that of Mary Magdalene. We know what she was, steeped in sin and given up for lost by all but Jesus Christ. Yet after redemption she was charged with the highest mission that a mortal can be charged with: to be the first witness of the risen Christ. In these days of national tribula tion, indeed, of world crisis, we do not need to be reminded of the rele vance of the resurrection to each sin gle one of us or to nations. Individ ually, how many of us have not had some loved ones who paid with their lives for the sin or folly of others? Nationally, can any of us claim to have emerged from the, valley of death? We are exactly in the position of the early disciples. Frustration everywhere—north, south, east and west—no matter where we look. Ma terialism and frustration, nothing else. But thank God, there are two other directions. Look UPWARD, and there we see the risen Christ. Look INWARD, and we see God in His temple renewing our spirit day by day. Says Saint Paul, “ Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” Let us die unto sin and live unto God day by day, for resurrection is within us, and resurrection tri umphant, throughout the ages as now, blazons in glorious defiance: “ O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”
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