Easter Sermon by The Rev. Jerome F. Politzer
For the Christian, the hope for everlasting life is based upon the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Each Sunday is a day of celebration of that glorious event. The early Christians chose the first day of the week as the day of worship to mark forever the victory that God has won for us through His son Jesus Christ. The Resurrection is the event that galvanized the discouraged and defeated followers of Jesus into a spirit-filled movement which, in the short time of a hundred years, spread to every remote corner of the Roman world.
The truth of the Resurrection is demonstrated by the existence of the vast worldwide Christian Church today. Countless millions of ordinary people live by this belief every day. Just as it is difficult in the 21st century to understand and believe in this marvelous event, it was also difficult to understand and believe in the Resurrection in the 1st century. The ancient Greeks, Romans, and Jews were highly sophisticated and intelligent people. They had the same hurdle of faith to overcome as we do today before they could grasp the meaning and power of our Lord’s Resurrection.
The Resurrection -- El Greco
St. Paul was brought before Herod and was questioned by him as to why he had left a lucrative and prominent position as a leading teacher of the Jewish religion and had become a wandering evangelist on behalf of Christianity. Paul told him that this Jesus, whom the Jews had crucified, God had raised from the dead and that He had appeared unto His disciples and unto Paul. The king responded by saying, “Paul, you are insane. So much learning has made you mad.” We should not think that we have a greater problem today because of our own difficulty to believe in the Resurrection. It is by the power of God that we are led to faith, not by any human mental gymnastics.
Today we must deal with the misguided efforts of religious leaders who deny this truth and attempt to explain it away. What is being taught in all the mainline Christian seminaries is that the miraculous events in the New Testament are merely symbolical statements intended to describe intellectual truths. For instance, the story of the Resurrection is presented as a way of saying that the teachings of Jesus and the love expressed by him live on, but that as an historical event it did not occur.
There were many pseudo-Christian teachers in the first, second, and third centuries who taught that the miracles were not actual historic events. The miraculous birth of our Lord and His miraculous Resurrection were denied by these false teachers of Christianity. In those days they were called Gnostic. Today we call them professors of theology.
The false teaching was not a detriment to the spread of Christianity however, because the truth of the miraculous nature of Christ had the ability to renew the believers. It was no longer a matter of argument; it was the truth. A whole new quality of life came upon them.
Paul had to deal with people who doubted the Resurrection and with teachers who would attempt to explain it away. Paul said, very simply, that if Jesus did not rise, if this is not an historical event, then we are still in our sins, and further than that, we are of all men most miserable. This is the alternative that Paul lays out for us.
To believe in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ means that we believe He is the Divine Son of God. Further than that, we believe that He has opened up the doorway to eternal life for all mankind. Therefore, this world is not a hopeless conglomeration of meaningless events ending with everyone finally disintegrating and degenerating into nothing. The truth of the Resurrection opens the pathway to life with God forever.
What If It Isn’t True?
On the other hand, if the Resurrection is not true in an actual historical sense, then Jesus was misled, and He really was not an effective means of overcoming the world. His good teachings can only stand up under the best of circumstances, and in no way can they be considered an offering for sin. We still have to live with the memory of all our stupid mistakes and petty wrongs, as well as the great evils we have committed. If He is not really and truly the Son of God, then there is no life beyond this one. The grave has the last word for everyone. Truly Paul was not using the wrong word when he said that, without hope, we are miserable.
The question then, is how does one come to believe? You have to be hardheaded and skeptical in this world in order to survive. You can not adopt fairy tales and old legends and attempt to live by them. I think the example of Thomas in the New Testament is the one that speaks most truly to all of us who are struggling with the truth of the Resurrection. There were ten appearances of Jesus that are recorded in the New Testament concerning His Resurrection. There were probably many more but these have come down to us in the tradition of the Church.
As you recall at the earliest appearance of Jesus to His disciples, Thomas was not present. When they told him that they had seen the Lord, Thomas said, “Except I shall see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.” There have always been over the ages stories of ghosts and of reappearances of the dead. That is not what the Resurrection represents. The Resurrection faith of the Christian church claims that Jesus fully in the flesh rose from the dead. This body is a glorified one and is not confined by the limits of time and space. Thomas was unable to believe that this event was really true unless he could actually see the physical evidence.
St. John tells us that eight days later Jesus appeared to the apostles, and said to Thomas, “Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side; and be not faithless, but believing.” Thomas responded in awe and joy, “My Lord and My God.” Then Jesus said to him, “Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed; blessed art they that have not seen and yet have believed.”
My Redeemer Liveth
Thomas represents all those who have to struggle to find faith. The key to understanding how this is achieved is found in the words of our Lord himself who said, “It is expedient for you that I go away; for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send Him unto you.” The Holy spirit comes to lead us to faith. Specifically Jesus said, “How be it when He, the Spirit of Truth, has come? He will guide you all into truth.” It is through the Holy Spirit that we are led to believe in the truth of the Christian religion, especially in the truth of such a great miracle as the Resurrection. The Spirit comes to us in our own inner experience. He speaks to us in our deepest needs. When we need God the most, the Holy Spirit is the closest to us.
In the Old Testament we have many prophesies of the Resurrection. Perhaps the most complete is the one by Job, who in the midst of great suffering and questioning was led to faith in God by the Holy Spirit. Job prophesied saying, “I know that my Redeemer liveth and that He shall stand at the latter day upon this earth, and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God.” It was in the midst of pain and sorrow that faith came to Job.
It was through the wounds in the body of Christ into which Thomas was bidden to share, that faith came to him. This means that, as we too share in the suffering of the body of Christ in this world, we too will be led to faith. We can not find faith in an abstract way such as in a classroom, or in the reading of many books. It is through our attempting to live the Christian life that the Holy Spirit opens our minds and hearts to the truth of God.
I have always been a bit of a skeptic. When I was a little boy attending Sunday school, I would frequently question what the priest was teaching us. Our rector at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin was a theological professor who wrote many books. When I was at my theological seminary, he sent me a copy of a book he had written in which he recalled a incident in the confirmation class at St. Mary’s years ago. He told how he was lecturing on the country of Judea and the river Jordan. A little red-headed boy raised his hand and said, “I don’t believe in the existence of the river Jordan because I have never seen it.” He was referring to me, and he had put this illustration of non-faith in his book. He also sent me a bottle of water from the river Jordan to convince me that it really did exist.
While I was being taught at the seminary that the New Testament miracles really did not happen, of course, I was wondering about all this. It was not until I became active as a priest in the Church with a congregation of real people that I began to abandon this skeptical approach and finally to believe fully in the historical truth of the Resurrection. You can not sit down with a young mother and father who have just lost a beloved little child through sickness and tell them that the Resurrection is only a symbolic truth. You can not. In that situation, the only thing that can bring back hope and consolation in the deepest sense to the parents is faith that the Word of God is true and that the Resurrection is a reality, and that life goes on with Christ. To be able to convey this truth to the grieving couple and to see their pain and suffering turn to joy and hope is a wonderful vindication of the power of the Spirit of God.
One can take example after example from the crucible of life through which the Holy Spirit guides us to believe in the risen Christ who comes to us because He was resurrected from the dead. To believe in the Resurrection means that we have a future. We have a glorious vista which is promised to us in Christ. The promise is that the work that we have begun here, the relationships, the associations, and the joys we have known will all go on forever. They are not ended with this life. They are transferred to a greater and more glorious world of experience in heaven.
Office Upstairs
There was a much beloved doctor in the little town of Big Springs, Texas in the early frontier days who took care of the village people, the ranch hands, and the cowboys. When he could not pay, he would never ask for money. He was so short of funds when he died that his wife did not have enough money to buy a tombstone. One of the cowboys whom he had befriended took the sign off the hitching rack in front of the old two-storey building in which he practiced and placed it on his grave. The sign read, “Doctor Edward Jones, Office Upstairs.”
We are inspired by the faith of the common people of the Church. They are the real priests, preachers, and teachers who, even though they have not seen, believe. Through all the vicissitudes of life, they know the power of the Holy Spirit who brings to them and to us the glorious knowledge and the wonderful truth of the Resurrection of Jesus. We can say like them and like Christians all through the ages in response to Jesus, “My Lord and my God.”
Fr. Politzer serves on the ETF Advisory Council.
Loading ...