Victory!

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

In this excerpt from 1 Corinthians Paul the Apostle gives us a nutshell account of what the earliest church called “the Gospel.” It remains the kernel of what we continue to call the Gospel, or “Good News,” and so we pay special attention to it on this foundational, festival day. The terse statement is the foundation stone on which all Christian preaching, praying and practice depend. If it turns out to be untrue, then, as the Apostle says later in the same chapter, we are of all people most to be pitied (15:19); but there can no longer be any fear of that, because once again in the year 2003 we Christians testify that what the Apostles preach and we believe continues to be the source of joy and power for us, and on behalf of millions of Christians down thousands of years I proclaim again that “Christ is Risen” and you respond, “Christ is risen indeed!”

The bedrock “Gospel” is just this: “Christ died for our sins, God raised him to life again, and all takes place according to the Scriptures.” “This is what we preach and this is what you believe.” So today I invite you to dwell for a while on this wonderful message and let its truth begin or continue to transform your life. What is its truth? Simply that Jesus Christ lives and gives us who believe a daily share in his eternal life. This is what we preach and this is what you believe, and for that reason we all know the constant presence of the living Christ.

A young Swiss pastor who had served voluntarily in the German army as a stretcher-bearer in WW1 comes home to his little church in the Alps. As he strides towards it through a glorious meadow in the autumn of 1918, he sees a dark emptiness in his heart and feels a heavy horror in his gut. No beauty of mountains or meadows can sweeten his sour malaise. He enters the church, mounts the pulpit, opens the great Bible and falls into despair. He has nothing to say; after what he had lived through, after the bitter futility of the bleeding and dying, his mind is wracked on the memory of pompous lies by the Kaiser, the breathy patriotism of chaplains, the swaggering smugness of the administration, and the inscription on soldiers uniform buttons, “God with us!” “Who is this God?” he asks, and hears only silence in return.

So he begins to reconstruct a faith from the ground up and chooses as his starting point not the God of German culture and military excellence, not the God of the Kaiser and the General staff, but the God of the Apostle Paul. He writes a commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans, which was said to fall like a bomb on the playground of the theologians, because it interprets Paul’s God as, radically and exclusively, the crucified and risen Christ, and not in any sense the spiritual dimension of a nation or a culture. This Christ, who is the one true God, stands as judge over against the culture that crucified him and refuses to be co-opted into it. This Christ is no German, and emphatically he is today no American!

The name of this young pastor was Karl Barth and he went on to become the single most important Protestant theologian of the 20th century, and if you come to my study you will see twelve volumes of his “Church Dogmatics” on my bookshelf. His rediscovery of the truth of Christ and Christ alone was historically conditioned by the failure of the paganization of Christ by one or another European culture, German, French, British, Austro-Hungarian, and by the manifest destiny myth of the United States. They made Christ in the image of their own cultures and deployed his authority to justify their own wars. Consider the outcome of just that first twentieth century war. The righteous victors France, Britain and the USA made such a mess of the peace in 1919 that only 20 years later there began a replay of that war that was immeasurably more costly to the human spirit, and in which many of us still living lost loved ones. It is so easy to win the war and lose the peace. 

Today we are in grave danger from the Americanization of Christ, his transformation into the totem of our new world empire. We are now the greatest empire in the history of the world, far greater than Rome, or Istanbul, London or Paris. We have just followed in the paths of the medieval Mongol hordes and sacked the premier city of Islam, Baghdad, the traditional seat of the Sunni caliphate. With the Jewish Zionists on one side and the Christian crusaders on the other Islam must feel itself caught in the pincer movement of its legendary enemies. What shall we say in Christ’s name today?

It is a day of victory, as our hymns and choral music proclaim, but emphatically and clearly not the kind of victory that broke Barth’s heart in 1918 and brought on the most costly war of our culture in 1939, and surely not the victory of 2003, which continues to unfold with greater and greater dismay for those who thought this war unnecessary and unjust, and perhaps even for those who did not. No, our Christian victory is something else so let us try to hear what the Apostle says of it.

In Christ God has won a final victory over sin and death. This is what the Gospel says, “He died for our sins and was raised “ that is, he died because of our sinful violence, by taking it into himself and bearing it away, and he returned to us in peace and joy. He died as he reached out through our violence to grasp our hand and was thrust away and killed. He died in the violence of children shredded by fragmentation bombs, crushed by falling masonry; he died trying to get close to us. We spent Holy Week remembering this side of the Gospel, and that has been good, because if we do not remember the dark side we cannot understand this return of the light, the good news that he lives again despite our fatal hostility. It is not just sin in general that he bears in himself on the Cross, but my sin in particular, my violence against him, my desire to be drive him away.

So what is the joy of the Easter victory? My sinful violence could not destroy him, nor could it drive him away; my hostility could not  stop him loving me. This is perhaps the most joyful and infuriating thing of all: he will not stop loving me; I cannot get rid of him, not even by mocking and murdering him. Let’s be utterly particular about this. We come to church as part of our search for joy. We believe that our lives are meant to be joyful and fulfilling. We need to feel good about getting up in the morning, and good when we go to bed at night. We want to feel that every moment of our life is worthwhile, and this desire is just a glimpse of a fact of life so much more profound than anything but what the greatest novelists can portray.

 Here is our Christian explanation of it. That constant call for joy in us is real and true; it is God calling us to Himself. That anxiety, even misery, in us is our sin, pushing God violently away. We have done God great violence, individually and together - no wonder there is deep disquiet in our hearts - but the Gospel is that God has overcome the violence we visited on him, has overwhelmed our murder of His own Son. God by suffering that great crime without retaliation has by the power of His immortal life returned to us alive, and offers us the same love as ever, the love of eternal life.

If you believe this, Christ will come to you and abide with you forever. You will find every moment of every day to be filled with meaning, because the risen Jesus is with you. You will be relieved of all anxiety because the risen Jesus is with you. This is what we preach and this is what you believe, and the reward of that faith is eternal life in Christ, who comes to us and abides with us every day.

So there are three things to remember today: Christ’s rising from the dead means that he has overcome our sin, in the sense that all we have done to keep him at bay, to drive him away, to be rid of his troublesome love, has failed. He wants to be with us still. Secondly, Christ is Christ and never to be confused with culture. Even beautiful music is a snare and a delusion if it obscures rather than reveals Christ, and clearly feeling good about national culture and imperial pomp is not the presence of Christ. Christ is Christ and not our feelings, our ideas or our theories, and he can be met only in faith. Thirdly, therefore, since Christ is Christ and nothing else, if we want him with us we can only believe him. Faith is the way he chooses to come to us. That Jesus lives despite our best efforts to kill him is the victory of Easter. “Thus we preach, and thus have you believed.”

Amen.