As we draw near to the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, my mind is drawn to Paul’s magnificent exclamation near the end of his first letter to a group of Jesus followers in the ancient city of Corinth. “Death is swallowed up in victory.” “O death, where is your victory?” “O death, where is your sting?”
In reflecting on this marvelous outburst, though, I have long wondered: what on earth does that mean? Why would Paul close this powerful reflection on the resurrection with such an odd exclamation? It almost seems like he wanted his readers to look at the resurrection through this lens. How does this — the idea that the sting and victory of death are gone because of the resurrection — form the lens through which the resurrection is best understood? I get that the resurrection is the center point of our faith. But what does it actually mean?
Jonathan Waits
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Think about it like this. For all of human history, death is the single enemy we have not been able to conquer. We live in a world entirely consumed with death. We can heal bones. We can cure most diseases. We are capable of (which is not the same as being wise about) manipulating life in a variety of ways. If you want a blond-haired, blue-eyed baby boy, geneticists can do it. In some cases we can keep a person on the cusp of death for weeks, months or even years.
We have mastered our minds. We can drive people crazy or make them sane once again with the aid of pills. We can make blind people see and deaf people hear with electronic medical implants. We can manipulate our bodies in all kinds of different ways. We can make ourselves taller, shorter, larger or smaller. We augment, reduce and change size, color and shape. We can build structures of enormous size and complexity. We can build robots small enough that several hundred or even thousand could fit on the head of a pin. We can shape our environment entirely to our liking. We can change the direction and flow rate of rivers. We can hold back the tides. We can move mountains and fill valleys. We’ve explored the darkest corners of space and the deepest crevices of the oceans.
Yet death alone remains unconquered.
In Ecclesiastes 3:11, Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, observed that although our view of it is limited, God has put a taste of eternity in our hearts. Human history bears witness to this truth in our dealings with death. No human culture has ever accepted that death is simply the end of existence. The Greeks and Romans imagined the underworld and its various regions for the good and the rest. In the East the idea of reincarnation developed and became very much systematized. Other eastern religions imagined that when our spirit leaves this body we join up with the larger universal spirit and become once again a part of the whole that made the world. The Vikings had Valhalla where the bravest men went to have an eternal victory celebration. The Jews had Sheol where the dead went to wait for the resurrection at the end of time when the righteous would be rewarded. Even in today’s increasingly secularized West, people are often consumed with leaving a legacy by which they will be remembered by the living.
The common theme running through all of these is that good people get a good next part of their story while everybody else gets either a neutral or a bad end depending on how bad they were. All of this is not to demonstrate that the Christian concept of eternal life is merely another in a long line of attempts to avoid dealing with the seeming finality of death but rather to show that humans have never been willing to accept the notion that the end of this life is the end of our existence. There is a spark of eternity in our hearts. We were created for it, we know it, we can’t see it and so we pant for it blindly, painting all kinds of pictures of this thing we cannot see and yet know with an unexplainable certainty exists. For thousands of years of human history, this was the sting of death, the victory of death. This was the agonizing fatalism of human life.
And then, everything changed. A man died and didn’t stay dead. Furthermore, people saw him alive again. The grip in which death held the people of this world was forever broken. Where once there were only questions, now there was certainty. Death is not the final answer. If this one guy lived again, perhaps the rest of us will someday as well. There is something more — much more.
This, my friends, is the hope and the promise of the resurrection. When the disciples saw Jesus standing there alive after having been dead everything changed. Everything. Nothing could be viewed in the same light any longer. Life flooded their vision and for the first time they could see everything clearly.
Have you experienced that before? Seeing things clearly for the first time? It takes looking through the right lens. If you want to see clearly, you have to look through the resurrection. This Easter may you experience the freedom from the sting of death in all its forms as you learn to view life through the lens of the resurrection.
Jonathan Waits ([email protected]) is pastor of Central Baptist Church in Church Road, Va.