Luminescence, Volume 2. C. K. Barrett
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hours of study and practice. That is the difference between a real musician and a bad one. I sit at the piano trying hard to remember that I must get that third finger on the C#. You don’t see Ashkenazy doing that.
Back to where we belong. “I will sing with the Spirit, I will sing with my mind also.” I will put the best of my thoughts into sermon, prayer, hymn and I will remind myself that if God is not in it, it isn’t worth much. And in the real business of living I will with iron hand discipline the old selfishness out of my life, knowing that only the Holy Spirit can achieve the result, until someday I can live, as I know I may one day sing, with the free and loving spontaneity of heaven.
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“THE VICTORY OF EASTER”—1 Corinthians 15.54–57
[Preached four times from 4/4/99 at North Road, to 4/27/03 at Houghton-le-Spring]
All this week, these words have been in my mind for this morning’s sermon. I looked for others in the Easter story, but I could not find one. And all this time this theme has been accompanied by a counter-theme. Paul asks his rhetorical question—Death, where is your sting, implying that death has no sting. But the question has turned into a real question that has an answer. Death where is your sting? Answer: in Kosovo, and of course in dozens of other places, but today one name will do. And the answer was accompanied by a quotation that came unbidden to memory from a poem I have not looked at for decades. Do you know nowadays the name of Studdert-Kennedy? A great man, a great army chaplain in 1914–18, and a poet too, writing out of feelings stimulated by conflict and carnage. There is a poem entitled, “Missing—believed Killed” written with reference to a mother, whose son is so reported. He must be dead but no one can find the body. The poem ends:
She only asked to keep one thing, The joy light in his eyes: God has not even let her know Where his dead body lies. O grave, where is Thy victory? O death where is thy sting?Thy victory is everywhere, Thy sting’s in ev’rything.
That is where we start this Easter Day. What has the day, what has St. Paul to say to us? ‘Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Is it credible? Would you dare to go and say it to all these refugees? Of course it all starts with the fact—the story of Easter. That is indispensable. Don’t think that I am asking you to neglect it. We have heard John’s version of it in this service. When you get home, sometime today read Matthew’s, Mark’s and Luke’s version. But notice how, as Hoskyns long ago pointed out, 1 Corinthians 15 changes its style. It begins with the simple and story-telling style of the Gospels, Christ died, and he was buried, and he was raised and he appeared to Peter, then to the Twelve, then to more than 500, and so on. But as soon as the record is complete, Paul begins to argue, with all those argumentative particles that make it possible to argue in Greek as in no other language. And he is still arguing here at the end of the chapter.
He quotes the Old Testament. First he has Isaiah—“he has swallowed up death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people will be taken away off all the earth.” Then he quotes Hosea, but no, he misquotes Hosea. “O death, where are thy plagues? O grave where is thy destruction?” That sounds alright, but study the context. Paul’s question, as I said, is rhetorical. He means “death you have lost your sting, your victory. You do not have them.” Hosea’s question is different. He is saying, “Come on death, bring out your plagues; grave produce your destruction. We are going to use them on this wicked, faithless people.”
Paul knew the Old Testament. He was a trained rabbi. He probably knew most of it by heart. What is he doing? He has transformed the saying about death and its sting. Vengeance has become love, love has become grace. We are more than conquerors through him who loved us. That is the transforming agency. It is not resurrection only, it is crucifixion and resurrection, the two belong together. Some people think that vs. 56 is a feeble pedestrian theological gloss, put in by some stupid copiests who interrupted and ruined the flow of Paul’s triumphant verse. It is not so, this verse is necessary if we are to see the foundation on which the victory rests. Every great military victory rests on what may seem to be tedious, methodical, plodding staff work, which deals with supplies and logistics. It is like that here. This is the supply verse.
It is easy, and not wrong, to shout about victory over death, to join in what Noel Davey called “the simple whoop of triumph.” To say Jesus is alive, death is dead, is well enough, but all the same your friend has died, and you know that you will die. Where is the victory? Paul knows that death has a sting, and he knows what it is—“Hold on a minute,” he says. There will indeed come a time when death is no more, but he has already pointed out that death is the last enemy to be destroyed, and we shall not see the end of it until God is all in all, and his purposes are complete.
What about the present? Sin and death have been bound up together from the beginning. It was through sin that death entered the experience of the human race. It is there in the old story of the Garden of Eden, and it is there in whatever way you may choose to view the history of humankind. It is sin that turns the clean wound of death into the scorpion’s sting. If you can look back on a long sequence of happy unclouded relations with your dead friend, you are sad that in this life there will be no more of them. What makes the scorpion’s sting is the thought, “If only I had not said that to him! If only I had done that act of kindness that I thought of but was too idle or too stingy to do ! If only we had taken the trouble to put things right after that quarrel!” Or, if you feel you must cast death in the teeth of God, “Why did he do it? Why did he take from us this innocent child?” And all this means I live in a world where death ought not to be. It is here because human beings have chosen to take away from God, who is the source of life, to go this way, rather than his way.
Sin stings because it cuts us off from one another, because it cuts us off from God; this is the dreadful wound it inflicts. And God has dealt with it. “God commends his love towards us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” So be reconciled to God, accept what God offers, the victory has come, and the sting is gone. Pain has not gone, sadness has not gone; death is real, death is hurtful, but the sting is gone.
We may build it up further. Where does sin find its power? In the Law. But isn’t the Law a good Law, God’s own good gift, holy, righteous, and spiritual. Yes indeed it is, but sin has got hold of it and pressed it into service to fight on the wrong side. It aggravates rebellion, it makes us think if we obey it, we have given God his due, and may therefore bargain with him as equals. But God has given us a new way by which to be related to Him. “What the Law could not do, in that it was weak, through the flesh, God did when he sent his Son.”
God has found ways to defeat our sin, due to which we were too bad to know Him, ways of defeating our legalism, in which we thought we were too good to need Him. And we see this happening in our world. We see lives in which sin and legalism are being beaten. Today (4/4) is the day on which Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. He was not a perfect man, but there is freedom for you. I have seen it inscribed on his grave in Atlanta. “Free at last, free now even from death,” but before that a man set free by the victory of God. And we have seen it in lives that have no memorial. And because we have seen God setting people free from the bonds of sin and legalism, we know that at last the last enemy will be beaten too. And it all began with Easter. “Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory in Christ Jesus.”
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“GOD’S COMFORT—THE REFORMATION”—2 Corinthians 1.3–6
[Preached sixteen times from 10/31/63 at the Durham F.C.F.C. to 10/31/91 at Spennymoor]
Even if on other occasions I was in the habit (which I am not) of paying a text the disrespect of announcing it and then forgetting it, I could not do that today, for not the least of the lessons we have learned from the Reformation is that when a preacher and a people come together, they do so not in order to entertain one another and discuss the latest religious ideas, but to stand under the Word of God, and to hear and gratefully obey what God shall say to us out of his Book. Nevertheless, having said that to make the operation clear, I am going to leave the text for a few minutes, not in order to forget it, but in order that in a little while we may