Death is overcome, for He is Risen!

BY GLEN O’BRIEN

When my daughter Sophie was much younger, she arrived at church on Good Friday, gave me a big hug, and said, “Dad, I had a dream that you died, but you didn’t!”

I’m sure we’ve all had that experience. We wake from a bad dream and feel a wave of relief, realising that the horrors we faced were merely an illusion and that all is well again.

The disciples in John’s account of the resurrection (John 20:1-18) must have experienced something similar. When Mary saw Jesus standing in the garden alive and well – more alive and well than ever – all that had happened over the last few terrible days must have seemed like an illusion – a bad dream. Now, all was well again.

But the first disciples did not reach this realisation as quickly as we do. It is impossible for us to work our way back into their experience because we know the end of the story, and they didn’t.

It’s like watching a replay of the Grand Final match; it’s nowhere near as exciting as watching the game live because we already know the outcome. We try to enter into the disciples’ experience when we dramatise the leadup to Easter through Lent and Holy Week.

On Good Friday, it’s bad form to make mention of the resurrection or to rush too quickly from tragedy to triumph. But, as much as we try, we can’t really do it because the fact remains – we know the end of the story. It’s easy to forget that those first Christian disciples had not yet seen the ‘twist’ in the story.

Not only do we have to deal with Easter ‘spoilers’, but we have also tended to ‘tame’ the Easter story, causing it to lose its dramatic power. We have come to see it as some kind of natural process: as spring follows winter, and the butterfly emerges from the caterpillar, so too does resurrection follow crucifixion.

But that is not it at all. Death is a horrible, blunt and final reality. Ask anyone who looks into a coffin and sees their dead child, parent, or spouse. Death is death, and that’s all there is to it.

Jesus died violently on Good Friday at the hands of cruel instruments of an oppressive state, and from the perspective of his grieving friends, that was the end of it. Despite Jesus telling them repeatedly that he would rise again, it had never truly resonated with them, and they were in grief and despair. 

The first disciples did not experience the resurrection as some symbolic representation of a natural process. It freaked them out, but it also overjoyed them. Their beloved Jesus was dead, but now here he was, alive again! It was not something natural but something supernatural.

Christ’s resurrection runs so opposite to the direction of nature that it overturns nature and institutes a new creation. Yes, Easter is a time of rejoicing, but not because every cloud has a silver lining, not because there are no valleys without corresponding hills, and not because tadpoles turn into tree frogs or grubs into butterflies, but because Jesus Christ is risen from the dead!

In the fourth century, John Chrysostom wrote a sermon that became one of the most famous Easter sermons ever written. In it, he exulted in the victory of Christ’s resurrection.

He pictured death and hell as having been ‘tricked’ by the death of Jesus. Death saw the impotence of a lifeless body but could not see the power of a resurrected Christ. “Hell took a body and discovered God! It took earth and encountered heaven. It took what it saw and was overcome by what it did not see.”

We read in Acts 10:39-43, “They killed [Jesus] by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him from the dead on the third day [and now] everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

This is our Easter proclamation: ‘Forgiveness has risen from the grave.’ This Easter, we will move from despair to exultation, from ‘He is not here’ to ‘He is Risen!’ and from startled confusion to confident confession.

Death and hell are finally overthrown because Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

*Glen O’Brien is Research Coordinator and Lecturer at Eva Burrows College, University of Divinity