The Threat is Empty

[A reflection on one of today's readings from Paul's first letter to the Church in Corinth, which may be found here along with the other readings for this Holiest of Days.]

"If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied." (1 Cor. 15.19)

Yet our hope in Christ is not for this life only but the life to come. St. Paul also wrote, "To live is Christ, to die is gain." (Phil. 1.21) In Our Lord's Passion, Death, and Resurrection, He confronted Death square in the face and defeated it. He entered into its cold embrace and destroyed it. He took with Himself a nature subject to it and freed that nature, rebuilt it so that Death likewise could not hold it. This means for those who choose to walk the Way, the threat of Death is no threat at all. That is our hope in Christ.

In the Way of Our Lord, we hear and believe in what the Lord told us, to love God, and to love our neighbour. This means forsaking those actions that drive us further from God, and taking up those actions that care for those around us: the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the despised, the bereft (a/k/a orphans and widows). These good things the powers that rule this world hate and abhor. These powers do not want us to love God but to fear and even to worship them. They do not want us to love our neighbours but to fear and even destroy those around us. In enticing us from the Way of Our Lord, the powers that rule this world have corrupted the hearts of human leaders and authorities to do that work, and to hold the threat of Pain and Death over others to force them into their way, the Way of Sin and Death. We see that today...oh, do we see that today...and many of our loved ones and friends and neighbours have succumbed to that threat.

Yet for us who follow the Way of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, those threats are meaningless. Yes, suffering and pain are not fun, they are even terrible, but the pain and death the powers that rule the world promise us if we do no comply have no real power over us. Christ is risen from the Dead, destroying Death by death, and so we who put on Christ have this hope, that to die in this flesh is to gain, for His Resurrection shall be Our Resurrection. The powers that rule this world are ruling on borrowed time. Having dealt Death its destruction, Our Lord will subdue before the very end those powers that have inflicted untold suffering and division upon us for countless centuries and even the present and the near future. Their time is short and they know it, and in the end their rule will be utterly ruined, and then Death, which received its sentence so long ago at a suddenly emptied tomb in First Century CE Judea, will be no more and all the threats of those powers rendered null and void.

For Christ is risen from the Dead, trampling down Death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!