The Living not Among the Dead
Canon Liddon. Luke 24:1-10 Now on the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came to the sepulcher, bringing the spices which they had prepared… I. THE FACT ANNOUNCED BY THE ANGEL IS, AS WE CAN SEE WHEN WE LOOK BACK ON IT, AMONG THE BEST ATTESTED IN HUMAN HISTORY. For forty days the apostles continually saw Jesus Christ risen, touched Him, spoke with Him, ate add drank with Him as before His death. They staked everything upon this fact. It was to them a fact of experience. One or two people may be hallucinated, but not a multitude. A large number of people will not easily be so swayed by a single interest or a single passion as to believe simultaneously in a story that has no foundation in fact. II. The fact of the resurrection is the ground of THE REMONSTRANCE of the angels with the holy women — "Why seek ye the living among the dead?" But is this question applicable only to them during that pause when they felt the shock of the empty tomb? Let us consider. 1. First of all, then, it would seem that we may literally seek the living among the dead if we seek Christ in a Christianity, so termed, which denies the resurrection. If Christ's body never left the grave, if it has somewhere mingled with the dust of earth, then, however we may be attracted by His moral teaching, we have no ground for hoping in Him as our Redeemer: there is nothing to prove that He was the Son of God in the way He pointed out, or that He has established any new relation between earth and heaven. 2. But nearly the same thing may happen in cases where the resurrection is not denied, but, nevertheless, men fail to see what habits of thought about our Lord it involves. His life is continued on among us; only its conditions are changed. "Lo, I am with you alway," etc. "I am He that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore." To think of Him as only one of the great teachers of the world, who have come and disappeared, is to lose sight of the significance of His resurrection from the grave; it is to rank Him in thought with men whose eminence has not saved them from the lot of mortality, and whose dust has long since mouldered in the tomb. It is to lose sight of the line which parts the superhuman from the human. It is to seek the living among the dead. 3. Yet more literally do we seek the living among the dead, if without formally rejecting Christianity we give the best of our thought, of our heart, of our enthusiasm, to systems of thought, or to modes of feeling, which Jesus Christ has set aside. 4. We may not be tempted in these ways to seek the living among the dead teachers or dead elements of old or untrustworthy ways of thinking. But there is a risk of our doing so, certainly not less serious and very much more common, to which we are all exposed. As you know, our Lord's resurrection is a moral as well as an intellectual power. While it convinces us of the truth of Christianity it creates in us the Christian life. We are risen with Christ. The moral resurrection of Christians is a fact of experience. Resurrection from the grip of bad habits, from the charnel-house of bad passions, resurrection from the enervation, corruption, and decay of bad thoughts, bad words, bad deeds, to a new life with Christ, to the life of warm and pure affections, the life of a ready and vigorous will, of a firm and buoyant hope, of a clear strong faith, of a wide and tender charity. But, as a matter of fact, how do we risen Christians really act? We fall back, willingly or wilfully, into the very habits we have renounced. Our repentance is too often like the Lent of Louis the Fourteenth; it is a paroxysm, followed, almost as a matter of course, by the relapse of Easter. To do the great French monarch justice, he did not expect to find Christ's presence in sin and worldliness, as do they who complain of the intellectual difficulties of faith and prayer, while their lives are disposed of in such a manner, that it would be wonderful indeed if faith and prayer could escape suffocation in that chaos of everything save the things which suggest God. (Canon Liddon.) Parallel Verses KJV: Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them. WEB: But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they and some others came to the tomb, bringing the spices which they had prepared.