The Day of Days
Canon Liddon. Psalm 118:24 This is the day which the LORD has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it. The day of days in the life of Christ was the day of His resurrection; and to the early Christians Easter Day was the queen of festivals. Easter should provoke a joy in Christian hearts, greater than any event in our private lives; greater than any in the world's public history; greater than any other even in the life of our Lord Himself. This is the immemorial feeling and sense of Christendom; but why should it be so? why has Easter, why has the resurrection, this extraordinary claim on the buoyancy of the Christian heart? I. THE JOY OF A GREAT REACTION; a reaction from anxiety and sorrow. So it was at the time of Christ's resurrection. The apostles had been crushed by the sufferings and death of Jesus Christ. When He was in His grave, all seemed over; and when He appeared, first to one, and then to another, on the day of His resurrection, they could not keep their feelings of welcome and delight, — traversed though these were by a sense of wondering awe, — within anything like bounds. "Then were the disciples glad when they saw the Lord." And this joy of theirs is repeated every year in the greatest feast of the Christian Church. Those who have felt the sorrow feel the joy. Year by year we stand by, in spirit, while Joseph of Arimathaea and Nicodemus lay Him in His grave; and the tension of sincere feeling, of sympathetic sorrow, of penitence and contrition which this implies, is followed by a corresponding reaction on Easter morning. II. THE JOY OF A GREAT CERTAINTY. The resurrection of our Saviour is the fact which makes an intelligent Christian certain of the truth of his creed. And in this way it satisfies a real mental want, and it occasions keen enjoyment by giving this satisfaction. All else in our creed depends on the resurrection of Christ; and to-day when we remind ourselves of its historical certainty, which is scarcely less illustrated by the apparent contradictions than by the collective and direct force of the accounts which have come down to us, we experience a mental delight at the freshening touch of truth, and cry, "This is the day which the Lord hath made: we will rejoice and be glad in it." III. THE JOY OF EASTER IS INSPIRED BY THE HOPE WHICH EASTER WARRANTS AND QUICKENS. Hope and Joy are twin sisters. Joy best enters the human soul when leaning on the arm of Hope. As the apostle says, "We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God." What is this hope which Easter most distinctly puts before us? and how does it spring from our Saviour's resurrection? The great hope which Easter sets before us is the completeness of our life after death. The difficulty of believing in a future life is due, not to the reason, but to the imagination as controlled by the senses. Who of us has not made this discovery in some one of those dark hours, which sooner or later visit every human life? Who of us has not stood by the open coffin, and felt himself, or marked how others feel, the terrific empire of sense in the presence of death? At such a moment the most modest anticipations of reason are deemed an unsubstantial guess: the clear teaching of revelation a solemn fancy; the mind's sceptre has passed to the imagination and the senses, and they decide that all ends with death, and that the grim secrets of the grave are the measure of man's impotent aspirations after a future existence. Now it was to deal with this specific difficulty that our Lord willed to die, and then, by a literal bodily resurrection, to rise from the grave. Truly we may exclaim with the apostle, that God "hath begotten us again unto a lively hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead," and with the psalmist, that "this is the day which the Lord hath made: let us rejoice and be glad in it." (Canon Liddon.) Parallel Verses KJV: This is the day which the LORD hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it. WEB: This is the day that Yahweh has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it!