“Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

(Colossians 1:27)

Do you ever think there is more promotion to this Easter business than there is product? Do you ever say to yourself: “I wish I could experience some of this Easter Glory I hear so much about? I go to church on Easter Sunday. I listen to the triumphant Easter music. I hear the gospel account of the miraculous Easter story. But somehow, it just doesn’t reach me. It’s all a sort of fourth dimension into which I have not been able to enter. God knows, I’ve needed it and wanted it as badly as anyone. My hopes have been dashed.  Death, cruel, despoiling death has come close and robbed me irreparably. My whole life has been tortured and turned upside down. If anybody needed and longed for some Easter glory, it is I. But it doesn’t reach me loud and clear. Why?”

Perhaps, if we have missed the Easter glory, it has been because we have looked for it in the wrong place. The Easter glory is not dependent on azaleas and wisteria blooming, nor on the excellence of a choir, nor on a sermon, nor on the elegance of Easter garments. St. Paul put the Colossian Christians on the right track for capturing the Easter glory when he wrote: “Christ in you, is your hope of glory.”

A postal card came to me all the way from Corinth, Greece. The photograph on the card was of a pile of stones in the foreground with barren rock mountains in the background — a rather bleak and uninteresting landscape. When I turned the card over I saw this message which my friend had written: “This is the rock platform from which St. Paul preached to the Corinthians.”

Why, after 2000 years is anybody interested in where a little Jewish vagabond tent-maker stood to make a speech? Why will a traveling Tennessean today want to see that spot and think it significant to friends back home?

Oh, because Paul stood there and preached the resurrection of Jesus Christ! How do we know this was his sermon topic? Because this was always what Paul preached: “Christ crucified and risen from the dead.”

At the beginning of what we are accustomed to refer to as the 15th chapter of Paul’s First Letter to those Corinthian Christians, Paul calls to their remembrance what he had preached to them: “Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also you have received, and wherein you stand; by which also you are saved, if you keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless you have believed in vain. For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day, according to the scriptures.”

But the significance of this unprecedented mighty act of God in raising Jesus from the dead did not stop with Jesus’ resurrection. Paul understood this to be the beginning of hope for the whole death-doomed race of humanity. God had broken the deadly cycle of sin. “As in Adam all died, so in Christ would all be made alive. Christ, the first fruits, afterward, they that are Christ’s at his coming.”

But the way to all this Easter glory, Paul made clear in his preaching of the resurrection was not an automatic, chain-reaction for everyone. It was rather an open possibility for everyone who welcomed into his or her life the living, resurrected Christ. “Christ in you,” Paul says to the Colossians, “is your hope of glory.”

Christ in your mother, Christ in your child, Christ in an ancient scripture, Christ in an orthodox creed, is not your hope of glory. But Christ received, believed, obeyed in your life, is your hope of glory.

Now this Easter glory the living Christ brings to us is a two-fold reality. First, it is a glory of knowledge — the comforting, consoling knowledge — about life beyond the grave. As Epicurus said long ago, with respect to death, all we mortals live in an “unfortified city”.

Leslie Weatherhead told of becoming very much intrigued by a house advertised for sale. When he arrived at the address no one was there and the place was locked up tight. By peeping in the windows he could get a bit of a notion of the house-plan and he could catch glimpses of the decorations, but he had no solid information of the number of rooms, the quality of workmanship, the comfort or beauty of the interior. Then he noticed a tiny sign placed in the front window which read: “The Key is Next Door.” So he went next door, got the key, and by means of it, explored the whole house.

So also for us and our interest in that intriguing and mysterious place where we will one day take up our residence. The door is locked now, but He who has the key is just next door. In fact, when we open our lives to Jesus Christ, he puts the key in our hands. He brings the comforting knowledge: “In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you and if I go and prepare a place for you I will come again and receive you unto myself. And whither I go ye know and the way ye know.” “Christ in you is your hope of glory.”

But then the Easter glory — Christ in you — is more than comforting knowledge for the future, it is power for living the resurrection life now. Karl Barth, that dour Swiss Calvinist theologian, said “that the Christian hope in this life is not merely for a life after death. It is not ‘the belief that’ a tiny soul, like a butterfly, will flutter above the grave and still be preserved to live on in immortality. This is not the Christian hope. We believe in ‘the resurrection of the body’. Body in the Bible is quite simply ‘a person’; moreover, a person under the sign of sin. And to this person it is said: ‘Thou shalt rise again.’ Resurrection means not the continuation of life, but life’s completion. We shall be changed, said Paul, which does not mean that a quite different life begins, but that this corruptible must put on incorruption. Then it will be manifest that death is swallowed up in victory.”

And this transformation, this completion, this mortal putting on immortality, is the work of the living Christ in the faithful servant of his Lord, right now. “Christ in you, your hope of glory now.”

St. Paul in his epistles uses the phrase, “in Christ”, 164 times. What did he mean by this favorite expression? James Stewart of Scotland explains: “Here is the key to the phrase, ‘in Christ’ — just this: Christ is the redeemed person’s new environment. Anyone ‘in Christ’ has been lifted out of the cramping restrictions of this earthly lot into a totally different sphere, the sphere of Christ. He or she has been transplanted into a new soil and a new climate, and both soil and climate are Christ. The spirit of the one ‘in Christ’ is breathing a nobler element; is moving on a loftier plane.”

On the wall of a kitchen in a restaurant I saw this sign painted where all the kitchen help could not help but see it: “If you are not proud of it, don’t serve it.” A good motto for places and professions other than eating establishments! “If you are not proud of it, don’t serve  it.” But how seldom can we really be proud of what in life we must serve?

Arthur John Gossip tells of going into his pulpit at St. Matthew’s church in Glasgow one Sunday morning after a very full week in which he had precious little time to prepare his sermon. He was frankly ashamed to face his people with that hastily put together message. And on the pulpit steps the Living Christ came to Gossip and unmistakably and clearly said: “Is that the best you can do?” Knowing the week that lay behind, humbly, but sincerely, Gossip said, “Yes, Lord, it is.” And that Sunday that hastily prepared sermon, Gossip discovered, became, by the grace of God, a trumpet.

There is the only hope for any of us: “that Christ may dwell in our hearts by faith, that we being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that we might be filled with all the fullness of God.”

And this is the fact witnessed to by many a weak and sinful man or woman, that the power of the resurrection is not something he or she has a faint notion might take place in the sweet bye and bye, but a reality they have known and been caught up in and excitedly experienced: “Christ is us now, our only hope of glory.”

The Easter glory, we don’t have to hunt for it. We don’t have to achieve it. Ours, just to receive it. Take it from Him who raised up His own son and gave Him glory.

Then we will be able to say at the last with Charles Kingsley: “Lord. . . I am no hero. . But a traitor, I have never been. . . I have tried to do the duty which lay nearest me; and to leave whatever thou didst commit to my charge a little better than I found it. . . To do that is to stand at last, wounded perhaps, but crushing the head of evil.” For it is Christ in us, not we ourselves, and certainly no other, which is our only hope of glory.