“Now is Christ risen from the dead and become the first fruits of them that slept.”

(I Corinthians 15:20)

Who of us did not wonder what it would be like to be a passenger on the hijacked Santa Maria? Some people thought it would be great fun to have an extended cruise in the Caribbean. Some rather relished the excitement of sailing on a ship that had been taken by pirates. Others thought of the dangers and discomforts involved. What about food running low with the ship so long out of port and just sailing round and round in the ocean with no known destination? And what would happen to the passengers if the Portuguese or U. S. Government sent gunboats to shell the ship and wrestle it from the pirates?

Well, we all finally learned what the actual passengers on the Santa Maria had really thought and experienced and felt on that eventful cruise when at last they were brought safely into port, set free from the pirates’ grasp, and were given a chance to tell their experiences and express their feelings.

Almost to a man the passengers reported these three overwhelming impressions from their cruise on the pirated Santa Maria:

First, a sense of hopelessness settled down upon them as they sailed on day after day without a known destination.

Second, a sense of fear and helplessness seeped into their souls from being under the control of an evil capricious power, against which they could not effectively prevail in their own strength.

Third, they all reported an indescribable feeling of hope and joy when at last evidence of their deliverance drew near.

Now the experiences of the passengers on the hijacked Santa Maria should help us to understand the momentous meaning of the resurrection of Jesus Christ for our lives. How much like those distraught passengers on the Santa Maria our cruise through life would be, if Jesus Christ had not come into our world, died for our sins, and risen again the third day. Yes, the experiences and impressions of the Santa Maria passengers parallel ours in these three tremendous ways:

First, we, like they, are overwhelmed with hopelessness for want of a known and sure destination until we know and believe that Jesus Christ rose again from the dead on the third day after his crucifixion and death.

Emil Brunner says that “when men have merely this short life before them, which ends in death, anxiety comes over them and panic that the door will be closed.” (E. Brunner — I Believe in the Living God — p. 88 — Westminster Press, 1961)

Someone will say: “It is only the aged and middle-aged who are interested in life after death. Young people don’t give any thought to that. They are concerned with life — this life here.”

Well, how crazy can you get? Can’t we see that youth’s horror at the infirmities and incapacities of old age is but the preview of their fear and frustration before death? A modern novel describes the revulsion of a young prep-school student at the sight of his elderly professor whom he had gone to see when the old man was ill. “Old Spencer had on this very sad, ratty old bathrobe that he was probably born in or something. I don’t much like to see old guys in their pajamas and bathrobes anyway. Their bumpy old chests are always showing. And their legs. Old guys legs, at beaches and places, look so white and unhairy.” (Salinger — The Catcher in the Rye — Signet Books — 1960)

Yes, all of life’s voyage is clouded with helplessness and despair, even for the very young, until we understand clearly what is our port of destination. This we can know only through Jesus Christ whom God raised from the dead and sent to say to us: “Be not afraid. Let not your heart be troubled. In my Father’s house are many rooms. I go to prepare a place for you. Beyond this realm of tears, this region of aging, there is a place of light perpetual and life eternal. I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me shall never die.”

Then again, our cruise of life, like that of the passengers on the Santa Maria, is cursed with a fear and helplessness that comes from being under the control of an evil, capricious power, until we know and believe that Jesus Christ is raised from the dead.

The passengers on the Santa Maria couldn’t help themselves. Their only hope was for deliverance from the outside. They were as helplessly under the control of the lawless men who had seized their ship as was that poor woman who was held hostage in her own car by those armed bandits here in Memphis the other night, and who finally was killed when they wrecked her automobile.

When we read the New Testament carefully, we readily see that the biggest thing about Jesus rising again from the dead for those first disciples was not the assurance of a pleasant port of destination — of life after death (important as that was) — but rather the biggest thing for them was the experience of deliverance from the hold of evil, deadly powers that held sway in their lives in the immediate present. The fact of Christ’s resurrection was evidence to the first Christians that there was a power at work in the world stronger than all the hideous evil forces that had crucified Jesus. That power which took Jesus out of the grave, they believed would yet remake the world. And when they began to trust their lives in faith and obedience to that Risen Lord, they discovered that they were indeed set free from the enslaving power of evil in their own personalities.

This is the reality St. Paul is talking about in his Colossian letter we were reading from this morning. Man’s weakness and tendency toward evil can be exchanged for the power of God and the beauty of Christ-like character.

But you may say: “This power you talk about is not for me. I’m not the stuff out of which such victories are won. Don’t mock me with the image of Christ-likeness. I know myself too well; my thwarting failures are too baffling, the contradiction of my nature too inexorable, the chains of defeat too firmly shackled on my soul.’

“The real New Testament answer is to say: ‘You surely do not imagine that the power which took Christ out of the grave is going to be baffled by you. That the God who did this colossal, prodigious act of might is going to find your problem too hard for his resources? That He, who on that great day broke the last darkness of the universe, may have to confess himself impotent on the scale of your life and say: “I can achieve nothing here; this is too intractable for me?’” (J. Stewart — A Faith to Proclaim — p. 128 — Scribners 1953)

O no! “Now is Christ risen from the dead and become the first fruits of them that slept.” (I Corinthians 15:20) “Therefore, as God’s picked representatives of the new humanity, purified and beloved of God Himself, . . . reach out for the highest gifts of heaven.” (Colossians 3:12, 1) (Phillips Translation)

Finally, how like those passengers of the Santa Maria we should be in the joy and hope we ought to feel when at last there appears to us genuine evidence of our deliverance drawing nigh.

A newspaper account carried a statement from a thirty-six year old business man from Lincoln, Nebraska, after his rescue from the Santa Maria: “It made me feel mighty proud to see a plane from my country flying over the ship when we were headed for an unknown destination. I’ll never complain again about paying income tax.” How many of us would choose that kind of cure from income tax pains?

The sight of that plane with our country’s emblem on the wing flying in the sky above the Santa Maria was evidence to that despairing man that his country had not forgotten him, though he at times had not been too loyal an American, and that sight gave him hope and joy.

Dr. Bill Moseley, last Sunday afternoon, told a gathering of young people from all our Memphis churches that in the backward, neglected areas of north Brazil where he works as a missionary of our church, the communists are winning converts everywhere so rapidly. How? Not because of anything they actually do for the poor people there. They don’t give them bread. They don’t bring them medicine. They don’t even teach them improved farming methods to keep them from starving, yet they win converts to communism. What do they do for the people? They give them hope — hope to rise out of their desperate despair, though as Bill Moseley says, we know it is a false and groundless hope.

You young people nowadays do a lot of talk about how much you detest phonies. You say that you despise shame. Well, you young people are not by yourselves. Everybody despises the phony — even that which is phony in his own heart.

A recent television run of an old movie portrayed the Dead End Kids in a reform school. These kids thought the superintendent of the school was a phony in spite of all he told them of how he was trying to help them and working for their welfare. They didn’t believe him and they did all they could to work against him and to make his life miserable. Finally, in their planned disobedience, they overheated the steam boiler. They blew the furnace into an inferno. Then they ran. Everybody escaped except one. He lay unconscious on the floor of the flaming basement.  The only person who would dare to attempt his rescue was the reform school superintendent. When he came back through the smoke and flame with the unconscious lad across his shoulders, the Dead End Kids knew who was their friend. He had proved that he was not and never had been a phony. Then they understood that his rules and plans for them were meant for their welfare.

When Jesus Christ, the only perfect man, God’s son, went to the cross and died to rescue us from the terrible mess into which we have got ourselves by our disobedience, and God raised Him up and gave Him glory, He proved the genuineness both of His limitless concern for us and the power He has to rescue and deliver us.

Will you take Him now as your Savior? Will you claim now for your very own the genuine joy and unshatterable hope which only the true Savior can bring?

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who begat us again into a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, unto an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled, reserved in heaven for us, who by the power of God are guarded through faith unto a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. Amen.”