“I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”

(John 11:25)

When we come up again to Easter Day, our thoughts turn to those we have known here and loved and lost awhile. We think of those whose names and lives have been so interwoven with ours that their death has left in our consciousness a great gaping hole as when a strong wind uproots a massive oak.

We think of the young child for whom death came in the midst of his play. We think of the young professional man who was just stepping across the threshold of his best work and death came as an unexpected interruption. We think of the elderly person for whom death came like a tardy airplane, so late in coming that she was all worn with the waiting.

And most surely on this Easter Sunday, which falls in the midst of our anniversary celebrations of this great church, we think of those remarkable people in the Grace Covenant congregation whose supportive faith and love have formed our spirits before they passed on to join the Church Triumphant.

But when death came for each, young or old, friend or relation, each passed on irrevocably. So death, for us, is like a boundary. We, who are living on earth, are on this side of the boundary. Those who have died are on the other side of it. We cannot go to them. They cannot come to us. When they cross over, we see them no more.

The joy and comfort and triumph of Easter for us is that this day marks the anniversary of that time when the boundary of death was crossed and re-crossed. On the first Easter Sunday He, who had been crucified on Friday and laid in Joseph’s tomb through Saturday, came back from the grave. He, who had entered through the gate of death, came back to life again. So death is forevermore a breached wall, a crossed boundary, a defeated enemy.

Christ, the pioneer of our faith, who crossed the boundary that is death, came back to tell us it is just a boundary, not an end; that beyond is not mere nothingness, not “non-being,” but across that boundary is a Father’s House, and a homey welcome, and perpetual light, and peace and freedom from pain.

Airplane pilots who come back from the experience of crossing the sound barrier tell us that as the plane approaches that invisible boundary it begins to vibrate and rattle terribly as if the mechanism would shake to pieces, and at the moment the sound barrier is breached there is a loud explosion like ten thousand cannons — but that one should not be afraid, but just hold on, for once through the barrier, the plane glides with unbelievable smoothness as on silver wings.

So, the Pioneer of our faith, out of His own experience, comes back from crossing and re-crossing the boundary of death and assures us: “In My Father’s house are many mansions . . . I go to prepare a place for you . . . Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid . . . I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in Me though he were dead, yet shall he live and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.”

But if the joyous comfort of Easter is our faith’s assurance that death is only a boundary that can be safely, smoothly crossed into a fairer land, then the solemn challenge of Easter is that the important crossing is not at the point of death, but at the point of discipleship. The most crucial boundary is not between the living and the dead, but between the believing and the unbelieving, between those who already have everlasting life as a present possession, through faith in and loyal discipleship to Jesus Christ, and those whose lives have no such eternal or everlasting quality.

Everyone in my city of Memphis knows that the Mississippi River is the boundary between the states of Tennessee and Arkansas. Indeed, most Americans think of the Mississippi River as the boundary between the East and the West of our great country. And quite a formidable boundary it is in some springtimes with the river at flood stage!

Once, soon after we moved from Richmond to Memphis, your friend and mine, George Docherty, from Washington’s New York Avenue Church, came out to Idlewild for our Holy Week services. He told us he had never seen the Mississippi River and begged to be driven down to view the Father of Waters. His first glimpse from the Memphis Bluffs was an awesome sight. The river had overflowed its banks and covered the Arkansas lowlands for miles. In amazement Docherty exclaimed: “How did those early settlers in their covered wagons, migrating from the East to the West, ever cross this river? How did they do it?”

But for George and me that day, the crossing was easy. We drove rapidly across on the sturdy steel bridge and the broad causeway. Yes, how easy to get across that formidable boundary for anyone who can drive an automobile and make use of the skill and sweat and tears of engineers and workmen. How much easier for one who can pilot a plane! So, for anyone who would go safely and speedily from the East to the West of our great nation, the most formidable boundary to be crossed is not so much the River, as the driver’s or pilot’s license test!

In the realm of the human soul, the crucial crossing is not at the point of death, but at the point of discipleship.

Jesus Christ was not clothed with immortality, everlasting life, after death had struck Him down. He always had eternal life — that life which is of the quality and character of God, His Heavenly Father. Christ was just as immortal when He hung dying on the cross in the deepening shadows of Black Friday, as He was when He came forth from the tomb on Easter Sunday morning. The life that was in Him was of God, eternal and everlasting. Death and sin and brutality could not destroy the kind of life Christ has any more than harsh words could hold back the dawn. And the Christian’s victory over death is won not at the time of death’s crossing, but at the time of conversion.

“It is won in that experience of true death which takes place when a person meets God in the experience of conversion. ‘I have been crucified with Christ,’ said St. Paul, ‘yet I live. And the life I now live in the flesh, I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.’”(Galatians 2:20 — B. T. Niles — Preaching the Resurrection)

“We know we have passed from death to life,” cried that joyous first century Christian, “we know it, because Christ has given us life and we love our brethren.”

Graham Greene wrote a novel in which he made the leper, the person who has contracted leprosy, the symbol of modern men and women, and of the long disease of modern life. It is the fate of one suffering from leprosy to die piece-meal: fingers, toes, nose and ears deaden and fall from the still living body. Some say it is this quiet, merciful side-effect of leprosy — this disappearance of sensation, of the powers even to feel pain — which haunted Graham Greene and which he made the basis of the story in his book, A Burned Out Case; for the principal character, a man named Querry, is an architect who is rich, successful, greatly loved, but he is also dead spiritually. He has had it. Like the physical leper, he has spiritual leprosy, death on the installment plan.

“Life is not lost by dying,” affirmed Stephen Vincent Benet. “Life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all our thousand small, uncaring ways.”

The horrible part of this spiritual leprosy, which is the congenital deformity of all mankind, is that there is no cure we can find for ourselves. No local applications will avail. We try this home remedy or that to stay the destruction, but it is no good. We are dying in the midst of life.

Where is health and help? Only in Jesus Christ whom God raised from the dead. In Him is life. He has everlasting life, eternal life; not just endless life, stretched out like a string that can never be cut, but life with a new, imperishable, other-worldly quality of awareness to eternal, spiritual values; life that responds to God, to His call, and His righteousness at every moment; life that quivers, with the thrill of expectancy and understanding in every moment, to the presence and purpose of God; life that sees with open eyes both the beauty and the banality of our world. And Christ gives this imperishably, everlasting life to those who will have it from Him now. But it comes only, moment by moment, to the faithful obedient disciple. If we do not get it now, we cannot hope to have it hereafter.

So, our problem is not longevity, a stretching out of our earthly life a bit more. Rather, our problem is to have the purpose to live for God at every moment. And so:

 “Not for us are content, and quiet, and peace of mind,

For we go seeking a city we shall never find.

Only the road and the dawn, the sun, the wind and the rain,

And watch fires under the stars, and sleep, and the road again.

We travel the dusty road till the light of day is dim,

And the sunset shows us spires away on the world’s rim.

We travel from dawn to dusk, till the day is past and by,

Seeking the Holy City beyond the rim of the sky.”

                        John Masefield — The Seekers