I Corinthians 15:19-26, 54-57
“The Last Enemy”
April 17, 2022 – Easter
My adversary is often a scaly creature with a brain smaller even than a bird’s. Yet I constantly find myself outwitted as I try to hook, reel in, and capture a trout in my net. I will put all my wits to use studying bugs floating on the water, determining if I’m looking at mayflies or caddisflies and just what color those insects are. Then I’ll tie on the best imitation I have in my flybox and present it to that pea-brained fish.
More often than not, there will be no takers for my offering. So I’ll stop and observe again. Maybe the natural bug bodies are a little more olive colored than they are gray. Maybe the wings are a little lighter. So I’ll dig out a different fly and try that, seeking to “match the hatch” of insects and defeat my foe.
I may go through half a dozen different bug imitations, winged dries floating on the top, segmented larva drifting along the bottom, with no victory. In the end, though, I may just tie on an old standby, a Royal Wulff. It’s a gaudy creation of moose hair, white calf tail, red floss, and green peacock feather. It looks like no actual insect in all of God’s creation, but to my chagrin it may be just what that tiny mind with fins decides to eat that morning.
A trout is a complicated opponent, but most of our real adversaries in life are far worse. They have names like cancer or heart disease; depression or dementia; racism or poverty; hate or fear; abortion or gun violence; terrorism or war. All these enemies threaten not only physical lives but our very souls as we try to combat them with a flybox full of tactics which usually never quite catch and bring our foes to the net.
Of course there are some victories. I do catch a fish every once in a while. We will say that a treatment beat cancer for us or a new law diminished racism. Or we may accept substitutes like cheering on the Ducks or watching Batman bring down the Joker. One of the most satisfying scenes I’ve ever read in literature is the final confrontation with the villain Uriah Heep in Dickens’ David Copperfield. Heep is one of slimiest, sneakiest evildoers, real or imagined, that you will ever meet. When David and his friends gather one day to confront him and bring out proof of his fraud and treachery, it is a wonderful scene, full of all the excitement and joy you could ever want. Heep hangs his head in defeat.
Yet we all know our greatest enemies are not so easily conquered. Near the end of a book titled A Mirror for Observers by Edgar Pangborn, a woman seems to be dying of a fever. Two friends sit by her bed and care for her through the hours and days of her illness. As he sits there holding her limp hand one of them wishes that her disease were a tangible enemy, a fire-breathing dragon which could be opposed with body and sword. But “the real dragons,” he thinks, “are always quiet, without form.” For these you need a courage that will uphold you “against the attack of shadows.”
The attack of shadows. We don’t know how to do battle with darkness and shadows. The psalm calls it “the shadow of death.” We don’t know how to fight death. In the end, it defeats us all. It is the conflict that begins the moment we’re born. Every one of us will finally, sooner or later, come out a loser. The victory we long for escapes us, and we die.
In traditional Christian language, death has two allies: sin and the devil. The opening chapters of Scripture teach us that Satan brought sin into our lives and that sin brought us death. That unholy trinity, sin, death and the devil, has been our enemy ever since. Before them, you and I are usually powerless, especially against that one which our text in verse 26 calls “the last enemy.” We all die, no matter how many tricks we’ve got in our fishing vest or tackle box.
In our Gospel from Luke that is what the friends of Jesus must have thought as the sun came up on Easter morning. The week before they anticipated a great victory. Jesus was the promised Messiah, the King of Israel. He was proclaimed as such just as we celebrated ourselves seven days ago on Palm Sunday. All that week, at any moment, they expected Jesus to take charge, to call up the forces of righteousness, to bring down the power of God, and to win them a great victory over the Romans. But it didn’t happen. The Romans instead nailed Jesus to a Cross. Sin and the devil put Jesus to death.
Friday we heard Jesus Himself say when He was arrested that it was then the time for the power of darkness. We call the Good Friday service Tenebrae, “shadows.” The shadows won that day. What the disciples had expected did not happen. They lost. Feeling that deep loss, women who had followed and served Jesus came early to the tomb on Sunday morning to anoint their defeated Master.
If that had been the end of the story, that victory of death, we would not be here today of course. As our text began in verse 19, “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” If our ordinary experience that death always wins in the end is the final word, then we’ve got nothing to celebrate here. That’s why Paul today leads us immediately on in verse 20 to the word we’ve been saying all morning, “But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead!”
It’s the same word which greeted the women in the Gospel from Luke 24. Verse 2 says the stone was moved and the body was gone. Two angels appeared to ask what they were looking for, to ask them why they were looking for someone who had been defeated. “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” “He is not here,” they said, “but has risen!”
Jesus was not there, not in the place of the lost, of the dead. The one they were looking for was no loser. Hadn’t he said so all along? “Remember how he told you,” says verse 7, that losing the battle of the Cross was only a step on the way to winning the war of life? Didn’t He tell you He would be crucified and then rise on the third day? Jesus would lose at first. He would even die. But then He rose victoriously.
The Anastasis, which means “resurrection,” icon of Greek Orthodoxy is a sermon in itself. It portrays the rising of Jesus via images based on an event that began yesterday, on Holy Saturday, His descent into hell. Jesus stands upon the gates of hell, which He has broken open and which have fallen into the shape of a cross. He extends His hands to lift Adam and Eve, the parents of humanity, from their graves. On the Lord’s right above Adam we see David and Solomon with John the Baptist looking on. On Christ’s left above Eve are likely Adam’s and Eve’s son Abel as a shepherd, Moses, and perhaps Elijah.
That icon shows us Jesus making true what Paul says in verse 21 “For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man,” and verse 22, “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.” In this great Christian image, even Adam himself along with Eve will be raised up by Jesus.
What we see at the bottom is telling. Beneath Jesus’ feet and the Cross, we see the dark depths of hell. It’s filled with scattered keys, links of chain, and broken locks, symbolizing the breaking of the bondage which held humanity. There is a bound figure at the bottom, completely defeated. That’s Death, “the last enemy,” according to verse 26.
Yet, as I’ve been saying, you and I know that hasn’t quite happened yet. Death seems very much alive and well and active among us. Kendal and Sarah were to sing “Mercy Tree” today, with the refrain, “Death has died.” But it’s not quite so. So we need to hear and remember what Paul said both in verse 20 and 23: Jesus Christ is “the firstfruits.” Jesus is that first daffodil poking its head out of the ground in February. He is that first strawberry turning red in May. He is that first luscious blueberry appearing in June. Right now, He is the first of many more to come. He is also the one who makes it all possible.
We are here to celebrate the beginning of that great Anastasis, the great rising that is yet to come. Verse 24 assures us it will happen, “The end will come, when he [Jesus] hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.” And then, once again, “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”
That last enemy will be destroyed. I believe it because, as the beginning of chapter 15 argues, all the evidence points in that direction. I also believe it because I see it happening in you and me all the time. I saw it happen in my grandmother. Please let me tell you about her. I wasn’t her first grandson, but like my own grandson nearly was for me, I was born on her birthday. The other grandkids tell me I was her favorite, although I didn’t think about that much. I just knew she loved me a lot and that we were good friends.
My sister and I visited Grandma for long stretches in the summers. We would stay with her in Arizona and spend lots of time at our cabin in Oak Creek Canyon. Summer there is hot. One afternoon, when I was maybe ten years old, Grandma took us down to the creek, mostly to get cool. I never missed a chance to fish, so I took my pole. Trout often don’t bite well during a warm afternoon, but I managed to catch one. We didn’t know about catch and release and this fish was big enough to keep. So I put it on a stringer.
I only caught the one trout that day. When it was time to go home, Grandma looked at my one, lone fish. It was too late to throw it back, but she didn’t want to dirty up her kitchen sink to clean just one fish. So she told me clean it there by the creek. I knew how. I learned the rule, “You catch it, you clean it,” early on. I dug out my pocketknife and proceeded to gut that trout and throw the “offal,” as Grandma called it, in the bushes for a raccoon or skunk to eat.
Then I hung the fish back on the stringer and we began to walk back up the hill to our cabin. To my grandma’s horror, that poor, gutted fish flopped around all the way home. It was a goner, but it didn’t know it. I told you they have tiny brains. It’s simple nervous system kept its tail moving long after its vital organs were gone—flop, flop, flop.
I told you that story because I want you to know that death is in the same position as that gutted fish. It has been caught and killed but it doesn’t quite know it yet. As Gregory of Nyssa so wonderfully put it, Death took the bait of Jesus life, but God hooked and hauled it out gasping on the shore. Jesus defeated death, but it still flops around. The victory is won but Death is a sore loser. It appears sometimes that the victory didn’t happen, as if Jesus didn’t really win, as if death is still the winner. But it’s just flailing on the end of the stringer. Death has died but hasn’t quite realized it yet.
Death still hurts us all the time. All the dead in Ukraine. Nearly a million dead in our country from COVID-19. All the lives aborted or shot away with guns. Death still frightens us and makes us miserable. But it’s just the last gasps of a dead fish. Death has been defeated because Jesus Christ walked out of the tomb on Easter morning and sealed its fate. He rose from the dead and gave us the victory.
I have here a copy of my grandma’s devotional book from the beginning of 1983. She had moved to the Arizona Pioneer’s Home in Prescott less than a year before. Grandma wrote in her book as she read each day. You can see that sometimes she was up and sometimes she was down. On April 3, which was Easter that year, she wrote, “Doesn’t seem like Easter.” But on April 17, after reading about the resurrected Lord appearing to Mary Magdalene and to Thomas, she wrote, “I know that Christ is risen.” At the beginning of the reading for April 24, she wrote, “I didn’t get to church.” After reading about the beauty of song birds, she wrote, “No birds sing here at the home. They spray to keep them from nesting.” Up and down. Some victory, but also defeat.
But then there is her entry for April 21. There she read to herself a poem, which has these lines:
And when on that last day we rise,
Caught up between the earth and the skies,
Then shall we hear our Lord
Say, Thou has done with doubt and death,
Out of place, out of sync with the calendar, Grandma wrote there, “This is the 25th. I have been so miserable. Hope they X-ray me today. I see the doctor Wednesday. I think I’m ready to meet the Lord in the sky.” That may have been the last thing she wrote. She died early that Wednesday, April 27, 1983.
The last enemy flopped around for Grandma. Sometimes fear of it made her miserable. She believed in Jesus’ victory. But Death would flip its tail and she would doubt. She wrote prayers here, asking for more faith. Christ assured her again of His victory and she believed and wrote, “Thank you God.” And so it went, Grandma and the flopping fish of death. Finally, that hideous fish flailed its tail at Grandma one last time and she died. But it only looked like death won.
We flew out for her funeral that next Monday. They asked if I wanted to say anything in the service. I said I wanted to read scripture. We entered past her open casket. I looked down at her and knew she had not lost, that she was still alive. Then I stood up in front of our family and Grandma’s friends and read I Corinthians 15:54-57,
the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’ ‘Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’ The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
That was Jesus’ victory for Grandma. I’ve seen that victory come to my father-in-law, my mother-in-law, and to my own mother. Over the years I’ve seen it come here among us, most recently to Paul who was remembered by his family on Friday. It is in just those Christian deaths that I see Jesus’ victory most clearly. Grandma did not lose. They did not lose. Grandma is with Jesus. Her death was swallowed up in His victory. Every Christian’s death is swallowed up in His victory.
The angels asked the women why they were looking for Jesus. They said, “He is not here; he has risen!” In a great sermon on the Resurrection, George MacDonald said that because of Jesus it will one day be possible to say of anyone, “He is not here; he has risen,” “She is not here; she has risen.” It will be said over the casket, over the grave of every Christian. Believe in His victory and His victory becomes your victory. Die and you will rise with Him. He is risen. So will you be raised. That’s our victory.
I leave you with the word of the angels, our Easter victory cry: “He has risen.” He is risen! Raise that cry today. Raise it over the grave of every believer. Raise it in the midst of every loss. Raise it up in the shadows and the darkness. Raise it up when it feels like you are losing the battle. Because Christ has won. Jesus has been raised. He is victorious. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead and He lives to raise up you!
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2022 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj