Mark 16:6-7 And he said to them, Be not affrighted: You seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here… Christ is risen. O how do those words change the whole aspect of human life! The sunlight that gleams forth after the world has been drenched, and dashed, and terrified with the black thunder drops, reawakening the song of birds and reilluminating the bloom of the folded flowers, does not more gloriously transfigure the landscape than these words transfigure the life of man. Nothing short of this could be our pledge and proof that we also shall arise. We are not left to dim intimations of it from the reminiscences of childhood; vague hopes of it in exalted moments; splendid guesses of it in ancient pages; faint analogies of it from the dawn of day, and the renovation of spring, and the quickened grain, and the butterfly shaking itself free of the enclosing chrysalis to wave its wings in the glories of summer light: all this might create a longing, the sense of some far-off possibility in a few chosen souls, but not for all the weary and suffering sons of humanity a permanent and ennobling conviction, a sure and certain hope. But Christ is risen, and we have it now; a thought to comfort us in the gloom of adversity, a belief to raise us into the high privilege of sons of God. They that are fallen asleep in Christ are not perished. Look into the Saviour's empty and angel-haunted tomb; He hath burst for us the bonds of the prison house; He hath shattered at a touch the iron bars and brazen gates; He hath rifled the house of the spoiler, and torn away the serpent's sting; "He is risen; He is not here." They that sleep in all those narrow graves shall wake again, shall rise again. In innumerable myriads from the earth, and from the river, and from the rolling waves of the mighty sea, shall they start up at the sounding of that angel trumpet; from peaceful churchyards, from bloody battlefields, from the catacomb and from the pyramid, from the marble monument and the mountain cave, great and small, saint and prophet and apostle, and thronging multitudes of unknown martyrs and unrewarded heroes, in every age and every climate, on whose forehead was the Lamb's seal — they shall come forth from the power of death and hell. This is the Christian's hope, and thus we not only triumph over the enemy, but profit by him, wringing out of his curse a blessing, out of his prison a coronation and a home. (Archdeacon Farrar.) Parallel Verses KJV: And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him. |
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