| Last month, we looked at my favorite Lenten hymn “O Sacred Head Now Wounded.” This month, as we begin Easter, I thought it fitting to break down one of my favorite Easter hymns, “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today.” It is a joyous hymn filled with the source of all that joy, Jesus Christ and His resurrection!
The first verse of the hymn is a verse of praise. We confess that Jesus is risen from the dead, and leads us to react with shouts of joy! His disciples were downcast and afraid after the crucifixion, but now that fear and sadness gives way to joy because Jesus is, in fact, alive. Raise your joys and triumphs high! Jesus is alive! And this call is not just for the disciples. This glorious news is to be shouted and sung by all men, women, and angels. Sing ye heavens, and earth reply! Rejoice all men and angels! Jesus lives!
The next three verses then detail the implications of Jesus’ resurrection of the dead. Verse two focuses on Jesus’ defeat of death for all mankind. He, as the conquering Savior and King, has defeated death by His death. C.S. Lewis says it best in his book Miracles: “On the one hand Death is the triumph of Satan, the punishment of the Fall, and the last enemy. Christ shed tears at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in Gethsemane: the Life of Lives that was in Him detested this penal obscenity not less than we do, but more. On the other hand, only he who loses his life will save it. We are baptised into the death of Christ, and it is the remedy for the fall…It is Satan’s great weapon, and also God’s great weapon: it is holy and unholy; our supreme disgrace and our only hope; the thing Christ came to conquer and the means by which He conquered.” Death is our ultimate enemy as the result of sin. No one has ever been able to conquer death, until Jesus did. His death has conquered sin, death, and the devil, saving all of humanity (“dying once, He all doth save”). And because we trust in our Risen Savior-King, we can rightly mock death, singing the hymn’s paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 15:55 “Where, O death, is now thy sting…where thy victory, O grave?” The answer: not here! Jesus, our Savior and King, has defeated you for all mankind!
Verse three continues with the victory language, but it emphasizes the victory of our redemption. “Love’s redeeming work is done.” The work of your redemption from sin is finished. The payment was made in full, and it was accepted. Because of Jesus, you are now redeemed from sin and death. He fought the fight against sin, death, and the devil, and won it for you for all time. He won it, as I’ve said before, through His death and resurrection. Christ’s death was the payment needed for your sin, and the crushing of death and Satan. Now death, the one enemy none of us could defeat, has met its match in Jesus. It could not hold Him down. And now, because you, and the whole world, are redeemed by Jesus, Paradise is open to all who trust in Him.
Verse four then elaborates on how this opening of Paradise by Christ’s death and victorious resurrection gives us hope for life now, and life eternal. We go now where Christ has led us, which is through death and into resurrection and life. We follow Him as we are joined to Him by faith and renewed from our old image of sinful Adam into the new image of our Savior. “Made like Him,” the verse continues, “like Him we rise.” Just as our new Head has risen from the dead, so too do we spiritually by faith today. We will also rise physically from the dead when He returns to bring us to Paradise. Because of that, the verse ends by saying “ours the cross, the grave, the skies.” Our sins were crucified with Christ, and so, we have forgiveness of them. That is how the cross is ours. We are also connected to Jesus’ death, and because of that, we daily die to sin in repentance until the day of our physical death. That is how the grave is ours. And finally, connected to Jesus’ resurrection, we rise again to the new life of faith now, exercised in service to our neighbors, and then at the end, we will rise again bodily to eternal life when He returns and brings us home to Paradise, the new heavens and new earth. Thus, we have the skies.
The song then ends in the same place where it began, praise. We praise our triune God for saving us from sin, death, and the devil in and through Jesus. It was God the Father’s plan to save us by Jesus’ death and resurrection, it was Jesus the Son who enacted that plan for our sake, and it is the Holy Spirit who reveals this plan and gives its benefits to you, me, and all who hear the Gospel and believe. Indeed, praise God that He has come and conquered sin and death in Jesus for you and me, and gives us that victory by means of His Holy Spirit! Have a blessed Easter everyone! He is risen, He is risen indeed! Alleluia!
In Christ, Pastor Michael Onstad
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