The Last Enemy to Be Destroyed Is Death (Easter Day: 20th April 2025)

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne, St Peter’s, Poulshot, and Holy Cross, Seend

Readings – 1 Corinthians 15. 19-26; Luke 24. 1-12         

“The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”

Christians in this country are lucky that the celebration of Easter comes when springtime’s miracle of new life is at its peak. The miraculous nature of new life is clear whenever we see it, from an April field full of cowslips and celandine to a new-born child sleeping in the arms of its mother. The very existence of life is a mystery, and our existence, as a species that can reason and has a sense of right and wrong, is stranger still. There are two explanations for of human existence. One is that we are the product of the spontaneous emergence of life from non-living chemicals, and then trillions of chance encounters over four billion years—that we are a freak occurrence in a meaningless, and largely lifeless, universe. The other is that we were created by something greater than ourselves.

Our first instinct is probably that the only explanation compatible with science is that the human race came about by chance. The universe is a huge place and the four billion year span of life on Earth is a very long time indeed… far too long for us really to get our heads around. You can also be a perfectly good and faithful Christian and believe that God used the natural processes of the universe to allow a species in His image and likeness to evolveand, that, given the sheer size of the universe and the depth of time involved, nothing else would be required.

For a long time that was precisely my position. There is no scientific evidence for God nor, I believed, could or should Christians waste their time trying to find evidence for something that is fundamentally a matter of faith. But do you remember that old saying that if you had enough monkeys hammering randomly at typewriters for long enough, that one of them would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare?

Well, the maths on that have been done repeatedly, and if you had enough monkeys to fill not just the world, but the entire observable universe, and let them type for the whole time until the protons that make up all matter began to decay, then the chance that one of them would produce Hamlet is so low that we don’t even have a name for the number. It’s not one in a billion or one in a trillion, but one in one followed by hundreds of thousands of noughts. If it is improbable that a play named Hamlet could emerge by change, how much less probable it is that a man named Shakespeare could do so?

More than that, life is only possible because a number of physical constants, such as the strength of gravity and the strong and weak nuclear forces, are within a very narrow range. It’s as if there are a large number of dials that have to be tuned to within extremely narrow limits for life to be possible in our universe.

The fine-tuning is so precise that it needs an explanation, whether or not God comes into it. The most favoured explanation not involving a creator is that there must be a very large, possibly infinite number of universes, so at least one can have laws of physics where life is possible. You’ll know the idea of infinite universes is a much loved plot device of science fiction programmes, treated by them as proven scientific fact, to the extent that people sometimes forget that there’s no hard evidence that any universe other than our own exists.

Our existence is extraordinarily improbable. Never forget that. Don’t allow yourself to be fooled into believing that somebody has found an entirely materialist, rationalist, explanation for where we came from and why any of this exists, because such an explanation does not exist. The possible explanations that don’t involve a creator God involve just as much metaphysical speculation and absolutely no physical evidence.

The mystery of life, mind you, is one thing, and the possibility of God is another, but of course, we all know that once you die, that’s it.

It’s not just modern people who find the idea of people rising from the dead ridiculous. Certainly, that sort of idea seems to have been the last thing on the minds of the women who went to their friend Jesus’ tomb at the crack of dawn on a Sunday morning. They brought along spices to embalm His body—a job that is done these days by undertakers. Among the very few who remained loyal to their companion right to His tragic end, they were determined to make sure His remains were treated in a decent and dignified way.

So far was the idea of anything mystical or abnormal from their minds that when the women encountered the empty tomb “they were perplexed” and then when they met two mysterious men in dazzling clothes who told them “he has risen”, they got really scared.

When they went back to the city with their stories of empty tombs and angels, Jesus’ other followers, far from welcoming the good news, considered it “an idle tale”. And why would you believe them? They were women after all, and women tend to be a bit hysterical and prone to making things up! Of course, I don’t think that, but that’s what they thought in both the Jewish and Gentile cultures of the ancient Mediterranean. If you wanted to make up a tall tale to hoodwink people into believing in a religion you’d made up to make money out of it, or to hoodwink yourself because you couldn’t face up to the death of your hero, you wouldn’t do it like this—with confused accounts, four slightly different versions of events doing the rounds, coming from women, and from men of no importance. Nobody sat down to iron out all the details. This story has the roughness of authenticity, but at the same time it isn’t an easy story to believe.

Because of that, there has long been a tendency of clergy to underplay the supernatural aspects of the Christian faith on days like this, when some of the congregation might be here for cultural reasons without necessarily believing in… the magic bits… of Christianity. But let me tell you this, if I thought Jesus was just a wise and holy teacher who got put to death for sticking it to the man – two thousand years ago! – why would I care? I would be doing something more relaxing with my Sunday morning than getting up before seven o’clock to preach this sermon three times.

St Paul was right—if it is only for this world that we have hope in Christ, then Christians are the most pitiable of all people. Jesus’ teachings on how to live may have inspired billions, but they haven’t changed human nature. We’re just as prone to bigotry and anger and panic as those people in ancient Jerusalem who had Jesus strung up—the difference is now that we have nuclear and biological weapons.

As a species, human beings are now the planetary equivalent of the fifteen year rich kid who thinks it’s a laugh to take Dad’s sports car out for a joyride after half a bottle of his best whiskey. If you’ve any doubt about that, switch on the news.

In that context, this worried world of 2025 were things we took for granted are crumbling, let me put to you a different possibility from Jesus just being a wise and holy teacher—that our existence, which is so improbable, is so treasured by God who made us in His own image, that knowing that our unique mix of gifts and flaws would inevitably lead us to self-destruction, He came up with a rescue plan. And it was this— the Creator of the universe in whom is life, became one of us Himself, and through being killed at our hands, because He could not die, has destroyed death for all who trust in His promises.

In what seemed to be humiliating defeat, Christ in fact defeated His enemies, and the last enemy to be destroyed is death.

Now thanks be to God the Father, who has given us the victory through Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Top image: The Empty Tomb by Mikhail Nesterov (1889).