Posting
the other day on John Donne’s “Good-Friday 1613, Riding Westward” got me
thinking about my favorite of Donne’s Holy Sonnets, "Dead Be Not Proud”:
Death, be not proud,
though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful,
for thou art not so;
For those, whom thou
think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death,
nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep,
which but thy picture[s] be,
Much pleasure, then
from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best
men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones,
and soul's delivery.
Thou'rt slave to
Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison,
war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms
can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy
stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past,
we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no
more; Death, thou shalt die.
Resurrection,
for Donne, wasn’t just an element of the creed to be confessed mindlessly at
daily and Sunday services. It was the
great hope of his life. Shortly before
his death Donne commissioned a portrait of himself clothed in burial cloths
with eyes closed, and hung it on the wall in anticipation of his future
glorious resurrection
And
what a wonderful hope and expectation this is! According to the Apostle Paul, those of us who
are "in Christ" through faith and who were, in God's reckoning,
crucified and raised with Christ (Romans 6:5-6; Colossians 3:1) have been given
the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit (Romans 8:9) as a down payment of
our ultimate inheritance (Ephesians 1:13-14; 2 Corinthians 1:22). Consequently,
the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead will, when Jesus returns, give
immortal life TO OUR MORTAL BODIES (Romans 8:11). THIS is the Christian hope guaranteed by the
events that occurred in Jerusalem on 5 April 33 CE—not some ethereal, boring,
disembodied existence strumming harps in the clouds, but an EMBODIED existence
in which we redeemed human beings can at last live—on a renewed earth!—as human
beings were originally created to live. May
those of us who share this hope anticipate this destiny by living our lives as
actually "dead" to sin and "alive to God," refusing to
allow sin to "reign" in the mortal bodies we now have ( Romans
6:11-12). Soli Deo Gloria.
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