The last enemy

Saturday, April 25, 2026

Feast of Saint Mark Evangelist

The last enemy

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Blessed the people who know the joyful shout;

in the light of your countenance, O LORD, they walk.

A different drummer accompanies this glorious, triumphant march. After the suffering, we discover that our earlier expectation of some kind of death to follow the pain, is simply not true.

We still have morgues, of course, funeral homes and cemeteries. These physical storehouses of death ask us to reconsider. Even Paul’s words to the Romans make me think, at first, that the freedom is yet to come, and it’s not for me.

The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

This is not exactly visible to my naked eye.

Already-but-not-yet. Facts that make sense in the body, in the world, fall apart in the spiritual realm. Although our culture will have its say, God opens doors into spiritual reality for all of us.

In the last days, terrible times will come.

Undercurrents of despair and resignation make it difficult to see, but death has indeed been conquered. Listen to just about any good Easter sermon, listen without cynicism or ridicule. John Updike’s famous “Seven Stanzas at Easter” does its part in describing the rolling away of the stone:

Make no mistake: if he rose at all

It was as His body;

If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,

The amino acids rekindle,

The Church will fall.

 

It was not as the flowers,

Each soft spring recurrent;

It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the

Eleven apostles;

It was as His flesh; ours.

 

The same hinged thumbs and toes

The same valved heart

That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered

Out of enduring Might

New strength to enclose.

 

Let us not mock God with metaphor,

Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,

Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded

Credulity of earlier ages:

Let us walk through the door.

 

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,

Not a stone in a story,

But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of

Time will eclipse for each of us

The wide light of day.

 

And if we have an angel at the tomb,

Make it a real angel,

Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in

The dawn light, robed in real linen

Spun on a definite loom.

 

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,

For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,

Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed

By the miracle,

And crushed by remonstrance. – 1960

Embarrassment at the miracle doesn’t happen after the suffering. I can’t afford to be embarrassed and hide the glorious moments of grace. That grace, like the moments on the Emmaus road, is given to me, to give to others.

The Lord Jesus, after he spoke to his friends,

was taken up into heaven

and took his seat at the right hand of God.

And those he left behind went forth and preached everywhere,

while the Lord worked with them

and confirmed the word through accompanying signs.

 

Letting Go, Being Held

By the mystery of grace,

the imperishable power of love,

death rolls over in its grave,

sighs,

and lets go.

No one could hold onto Jesus—

the soldiers at the tomb,

Mary in the garden,

the disciples at Emmaus.

Every time he slips through our fingers

and into our hearts.

Resurrection is such a mystery;

it’s hard to grasp

letting go,

being held. – Steve Garnaas-Holmes

(1 Peter 5, Psalm 89, 1 Corinthians 1, Mark 16)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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