Christ’s victory swallowed up the death which devours sinners, and its stinger was bent out of shape beyond repair.
There he sketched our situation: Satan had led God’s human creatures into “disobedience, sin, death, and all misfortune.” That meant we had no source of help, because God was angry with us and had condemned us eternally on the basis of what our sin had earned us. As a result, we lay under God’s wrath and displeasure, sentenced to eternal damnation, as we had merited it. “I had no lord or king but was captive under the power of the Devil. I was condemned to death and entangled in sin and blindness. But Christ came to loosen our bonds of disobedience, sin, death, and all misfortune. He came to release us from them. He came to route the tyrants and jailers who had tied our lives in knots. “Jesus Christ, the Lord of life, righteousness, and every good and blessing... has snatched us, poor lost creatures, from the jaws of Hell, won us, made us free, and restored us to the Father’s favor and grace. He has taken us under His protection and shelter as His own possession, in order that He may rule us by His righteousness, wisdom, power, life, and blessedness” (Large Catechism, explanation to the second article of the Apostles Creed).
Luther put this confession to music, in his “Christ Jesus Lay in Death’s Strong Bands,” as he sang the glory of Jesus’ resurrection. This imagery of bondage in chains describes our experience of being curved so tightly into ourselves, to use another of Luther’s expressions, that we cannot unwind. We learned under Satan’s tutelage to live with our hands tied behind our back. We stumbled and staggered through life blindfolded. Satan’s deception binds us to idols of his or our own making as we turn our lives to reliance on some person or object our Creator has made, rather than on our Creator Himself. This posture, chosen as we try to defend ourselves, chokes and suffocates us.
Being tied up with ourselves is a result of trying to defend ourselves and hold our lives together on our own terms, we strive to set our own conditions for judging ourselves as successful, secure, or satisfied. In attempting to shore up our lives and defend ourselves, we place ourselves under the power of those who hurt us by refusing to forgive them and trying to prove ourselves mightier than they. We try to right the wrongs we have suffered by letting pride dictate our terms for contentedness and by seeking success on our own self-devised standards. Jesus has freed us from such bondage and directs us to the framework for life He has set as the Eden of peace and joy.
Jesus has freed us from such bondage and directs us to the framework for life He has set as the Eden of peace and joy.No human being could have accomplished this. None are innocent or unblemished as was the sacrificial lamb to which John the Baptist pointed. Each one of us had our own deaths to contend with, no extra death for others to spare. One medieval tradition emphasized how God had to become human because a human being had to pay the price for restoring the covenant with the Creator. In contrast, Luther held that the second person of the Trinity became one of us because only God had the power to smash the chains holding us to smithereens. Only Christ, God the Father’s only begotten Son, could strip the power of death and leave it no more than an empty form that had held us captive in terror. When the Devil, who specializes in deception and death, met the Author of life in those fateful three days, he did not have a chance. Christ’s victory swallowed up the death which devours sinners, and its stinger was bent out of shape beyond repair.
Luther placed the death and resurrection of Jesus squarely in the context of Israel’s Passover deliverance, but Jesus is not only the Paschal Lamb in Luther’s hymn. From the death of this lamb on the accursed tree flows the blood that marks the doorposts of His people, just as the Israelites were given protection from the messenger of death by the blood on the doorposts and lintels of their homes. The old and evil leaven is gone, and His people feast on the body and blood of Jesus Himself, the body given for us, the blood shed for us.
The sun that shines through the empty tomb from the other side enlightens every day of our lives and warms our hearts. For when the stone rolled and the corpse walked, Christ’s coming to life unleashed a power that changed the battle. Christ set loose the might of a bomb of unimaginable magnitude which continues to explode in the midst of Satan’s forces and warriors, bringing them bit by bit to their bitter end. The world had been a dangerous place for God’s people who were subject to the lying and murdering legions of Satan himself. Now the world has become a dangerous place for the stooges of Satan. The prisoners who have been liberated from his prison are on the loose and ready to tackle his lies and death threats. They recognize what the Lord of the empty tomb wants them to be doing. We hear His call to attack the deception with the truth of Christ’s triumph over every lie. We assault the disruptions of life that the defensiveness of those around us impose on the weak and the vulnerable with the liberating message and power of Christ’s resurrection.
Satan has been defeated and tamed, but he still wiggles out to make a desperate pass at Christ’s family members. Therefore, it is vital that each day become a new day of dying to sin and rising to walk in Christ’s footsteps. As we feel the bonds tightening around us again, whether from wanton desires or despairing fears, whether from selfish acquisitiveness or from wandering into the sloughs of despond, we hear the rumble of the rolling stone and the gasps of terrified soldiers, who cried out, “Oh, my God, he is risen,” as the angels responded “Alleluia!” When we encounter temptations to manipulate or exploit others, to take advantage of them by trickery or sheer misuse of power, we join in the confession of Thomas, “My Lord and my God,” and experience the gift of freedom from such temptations. When we have fallen or slipped into sin again and Satan tells us to get real and admit that we like his way of life better, we laugh in his face and remind him, “Since Christ has set us free, we are free indeed” (John 8:36).
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