The Last Enemy to be Destroyed is Death
Though both his parents were wizards, Harry Potter grew up in a Muggle family, and on his first journey to wizard school, it fell to Hagrid to explain to Harry the wizarding world in general, and to break the news of his own early history in particular, of the death of his parents and the existence of his mortal enemy. This is what Hagrid said: “It begins, I suppose, with – with a person called – but it’s incredible you don’t know his name, everyone in our world knows…I don’t like saying the name if I can help it. No one does…people are still scared…this is difficult…His name was…”.1
Well, eventually, Harry discovered the name of the wizard who murdered his parents. He also discovered that almost everyone called this wizard ‘You-Know-Who’ or ‘He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named’ out of fear. Quite a lot of people had convinced themselves that this wizard had gone away for good. Harry sometimes went along with this and called him ‘You-Know-Who’ to spare the feelings of those around him. Yet Harry was never afraid to speak the proper name of his deadly enemy. Usually he just called him ‘Voldemort’.
Why was that the case? Because Harry was the Boy who lived. Voldemort had tried to kill him on the night he murdered his parents, but he wasn’t able to do it. “No one ever lived after he decided to kill them, no one except” Harry.2 Harry had faced the worst his enemy could throw at him, and he had faced him down. He took Voldemort seriously, but instinctively he knew he had nothing to fear from him.
That, of course, is just a story, but all of us here and all people in society at large have a common enemy. It is hardly ever discussed, and sometimes people convince themselves that it is a long way away. It is, however, inescapable, and when it comes down to it, it is widely feared. People often go to great lengths not to name the enemy outright. ‘I lost my mother,’ they say. ‘She passed away, she passed on, she departed.’ That common enemy is, of course, death.
Society at large makes a considerable effort to keep death and talk of death at some remove. We could almost say that society sub-contracts out the business of dealing with death to professionals, and the rest of us do our best to keep away from it. These professionals include doctors, nurses, carers, emergency service personnel – and, as we especially want to acknowledge today, members of the armed forces. The duty to put oneself in harm’s way, not to mention the requirement to contemplate taking the lives of others in the service of the nation, is a heavy burden to place on anyone’s shoulders. Devoting two minutes on one day a year to pondering that sacrifice, a sacrifice which to most of us is unimaginable, seems to me the least we can do.
To help us with that, here is another story, a true story this time, about an American Vietnam veteran talking in a var about his experience of war, a story I have taken from a book by Sam Wells.3 “Beside the bar, an older woman began to attack him. ‘You[‘ve] got no right to snivel about your little half-baked war. World War Two was a real war. Were you even alive then? … I lost a brother in World War Two.’ .. Finally the veteran had had enough. He looked at her and calmly, coldly said, ‘Have you ever had to kill anyone?’ ‘Well, no!’ she answered belligerently. ‘Then what right have you got to tell me anything?’
“There was a long, painful silence throughout the [bar].” … Then a friend of the veteran who was sitting with him “asked quietly, ‘When you got pushed just now, you came back with the fact that you had to kill in Vietnam. Was that the worst of it for you?’ ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘that’s half of it’. The friend waited for a very long time, but the veteran didn’t go on. He only stared into his beer. Finally the friend had to ask, ‘What was the other half?’ ‘The other half was that when we got home, nobody understood’. That, writes, Sam Wells, is the sacrifice we expect of our soldiers: the sacrifice of the unwillingness to kill, and the sacrifice of being isolated from all the rest of us, who have sub-contracted out and distanced ourselves as much as possible from that terrible responsibility.
Of course, the effort to distance ourselves from death is ultimately unsuccessful, whether we consider the reality of twentieth and twenty-first century warfare, in which civilians were and are victims to a degree never previously seen, or whether we simply stop to consider that disease, disaster and mortality are ever-present realities in our world. We see these realities on the news, and we experience these realities in our own family and friendship networks, and within our church family. The apostle Paul sums it all up by saying that ‘the last enemy to be destroyed is death’ (1 Corinthians 15:26).
‘Passing on, passing away, losing someone’ – in common with those around them in society, sometimes Christians use terms like these to spare the feelings of others. Yet Christians do not fear to speak the proper name of their mortal enemy. They do not fear to speak of death. It is not that they fail to grieve when they are bereaved. They do not pretend that death is an illusion, that death is nothing to worry about, or a cause for celebration, or that it is nothing at all. Make no mistake, they mourn and cry. There is a time for weeping, just as there is a time for dancing. But Christians need not grieve as those who have no hope. And why is that the case?
It is because Christians know that Jesus died and rose again. They know that their Lord is the Man who lived. Jesus Christ has faced the worst the enemy could throw at him – he surrendered to death itself – and by his resurrection, he defeated death. Because Jesus died and rose again, those who are called by his name take death seriously, but they know they have nothing to fear from it. Sam Wells speaks of the sacrifice of the Son of God as “the sacrifice to end all sacrifices” and “a truth to die for, [rather than] to kill for”. “Sometimes,” he writes, “I think that if we asked our heavenly Father what the worst part of the cross was, he would pause for a long time and say, ‘the sacrifice of my Son… that was half of it’. And if we waited in a terrible silence and finally found courage to ask, ‘What was the other half?’, he would say, ‘The other half was that 2,000 years later, nobody understands’.4
Yet Paul wrote this morning’s passage from I Thessalonians precisely so we would understand what the death and resurrection of Jesus means for us. He says in verse 13, “We do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or grieve like the rest of humanity, who have no hope”. The first letter to the Thessalonians was one of the earliest letters Paul ever wrote to the churches, if not the earliest, when Christianity was hardly a generation old. What concerned the first readers of that letter was that some of the first generation of Christian believers were growing old and dying before the promised return of Jesus. What would become of them? Had they passed away into the ether? Were they no more? Were they lost? To these questions, in verse 14 of chapter 4, Paul answers ‘No’. “We believe that Jesus died and rose again” – the sacrifice to end all sacrifices – “and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him”.
On the surface, that phrase “falling asleep” may sound like yet another euphemism for death, just another way of trying to live in cloud-cuckoo land and avoiding giving the last enemy its proper name. But in Paul’s usage, this idea of “falling asleep” is linked to the death and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus died a death which was “the wages of sin; and because [and only because] he endured the full horror implied in that death, [we understand that] he has transformed death for his followers into sleep”.5 If we die with Christ, we will also live with him (cf. Romans 6:8), because he died, and then was raised to life.
“Going to heaven when we die” is an imprecise way of trying to express the future confidence of a Christian. Heaven will instead come to us. Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians chapter 4 verse 14: “We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him”. We will rest in peace, then rise in glory, and finally (says Paul in chapter 4 verse 17) “we will be with the Lord forever”. If we have ever found ourselves wondering what heaven will be like, all we need to know is that the Lord will be there, and his unveiled, unmediated presence will be heaven to us.
Paul’s words in verses 16 and 17 of chapter 4 have unfortunately sent some folk in the direction of cloud cuckoo-land when thinking about heaven. “The Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.”
Paul is not here saying that those who have died in the Lord, together with those Christians still living, are going to be snatched from the earth in advance of its total destruction. The day of the Lord’s return will be about his arrival to reign upon the earth, rather than the final turning of his back upon it. It will be about the renewal, rather than the destruction, of the world. It will be about heaven and earth being united.
Two hundred years ago and more, Ramsgate Harbour was the main point of embarkation and disembarkation for travel to and from the European continent. At that time, harbours had not yet been built at Dover or at Folkestone. As a result, Ramsgate was a garrison town during the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century, and the memory of its close association with the armed forces survives in street names such as Wellington Crescent, Liverpool Lawn, Nelson Crescent and Military Road. After the Duke of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo, King George IV travelled through Ramsgate on his trips to Hanover, where he was also King. Famously, on his return from one of these trips in 1821, thousands of people went down to the harbour to welcome him back from his kingdom in Germany to his kingdom in Britain. At that time he designated Ramsgate a Royal Harbour, and an obelisk was constructed in memory of the event, which remains in place to this day.
This kind of welcome would have been very familiar to the citizens of Thessalonica, because in the classical world it was the custom for the leading citizens of a city to assemble outside the city walls and form a welcoming party when they were expecting visits from conquerors returning from battles and dignitaries on diplomatic missions. The honoured visitor would then be escorted back into the city in pomp and circumstance, just as in 1821 King George IV was accompanied by cheering crowds up from the harbour into Ramsgate Town and eventually all the way back to London.
F.F. Bruce, the biblical scholar, tells us that the Greek word used in classical literature for these meetings with returning conquerors is used by Paul in verse 17 of chapter 4 to describe our meeting with the Lord.6 We will be caught up in the clouds to meet him in the air.
But our heads won’t stay in the clouds on that day, any more than the crowds stayed at the harbour once George IV had arrived. Still less will the Lord depart the earth, having only just returned. Rather, on that day we will welcome our King to the earth which is rightfully his, and which will be renewed to be a fit dwelling-place for him, just as in 1821 the crowds escorted their returning King up into town. “And so we will be with the Lord forever” (1 Thessalonians 4:17), and that will be heaven.
So we understand that “resurrection is [not] an old-fashioned religious word for the survival of our souls after the inevitable death of our bodies…” Instead, resurrection is “the return of the whole person, body and soul together, not simply the continuing survival of his or her spiritual dimension.” It is not “a natural event, but rather a reversal of death brought about by” 7 the God who raised Jesus from the dead. Having done so once for his only-begotten Son, he will do so again for all who put their trust in him. His resurrection is the iron-clad guarantee of ours.
So when Christians speak of death, they know they are speaking about a mortal enemy, but an enemy who need not be feared, because it has been defeated by Christ. “Therefore,” says Paul in verse 18, who is always practical, even when, or especially when, he is at his most theological, “Therefore encourage one another with these words”.
Everyone knows that it’s hard to know what to say to a recently-bereaved person. There is a temptation to not say anything to them at all, for fear of saying the wrong thing. In this way, the loneliness and vulnerability experienced by people who have lost loved ones is often compounded. It is true that saying the wrong thing to a bereaved person is a real possibility. Saying that you know just how they feel isn’t normally very helpful. Nor is telling them that the death of their loved one was for the best, or that things aren’t so bad as they presently appear. A bereaved person is unlikely to be comforted by any of the mantras of positive thinking. However, the apostle Paul is telling us that there are words which can provide encouragement, and that there is a rock-bottom hope that gives a particular character even to their rock-bottom experience of grief. It is a hope, he has been saying, that is founded on the resurrection of Jesus Christ. So we may encourage one another with these words. Let us make the rock-bottom faith we share in Christ, let us make that faith the bedrock of our fellowship, in good times and in bad.
The reason we are able to encourage one another is that we have a sure hope for the future. This hope is not a generalised sunny optimism without any observable foundation; it is not the practice of positive thinking; it is hope that has been established by the fact that Jesus died and rose again for us. The entire secondary school career of Harry Potter was taken up with battling and finally defeating Voldemort. But that is just a story. In human history there have been, and continue to be, many wars. Yet the war to end all wars is not against flesh and blood but against sin, death and the devil. The last enemy to be defeated is death. And over this enemy, Jesus Christ has already triumphed. We believe that Jesus died and rose again – the sacrifice to end all sacrifices – and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. Therefore encourage one another with these words.
1 J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, pages 44-45.
2 Ibid., page 45.
3 Sam Wells, Power and Passion (2007), pp. 78-79.
4 Ibid., pp. 79-80.
5 Leon Morris, The Epistles of Paul to the Thessalonians, p. 85.
6 F.F. Bruce, 1 & 2 Thessalonians, pages 102-103.
7 Madigan and Levenson, Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews, page xii.
St. George's Church Ramsgate 