Jah Rises - Risen - Death Can Not Conquer I LOVE

We have gathered around the Table of the Lord to recall the love that God has shown us through the passion, death and resurrection of his Son. If we are unwilling to listen with the ears of our hearts to the words He speaks to us, let us at least look with the eyes of faith upon the one our sins have pierced. In a sermon, Leo the Great wrote, “How marvelous the power of the cross; how great beyond all telling the glory of the passion: here is the judgment-seat of the Lord, the condemnation of the world, the supremacy of Christ crucified… let us then acknowledge what Saint Paul, the teacher of the nations, acknowledged so exultantly: This is a saying worthy of trust, worthy of complete acceptance: Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners. God’s compassion for us is all the more wonderful because Christ died, not for the righteous or the holy but for the wicked and the sinful, and, though the divine nature could not be touched by the sting of death, he took to himself, through his birth as one of us, something he could offer on our behalf… By dying he submitted to the laws of the underworld; by rising again he destroyed them. He did away with the everlasting character of death so as to make death a thing of time, not of eternity. “

Allow me to close with a few lines from Robert Browning’s Paracelsus:

I am a wanderer: I remember well

One journey, how I feared the track was missed,

So long the city I desired to reach

Lay hid; when suddenly its spires afar

Flashed through the circling clouds; you may conceive

My transport…

But I had seen the city and one such glance

No darkness could obscure…