AP

One of the most anguished stories I’ve ever read was about what happened to Martin Luther’s daughter Magdalena. Barely fourteen years of age, she was stricken with the plague.

Broken-hearted, Luther knelt beside her bed and begged God to release her from the pain. When she had died and the carpenters were nailing down the lid of her coffin, Luther screamed out: “Hammer away! On doomsday she’ll rise again.”

A few years ago, Rev. Dr. John McClean, the Vice Principal at Christ College Sydney, tragically lost his sister to cancer. She was a young mum with three young children and, inspired by Luther’s words, this is how he started the sermon at her funeral (it is used with the author’s permission).

Dr. McClean said:

“Death, you must be pleased with your work, especially today. You’ve scored a great prize. You’ll be crowing, or cackling, or whatever your cry of triumph is.

It certainly looks like you won. You must be proud. You’ve torn Anne away from us and cut off so much promise. She had so more to do. She and her husband only had 16 years and had so many adventures still to come; she’d just started raising 3 great children;

her writing and research and teaching were blossoming; she had music to enjoy and friendships to grow and a house to create.

And instead, you — death — have given her two years of pain and now taken her away. You’ve turned the good and beautiful into a waste. We’re left wondering what it’s all for: if a life like Anne’s can just end. What’s left of her work and talents and love. As she watched the pictures before the service and heard about Anne’s life, we remembered all we lost. It hurts, we’re gutted. You’ve won.

It’s not that we haven’t fought. Anne resisted with all she had, and we cheered for her and urged her on. You almost had her when she was 18 — but she got away from you. You came back for another try. She hated it, she resisted but now you’ve got her.

You’re so confident. You’re already eyeing the rest of us, planning, plotting. You shadow us, inevitable and invincible; spreading your dark shadow. This morning, death, I have a message for you.

How things look is not how things are. YOU HAVE NOT WON! You have taken Anne: but her Lord Jesus Christ has risen from dead. You could not hold him and you can’t keep her.”

That is such a great expression of love but also a confession of Christian faith. For we have a hope which is stronger than death. We have a Saviour who has risen again from the grave! And because of this we have a sure and certain hope (Hosea 13:14; Cor. 15:55-58; 1 Thess. 4:13-18). As Job declared:

“I know that my Redeemer lives,

And that in the end he will stand upon the earth.

And after my skin has been destroyed,

yet in flesh I will see God;

I myself will see him

With my own eyes – I, and not another.

How my heart yearns within me!”

(Job 19:25-27)

This is the confidence which every follower of Jesus has. We can talk back to death because death itself has been defeated, and because of that we have nothing more to fear. As the writer of Hebrews explains: ‘Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Heb. 2:14-15).

The Scriptures tell us that there is going to come a day when death will be no more. A time when, as the apostle John writes: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Rev. 21:4).

Because we know all this to be true, we can now face death with such confidence that we can even talk back to it as Luther did when his precious Magdalene died. As both John McClean and Martin Luther declared in their own way: “Death, you are defeated, for the Author of Life has risen again from the grave!” And that means that all who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ will also live, even though they die (John 11:25-26).

– Mark Powell (with John McClean)