1 Corinthians 15:53–56
Paul’s great hymn of Easter victory in 1 Corinthians 15 has resounded down the centuries, encouraging every Christian and inspiring some of the greatest poets. Indeed, in this hymn, Paul himself quotes the poetry of the prophets, specifically Isaiah 25:8 where it is written Christ will swallow up death forever. What was still a prophecy for Isaiah had come gloriously true for the apostle who met the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, and it is going to come gloriously true for every Christian. And even now, thanks to Scripture’s witness to the Resurrection, we can taste something of Christ’s victory and exalt in it just as Paul does.
“Death has been swallowed up in victory”! There is a powerful paradox here, a great gospel reversal! For until Easter it was death who did all the swallowing, swallowing up every life, every civilization, swallowing up so many hopes and dreams, breaking so many hearts. But now death itself is swallowed up, and it is life, the resurrection life Jesus shares with us, that swallows death and stands triumphant.
Here is how two of the greatest Christian poets have responded to that victory in Christ. The Scottish priest-poet William Dunbar (1460–1530), writing over 500 years ago, celebrated Christ’s Easter triumph (you can surely hear his joy even through his archaic Scots dialect):
Done is a battle on the dragon black,
Our champion Christ confoundit has his force;
The yetis [gates] of hell are broken with a crack,
The sign triumphal raisit is of the cross.
Those are the opening lines of his poem, and for Dunbar it is not only death that has been defeated but the devil himself, “that old dragon,” and the gates of hell have been cracked right open!
Every verse of this poems ends with a proclamation of resurrection, and the third verse gets right to the heart of the matter:
He for our saik that sufferit to be slane,
And lyk a lamb in sacrifice was dicht,
Is lyk a lion risen up agane.
The one who allowed himself to be slain for our sake, who was sacrificed as a lamb, now rises like a lion! As a medieval scholar, C. S. Lewis knew and loved this poem, and I sometimes wonder if it gave him an idea for a story!
More than a century later another priest-poet, the Englishman John Donne, took inspiration from this same victory hymn in 1 Corinthians for his great sonnet “Death Be Not Proud.” Just as Paul writes, “O death, where is thy sting?” (1 Cor. 15:55, KJV), so Donne follows Paul’s example in addressing death directly, and, as Paul does, openly taunting death. He turns the tables on death, and instead of living in fear or cowering at the prospect of death, he stands up and mocks him, reminding him that he himself will die when death is swallowed up in victory. The poem opens with a bold rebuke:
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
Donne goes on to compare death to sleep, preparing us for the beautiful image of waking to resurrection, which will come at the end of the poem:
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Donne continues by telling death that he is merely a servant, indeed a “slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,” and then comes the triumphant final couplet, two of the most famous lines in English poetry, lines which have given courage and peace in the face of death to so many:
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
May we all rest and rise in the good news of Easter, the news that “one short sleep past, we wake eternally.”
Malcolm Guite is a poet, priest, and life fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. His books include Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year (Canterbury 2012) and Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Hodder 2017).
