The Lord is my strength and my song,
and he has become my salvation.
One of the best things about being a priest is something you might not expect…If I want to, I get to pick the music. And every Easter, I make one particular request: we have to sing “The Strife is O’er.”
The hymn uses an old 16th century tune called “Victory,” written by Palestrina for use in a sung mass. Victory is a fitting title for a song that uses the imagery of war to describe Christ’s victory over the last enemy, which is death itself. The words were translated from Latin by Francis Potts, a priest and hymnwriter who wrote many hymns before and after becoming deaf in his 50s. The “Alleluia” refrains were added later.
Like many of our Easter hymns, the words of the song are joyful and emphatic:
The strife is o’er, the battle done;
the victory of life is won;
the song of triumph has begun.
Alleluia!
But what makes this hymn so distinctive is the proclamation that it makes in the first line of the first verse: not “Christ is risen” or “Welcome happy morning,” or something to the effect of “Come on, get happy” – But, “The strife is over.” It recognizes from the very start that we poor humans have indeed endured great “strife” and that sometimes we need someone to tell us – in explicit terms – that “the strife is over” before we can even entertain good news.
The hymn unfolds the story so that we can come to joy on our own terms, in our own time. Each verse builds on the last, taking the singer from the battlefield, with its legions of deathly, dark forces, to the grief of Christ’s violent death. Then, down to Hell itself – where Christ frees the lost from their chains. And to Heaven, where all are restored to the paradise of God.
Finally, the hymn invites us to understand that our very participation in the song is evidence of the resurrection, which has freed us to live in the hope of our own new life in Christ…
Lord, by the stripes which wounded thee,
from death’s dread sting thy servants free,
that we may live and sing to thee.
Alleluia!
And then, at the very end of the hymn – having crossed the threshold of the tomb – we find ourselves in the bright presence of the risen Lord. And we can’t help but declare Alleluia to close out the song. (Alleluia means “Sing praise to the Lord.”)
Where the opening Alleluias seem to have been tacked onto the song as an afterthought, the closing ones feel more honest. They give us permission to try out joy for ourselves. We thought death was the end of the story, but it was only the beginning of a new story, one that is freed from the finality of death.
In the unfolding story of resurrection, our whispered alleluias are set loose to become loud shouts. If we let Alleluia into our weary hearts, we will feel it reverberating there, doing its work to untangle the knots of despair. If we let ourselves embody the buoyant freedom that Christ has made real, we won’t be able to stop proclaiming good news with reckless abandon.
If even death has been defeated, nothing can hold us back. Nothing can keep us from writing more verses to our Easter song. The worst has already come to pass. The strife is now over. And no enemy, obstacle, intrusion, or limitation stands between us and abounding, sustaining, ever-expanding possibility.
For 2,000 years, Christians have been proclaiming that a man who was God died and rose again.
This is an absurdity by some people’s reckoning. It seems to them an act of grace to deny the existence of living, breathing hope in the face of life’s suffering.
But Jesus’ resurrection “is a truth universally acknowledged” by those first disciples whose testimony lives on in the writings of the New Testament. The women who visited the tomb in the hour between darkness and dawn found an angel and an empty grave, while the empire’s watchmen quaked in their boots. Then, they ran into Jesus himself and grabbed ahold of his feet, bowing in reverence and holding onto the one they never thought they would hold again. And the men who crouched in hiding in the upper room touched the death-scarred hands of a living Savior.
But that’s not how the story ended. The Gospel of John tells us that: “…there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”
There are many other things that Jesus did, and he hasn’t stopped yet…
Through two thousand years of war and calamity – drought, flood, fire, and plague – as empires rise and fall, the people of God keep encountering the living Christ, just as alive as he was that first Easter morning:
- Responding to our prayers,
- Appearing in our dreams,
- Comforting the dying,
- Soothing the suffering,
- Nourishing us at the table,
- When all hope is lost – a light that shows a way forward.
The world itself cannot contain the books that the people of God could write about the living Christ – showing up in our well-worn stories of death.
Christ is alive – two thousand years of testimony attest to it. And if Christ is alive, though death may be the story of our day, we can turn the page.
And we will find, in the end, that “the strife is over.”
And we are free…Free to live in defiance of the predominant story – which is that death is the end of our story. Free to live like Easter people. Which is to say, to live like Christ, who knows the stench of death and moves toward life anyway.
We are free to add new verses to the song of Christ’s victory over death and the grave. We are free to live, not merely in the memory of those old testimonies, but in our own resurrection stories.
The strife is over. The tomb is empty. And the risen Lord is waiting to meet us on the road.
Alleluia! Amen.
Leah Wise 