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The last enemy to be destroyed is death.
Utopia is not a term much used these days, but William Morris, the Victorian poet and designer, believed that he had found it… and so he purchased it. It became his country home for many years, and it was called Kelmscott Manor. Kelmscott Manor lies on the Oxfordshire-Gloucestershire border on the upper reaches of the River Thames, just below the first lock, St. John's, at Lechlade. He might have called it "The Earthly Paradise", but he reserved that name for a cycle of his poems that he began in 1868. He certainly regarded Kelmscott as an earthly paradise – a heaven on earth – and he named his town house in Hammersmith, Kelmscott House, to remind himself of his distant Utopia. The journey up the River Thames between the two, set in futurist utopian terms, was described in his novel, "News From Nowhere". You must buy it and read it – it is still published in Penguin Classics.
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You may visit Kelmscott Manor on Wednesdays and Saturdays throughout the summer months. You will recognise the wallpaper and the tapestries, the Arts and Crafts furniture and many of the paintings, some of which Dante Gabriel Rossetti made of William Morris's wife, Jane, when he wasn't plying her with other less honourable propositions. Kelmscott is, if I may use the term, an utterly magical place. In one of the downstairs reception rooms, hung on the back of a door, is William Morris' overcoat – as though he had just left it there whilst he popped out for a while, and was coming back for it shortly.
Morris will not be coming back for it now, because he died in 1896, but his presence in his beloved house is still signified by that overcoat as much as by all his craft designs. After his death, the local doctor who had attended him was asked what Morris had died of, since he was only sixty-two years old at his passing. The doctor replied that he had died of being William Morris, because he packed into one man's life the life and work of eight ordinary men. The old overcoat looks as though it has been worn by a man like that. Morris' daughter, May, lived at Kelmscott Manor until her own death in 1938, but the overcoat was almost a sacramental presence to her of somebody who had once hoped to be ordained in the Church of England, but who gradually forsook organised religion as he grew older.
We all keep tokens of those whom we love, whether they be dead or still alive. I am hoping to live until I am at least ninety-nine years old, but whatever the case may be, in years to come, some of you may not be able to see an Alfa Romeo or a Vespa pass you in the street without thinking, "I wonder where Phil is now?" But it is when folk have died that tokens of remembrance assume deeply poignant significance. This is partly to do with who owned them, and partly because they remind us of the time when emotionally we believed that the earthly paradise of their owner's presence would never come to an end, but when we intellectually and logically knew that someday it would have to do so.
I can remember the sight of my father standing stolidly on the pavement outside his house as I drove away back to my adult life and work after a weekend visit, and as the years went by I wondered each time whether that would be the last time that I saw him thus. Now I stand on the pavement and wave farewell to my own daughters in similar circumstances, and I am conscious of having on my face the very same expression that my father wore. I wonder if the girls are now thinking the same things that I thought then.
And when it ends, and it was the last time, something seems to have won an irrevocable victory over the ones whom we have loved. They – and we – have been utterly powerless to resist when the earthly paradise was revealed not to have been heaven on earth, but paradise lost.
There is a very famous painting in the Louvre, in Paris, by the French artist of the seventeenth century, Nicolas Poussin, the title of which has found its way into much literature, poetry and other art. It is called, "Et In Arcadia Ego". The Latin title – Latin being Latin – has two very different possible translations. A chapter title in Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited" uses it in one way to mean, "I too was once in paradise", for the chapter that details the early idyllic days of Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte as Oxford undergraduates in the 1920s… all plovers' eggs, Cointreau, and endless summer days.
Poussin's painting uses the title in the darker, more ambivalent sense.
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The scene depicted is of rustic shepherds in Arcadia (Arcady is ever young…) in an earthly paradise. They have discovered a mysterious tomb, but the irony is that paradise should know nothing of death and of sorrow and parting. Hence the alternative meaning of the title – "Even in paradise I am to be found." The message of the painting is quite clear – death is the victor, even in an earthly paradise.
Poussin painted "Et In Arcadia Ego" in 1638, drawing on vaguely classical and mythological inspiration, but in exactly the same year, Rembrandt completed "Christ appearing to Mary Magdalen", drawing on the first Easter Day account of Saint John. The two paintings could not be more different in execution or in message. For Poussin, the tomb is irrevocably sealed, the stone of imponderable weight. For Rembrandt, the tomb is open, and is even attended by two rather languid looking angels, whose expressions even anticipate the twenty-first century response of disaffected youth, "Oh, whatever!" But Christ himself is there, taking Mary Magdalen unawares with his resurrection presence.
For Poussin, the Last Enemy, as Saint Paul called death, does win.
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For Rembrandt, the Last Enemy does not, and ultimately cannot, win. Those two totally contrasting propositions about the purpose of life, its end and its possible future, form the background to the fifteenth chapter of Saint Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians.
In that letter, Saint Paul has been countering a fundamental misunderstanding of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and of its significance for all of us who believe and trust in that gospel: If Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? Yes, of course, Christ was the first over whom death was to have no dominion, but those who belong to him will share in his victory too. At the moment, all human beings have to face the Last Enemy, but their future eternal life in God's presence is assured by the reality of Christ's own resurrection.
When Saint Paul came to write his second letter to Corinth, his doctrine had developed even further, and instead of envisaging an indefinite time through which the dead slept in a sort of metaphysical waiting room of the dead, he came to understand that death removed them from our confines of time and place and gave them immediate access to the eternal presence of God and its transfigured life. They shall be swallowed up by life, he proclaimed triumphantly. That is why, at this time of the year (and, indeed, throughout the whole Christian year), we speak of the Communion of Saints, not of the Communion of the Dead. We celebrate their resurrection life, not their indefinite intermediate waiting.
And do we have a token of the reality of the resurrection life, and of the assurance of the closeness of the Communion of Saints, and of the enduring companionship of those whom we have loved but who have travelled on before us? Most assuredly we do, because Jesus left us those tokens of bread and wine in the sacrament that we call Holy Communion. The saints do not need those tokens any more, because they are in the eternal presence of God, but we still need them as an anticipation and a promise of what is to be.
One day, even the Last Enemy, death itself, will have no place whatsoever in any paradise, earthly or divine, but until that day, we shall treasure our memories of those whom we have loved and love still, and our tokens that remind us of them. We shall share the tokens of bread and wine that Jesus left us to assure us that our loved ones are safe in his keeping. Whether you kneel at this communion rail tonight, or later place your flowers of remembrance upon the waters of the Thames that flow so softly through our town, remember that, although we too shall have to face the Last Enemy one day, just as Jesus did, the Last Enemy's days are numbered. His overthrow has been promised. The ultimate victory belongs to God and to his Son, Jesus Christ. Death shall not win… The last enemy to be destroyed is death.