magnificent march of an army, when a lord takes the field in great triumph with his lifeguards, banners, trumpets, and canisters, so that everyone hears that he is coming. So Christ too will go forth with a shout of command and cause a trumpet to sound which is called the trumpet of God. This will be done by the archangel with his innumerable host of angels, who will be his vanguard or forerunners and set up such a tumult that heaven and earth will be burned in an instant and lie in a heap, transformed, and the dead will be brought together from everywhere. That will be quite a different trumpet and it will sound quite different from our trumpets and canisters on earth. But it will be his own voice and language, perhaps
Hebrew, but even if it is not a particular language, it will be a voice which will wake all the dead.
I like to think that it will be a voice which says: Rise up, ye dead! as Christ called the dead Lazarus from the grave, "Lazarus, come out," (John 11 [:48]) and as he said to the girl and the young man in Matt.
9 [:25] and Luke 7 [:14], "I say to you, arise," accomplishing it with one word, as he spoke to the blind and the lepers: Receive your sight, be clean, etc. Here Paul calls this a cry of command or the voice of the archangel, that is to say, the voice of the archangel will shout so that it will be heard with our ears. And yet it is called a trumpet of God, that is, a trumpet by which God will wake up the dead through his divine power, just as he said in John 5 [:28–29], "The hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come forth, those who have done good, to the resurrection of life," etc. Here he means, not the voice which Christ himself will utter, but the voice of the archangel and the trumpet, which is God's voice or trumpet. Just as here on earth the preacher's voice which proclaims God's Word is not called man's word but God's Word, so here the voice is the voice of the archangel and yet the voice of the Lord Christ, as being spoken by his command and power.
You see, he portrayed how it will happen in such grand terms in order that we should be confident and bold and not be so frightened over those who die, especially those who die in faith in and through Christ, and that we should hope that Christ himself may come and take them, and us with them. That we should hope that the archangel will come first with his trumpets and thousands of angels (like the angel in Luke 2
[:13] who appeared to the shepherds at Christ's birth with the multitude of the heavenly host) and strike up the cry of command, with Christ suddenly striding forth, and afterwards, when we have been raised and caught up into heaven, sing everlastingly: Gloria in excelsis Deo, "Glory to God in the highest" [Luke
This, concludes St. Paul, we should most certainly expect, and comfort one another with these words.
And he describes it so confidently, as if it had already happened. He prophesies of future things still not experienced as if they were history, in order that he may make us as certain as he is, that we may not be frightened of death and disdain all plague, pestilence, and disease, and keep our eyes fixed upon that beautiful picture of what is to come, when out of this present winter in which everything is dead and buried he will make a beautiful, eternal summer and bring forth the flesh, which lies buried and decayed, far more beautiful and glorious than it ever was before, as St. Paul says in I Cor. 15 [:43], "It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power." For dishonor and weakness means that miserable, shameful form of man, than which there is no more shameful, insufferable carcass on earth, which is a great dishonor and shame to this noble creature. But this does not matter, for it will be raised again in honor and in a glorious form, just as a seed which is cast into the ground must decay and become nothing, but when summer comes it comes forth again with beautiful blades and ears of corn.
So we too should hope and shall hope that the merciful God has thus taken our beloved, deceased elector and will raise him up again with Christ, because, after all, we know that he was baptized into Christ, and that he so confessed the gospel and remained steadfast in the Christian confession and died in the same, that I have no doubt that when the trumpet of the archangel is sounded he will joyfully rise in an instant from this crypt and, with us and all Christians, go to meet Christ, shining more brightly than the sun and all the stars. To this end help us, God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.