Posted on: 1st April 2021

Someone said to me once, When someone you love dies, you need two good friends.  One who really believes in life after death, and one who absolutely doesn’t.  Because one will comfort you, but the other will grieve with you.   

When I was in parish ministry, visiting families of those who had died, as we prepared the funeral together, I would ask them What do you think happens when you die?  This is an important question to ask; it helps shape the form of a service in a way that speaks to their loss and empowers their experience.  And sometimes I would get the answer, Well nobody’s ever come back to tell us, have they?  This struck me as an odd thing to say to a Christian.  It fills me with something between anger and sorrow now, because it is a sign of our failure.  For the rest of the world, Church is mostly about not believing in evolution and not having sex.   But for the apostles the thing that mattered most was not the keeping of rules, (about which Jesus was pretty ambivalent:) or what happened at his birth (Mark and John don’t even tell us:) or even what his teaching was (Paul is more interested in who He was).   

What mattered most for the first disciples was that someone came back to tell us.  If that happened now, you’d want to make sure the whole world knew about it.  Because it is the most important thing ever.  Once you believe that life goes on after this one is ended, that changes the meaning of everything.  He meant it to.  

So we live as those who believe in the Resurrection to eternal life.  And that means everything.  Happy Easter!  

Written by Roger Quick   

YouTubeChannel::http://www.youtube.com/user/RevRogerQuick