Life After Death (3)

LIFE AND DEATH

I have been to Bethany and I have stood where, it is alleged, Mary and Martha once lived with their brother, Lazarus.

I have stood, like Mary and Martha, and looked into the dead face of someone close and dear to me and, in my disappointment, have tried to find someone to blame.

And when all else has failed, I too, like Mary and Martha, have tried to blame God for the death of the one I loved.

"Lord, if you had been here, my brother - my sister, my wife, my husband, my child, my friend - would not have died".

Somehow, we think that God can prevent our loved ones from dying.

And so in our grief; we often shake our fists at God in anger, and remind him of all the good things our loved one has done, and in so doing imply that only those who have done bad things deserve to die.

But who are we to judge? Only God knows the inward secrets of all our hearts, to whose loving mercy we have come to commend the soul of (name) today.

Not surprisingly then, Jesus refuses to get involved in this irrational kind of argument.

Instead, he redirects the attention of Mary and Martha, and the attention of us today, away from the physical death of Lazarus, and of (name) by reminding them, and us, that the departed "will rise again".

Like Mary and Martha, we often assume that Jesus is talking about "the last day", a time in the far distant future.

But he is not!

So Jesus goes on to say to Martha and Mary, and to us today, "l am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die".

In other words, those who believe in God will never really die. True they may die physically, (after all, all of us must die at sometime), but what really matters is that they do not die spiritually. They are forever with God, after their physical death, as much as they were with him before that death.

This is the Christian message of hope, of assurance, and dare I say, of even joy, at an

occasion like this.

And if we too believe this, as did Mary and Martha, then our sadness too, can be turned into gladness, in the knowledge that (name) is now in the nearer presence of God.

And that, my friends, is what is really important when viewing the life of (name) in the

perspective of eternity.