“In the Meantime…” (2 Corinthians 5:1-21)

Years ago (in fact it was the first summer after we were married), Karen and I decided that we would spend our summer vacation visiting her relatives and my birthplace here in Nova Scotia. We didn’t have a large salary between us, and we were young and adventuresome, so we decided that it would be a camping holiday. Everything went wonderfully smoothly until we were in Ingonish on Cape Breton Island. It was there that, around two in the morning, the heavens broke loose with a torrential rain. The downpour was unremitting. Pools of water began to develop on the roof of our old canvas tent and the whole structure began to sag. I ran around the outside tightening the guy ropes, but my efforts were of no avail. We rearranged things inside the tent to protect them from the drip-drip-drip that had begun to develop. But by five o’clock and not having slept a wink, we decided that it was time to pack up and abandon ship, so to speak. So, we hopped into the car, drove the two hours to Sydney and waited in the parking lot outside Canadian Tire until opening time. (Needless to say, the sky had already begun to clear, and I don’t think we had another drop of rain for the rest of our time in Nova Scotia!)

Well, I hope my little tale of woe doesn’t discourage any of you who might be thinking of camping this summer! It’s really an attempt to help us dig into the apostle Paul’s words in our passage from 2 Corinthians this morning, where Paul begins by writing about tents: “For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven…”

I probably don’t have to remind you that Paul was a tentmaker by profession. That was how he made his living. And I suspect that he worked hard to make good, quality tents. Although in the climate where he lived, they would have been more to shield from the sun than from the rain. Yet Paul knew that, no matter what kind of material you stitched a tent from, it was not going to last for ever. It might stand up for years, with special care perhaps even a decade or two. But the ravages of the hot Middle Eastern sun would eventually reduce it to worthless rags.

For Paul the tents that he carefully cut and sewed together were a reminder of his own mortality. The author of the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament put it much more grimly when he mused,

Honour and enjoy your Creator while you’re still young,
Before the years take their toll and your vigour wanes,
Before your vision dims and the world blurs
And the winter years keep you close to the fire.
In old age, your body no longer serves you so well.
Muscles slacken, grip weakens, joints stiffen.
The shades are pulled down on the world.
You can’t come and go at will. Things grind to a halt.
The hum of the household fades away.
You are wakened now by bird song.
Hikes to the mountains are a thing of the past.
Even a stroll down the road has its terrors.
Your hair turns apple-blossom white,
Adorning a fragile and impotent matchstick body.
Yes, you’re well on your way to eternal rest,
While your friends make plans for your funeral.
Life, lovely while it lasts, is soon over.
Life as we know it, precious and beautiful, ends.
The body is put back in the same ground it came from.
The spirit returns to God, who first breathed it.
It’s all smoke, nothing but smoke…
Everything’s smoke. (Ecclesiastes 12:1-8, The Message)

Well, if that doesn’t get you down, in recent months the fragility of life and health has been made much more real for us with the advent of covid. Who would have thought less than half a year ago that we would all be attending church on YouTube, followed by a fellowship hour on Zoom, and shopping at stores dressed like bandits?

Promised (1-8)

Well, it wasn’t my intention to put you into a depression this morning! Nor was it Paul’s when he wrote to his friends in Corinth. Because Paul wanted to assure them that this tent, that is our bodies, is not all there is to life—that they will be replaced with something far greater and far more glorious than anything you or I can ever begin to imagine. In Paul’s words, it is “a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands”.

Now the biblical authors in their wisdom (and that includes Paul) do not tell us in any detail what that resurrection life will be like. Suffice it to say that it will surpass anything we have experienced in the here and now. The prophets offer us glimpses in the language of poetry of a place where “the wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, and dust will be the serpent’s food,” where there is no harm or destruction (Isaiah 65:25). The book of Revelation gives us that remarkable picture of a numberless crowd of people “from every nation, tribe, people and language” standing around the throne of the Lamb, while the angels and the heavenly beings cry aloud,

Amen!
Praise and glory
and wisdom and thanks and honour
and power and strength
be to our God for ever and ever.
Amen! (Revelation 7:12)

But it seems to me that apart from a few other images here and there, that is about as specific as the Bible gets. C.S. Lewis was able to put a lot of these biblical pictures together in what I think is a very original way, in a little book entitled The Great Divorce. It is the imaginative story of a group of people who are transported from this world into the next. To his surprise, Lewis finds that the world as he had known it had in reality been little more than shadows and that life in the world to come was far more real and far more solid than anything he might have envisioned even in his wildest dreams.

After he gets out of the bus, he senses that he is in a space with a vastness far greater than anything he has ever experienced before. Even the solar system seems like nothing more than the inside of a room. As his gaze turns to his fellow passengers, he observes that they are transparent like ghosts, that the grass does not bend underneath them when they tread on it. He stoops down to pluck a daisy growing at his feet and, although he tugs at it until sweat pours from his forehead, the stalk refuses to break or even twist. The story goes on and I’ll leave it to you to read it. But the point that Lewis was seeking to make is that the world that awaits us is immeasurably more substantial than anything we have experienced or can even imagine in the here and now.

Practised (9-17)

At this point we need to be clear what Paul (and for that matter the whole Bible) is talking about. It is not just some future experience that awaits us, the proverbial “pie in the sky when I die”. For those of us who have entered a relationship with Jesus Christ it is a present reality. Paul puts it this way in verse 17: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”

So there is a sense in which, through our faith in Jesus Christ, you and I have already begun to set foot in that new creation. To be sure, we are still fallible, sinful and as prone as ever to mess things up (and here I speak from my own experience!). Yet at the same time we are called both as a church and as individual believers to live as inhabitants of that new creation.

“So,” says Paul in verse 16, “from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer.” That is, when we enter a relationship with Jesus, everything takes on a new perspective—particularly the categories by which we are so inclined to define ourselves and other people, whether they be social status or education or looks or sex or race or whatever else.

As I was preparing for this morning’s sermon, I came across some profound words on this subject by James Denney, a Scottish Bible scholar who taught with remarkable clarity. Here is a little of what he wrote more than 125 years ago:

Those who are in Christ have died to the whole order of life in which [people] are judged ‘after the flesh’. Perhaps the Christian Church has almost as much need as any other society to lay this to heart. We are still too ready to put stress upon distinctions which are quite in place in the world, but are without ground in Christ. Even in a Christian congregation there is a recognition of wealth, of learning, of social position, … of race, [all of] which is not Christian… These distinctions … are meaningless in relation to Christ, and ought not to be made… If [these] distinctions … are lost in the common relation to Christ, then life is open to us in all its length and breadth; all things are ours, because we are his. To make them narrows and impoverishes the soul. To be guided by worldly distinctions is to know … people by what is superficial in their nature; but … to look at [them] in relation to him who is Redeemer and Lord of all, is to know all our [brothers and sisters], and to know them not on the surface, but to the heart.[1]

This was the point that Paul was at pains to get across again and again in his two letters to the church in Corinth. For tragically it was a congregation where social status was still all too important for some, where others had not let go of pagan practices, and still others had allowed themselves to slide into immorality.

In contrast to this, Paul writes elsewhere that in the Christian community “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). And in the book of Acts Paul’s companion Luke tells us of the earliest Christian community, where

they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together… They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. (Acts 2:42-47)

Now I’m not saying that we need to mimic that church in every detail, but clearly it was a community in which Jesus was present, where the world to come was visible in the things that are, where God’s new creation was erupting amid the old. And that is what God in Christ is calling you and me to be today. To put it in Paul’s words, we are Christ’s ambassadors.

Purchased (18-21)

But how is all this possible? Paul summarizes it for us in what for me is one of the most profound statements in all of Scripture: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

It was on the cross that Jesus absorbed into himself all the anger, pain, bitterness and division, all the injustice, prejudice, conflict, hatred and evil that have so poisoned and corrupted God’s creation. It was at the cross that God pronounced his definitive “No!” to all that is wrong with the world. And through that cross God has opened the way to the new creation, to our home in eternity.

The day will surely come when you and I will shed this tent of our earthly bodies—when we shall be gathered in that new creation to stand in awe around the throne of the Lamb. But between that time and this God has redeemed us and called us and empowers us to be agents and representatives of that world that is to come—a community where Christ is present and seen and believed through the witness of our lives. May God the Holy Spirit make us equal to that task!

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[1]       Denney, 2 Corinthians, 1894, p. 208

“No Condemnation!” (Romans 8:1-11)

Allow me to begin by saying what tremendous joy it gives me to be worshiping with you “at” Messiah once again. Even though we can’t be with one another physically, it has been a joy for Karen and me to be able to join with you virtually for your online services.

At the same time, I have to say that my heart has bled for you all over the events of recent weeks. Your experience of the novel corona virus has been far more severe than ours out here on the edge of the continent. But in your case to the fear and isolation associated with covid19 have been multiplied several-fold by the brutal death of George Floyd and then by the rioting and destruction that followed it. The sight of familiar and much-loved places lying in ruins has been heartbreaking. Needless to say, you are in my prayers regularly, but how much more in the wake of these dreadful events!

Here at our church in Halifax we have been making our way through the book of Job in recent weeks. In the midst of indescribable suffering—after the loss of property, family, and finally his health, plagued by constant, unabating pain, Job cried aloud to God, “Why?” “Why?” “Why?” Perhaps there have been times when you have found yourself asking the same question.

Last week we heard a powerful sermon from Dave on the apostle Paul’s discussion of the power and inescapability of sin in Romans, chapter 7. As he concludes the chapter, Paul utters what seems his own cry of desperation: “Wretched man that I am!” he exclaims. “Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

By contrast, our passage this morning from Romans 8 begins with one of the most positive affirmations in all of Scripture: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

What Paul gives us here is not a suggestion. It is not a speculation or a theory or an idea. It is an unequivocal statement of absolute fact. I don’t know how to state it more emphatically! I love the way Eugene Peterson translated Paul’s words in The Message: “Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud.”

One of my vivid recollections of our years in the Midwest is of those enormous thunderclouds that would gather and seemingly within minutes could turn a sunny, bright, warm day into the darkness of night—sometimes to the point where the streetlights would go on. Some of you may remember camping one year at William O’Brien Park when there was a tornado warning. We were all instructed to leave our campsites and gather in the restrooms until the storm had passed—hopefully without taking us with it!

What a relief it was when, after some pretty fierce winds and torrential rain and more than a few resounding claps of thunder, the clouds parted and we were able to go back to our tents! Maybe that gives us something of the picture that Paul wants to paint for us here, when he declares, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” The clouds have passed. The rumbles of thunder have receded into the distance. The birds have begun to resume their evening chorus.

The cross of Christ rescues us
from the penalty of sin

But we need to ask ourselves, how is all this possible? If we are incapable of rescuing ourselves (and this was the point that Paul was at pains to get across in Romans 7) what has happened to make the difference? I want to say that there are two things.

The first is that Jesus Christ through his death on the cross has rescued us from the penalty of sin. The story goes all the way back to the second chapter of the Bible, to the day when the Lord God brought Adam and Eve into the garden of Eden. As they gazed on its splendor and beauty, God told them that all this was theirs to tend and to reap. “But,” he warned them, “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Genesis 1:17).

Well, we all know what happens in the next episode in the story. Adam and Eve chose not to put their trust in God’s word. Instead they chose to doubt his fatherly care and good purposes for them. And no sooner had they made that decision than the dark cloud of death began to overshadow them.

The letter of James speaks of the Bible as a mirror that gives us a true reflection of ourselves. As with so many of the stories in the Bible, we fail to see the meaning of the account of Adam and Eve if we do not see ourselves in it. Adam is me. Eve is me. And Adam is you and Eve is you. And the dark cloud that hung over them hangs over me and hangs over you to this day.

Back in the Dark Ages, when I was first ordained, there was a prayer we recited at funeral services that went back to the tenth century. It began like this: “In the midst of life we are in death…” “In the midst of life we are in death…” That is the tragic reality for the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve. So it is that we heard the apostle Paul cry out in chapter 7, “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”

The answer (like the answer always is in church, it seems!) is Jesus. When Jesus hung on the cross and uttered those words, “It is finished,” it was not that his life was ending. No, it was because in offering himself up in that one perfect act of sacrifice, he had vanquished sin and death once and for all. His was a cry not of defeat but of triumph. As Paul wrote elsewhere,

‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’
‘Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?’
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ! (1 Corinthians 15:54b-57)

So it is that, because of what Jesus has done for us on his cross, a shaft of bright sunshine cuts through the clouds that have hung over the world since the days of Eden. Sin and death are defeated enemies.

The Spirit of Christ rescues us
from the power of sin

“Well, John,” you might want to say in reply. “Perhaps that is so. But the fact is that we still sin and we still die. So how have things changed?” Allow me to respond by offering what has been for me a very helpful illustration. It comes from an author and theologian named Oscar Cullmann, who lived at the time of the Second World War.

On 6^th June 1944, 160,000 Allied troops landed on the shores of France. By dawn on that same day thousands of paratroopers had also touched down behind enemy lines, securing bridges and exit roads. It was the largest seaborne invasion in history and the cost in lives was enormous. Yet by the end of the day, all knew for sure that the Nazi hold on Europe had been broken.

However, the Nazi powers did not finally capitulate until eleven months later, on 8^th May 1945, the day we call VE Day (whose 75^th anniversary was celebrated just a couple of months ago). During those eleven months the warfare continued to rage fiercely and the fatality count continued to rise. Yet all along the Allies were certain that victory was in their hands.

That, said Cullmann, gives us something of a picture (albeit very imperfect in many ways) of where we stand as Christians today. Our victory over sin and evil and death was assured at Golgotha. But we still await VE Day—the day when Jesus will return and all creation will be renewed. Between those two days the warfare continues to rage. We witness it all around us in our society today in what can only be seen as a mounting, almost frenzied, opposition to the Christian message.

Yet in spite of all that is going on around us, I want to affirm, both from Scripture and my own experience, that the primary battleground has been and always will be within the confines of each of our own hearts.

In this regard I have often found myself falling back to the words of the celebrated Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. As many of you probably know, he spent eight years living amid the horror and brutality of a Communist prison camp in the Soviet Union. It was out of that experience that he reflected with these words:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

And this is where Paul’s second point comes in.

Just as Jesus gave his life for us on the cross to rescue us from the penalty of sin, so he now gives us his Holy Spirit to rescue us from the power of sin. Paul will have a good deal more to say about the Holy Spirit in next week’s verses from Romans—and I certainly don’t want to steal from next Sunday’s preacher! But in this morning’s verses Paul sets before us a choice. And the options are clear.

In Paul’s own words in verses 4 through 8, we can choose to live according to the flesh; or we can choose to live according to the Spirit. How do live according to the Spirit? Paul gives us three picture-words to make what he is saying clear. The first is to walk—to walk according to the Spirit or, as he puts it elsewhere, to walk in the Spirit. What does it mean to walk in the Spirit? Surely it means having the Holy Spirit as our constant companion moment by moment in whatever circumstances we find ourselves. It is what 17^th-century monk Brother Lawrence called the practice of the presence of Christ—consciously seeking him and keeping him in our company throughout the day.

The second expression Paul uses is to live in the Spirit. That is, to allow the Holy Spirit to be the one who dwells at the center of our lives; the one who gives meaning, joy and purpose to our life; the one who stirs deep within us at the very core of our being, who animates us, who shape our character and makes us who we are.

Thirdly, we are to set our minds on the Holy Spirit: to allow him to guide our thinking. I don’t know about you, but it is very easy for my thoughts to go in all the wrong directions—to think in ways that are selfish, uncharitable, impure and unworthy. How much we need the Holy Spirit to take our thought lives—to purify them and to raise our sights to look upon Jesus, day by day!

Well, Paul has taken us over a lot of ground in this brief passage. One author has said, “It is no exaggeration to say that [these verses] contain a complete picture of the Christian life as Paul understood it.” May God bless you as you seek to live that life and to share fully in Jesus’ victory over sin and death—trusting in his sacrifice on the cross and living day by day in the power of his Holy Spirit!

“In Accordance with the Scriptures…” (1 Corinthians 15:3-4)

As I look at Jesus in the gospels, I find myself again and again being captivated and challenged the remarkable conversations that he had with all kinds of people. Think of the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, for example, and her fascination over Jesus’ offer of living water. Or how about Jesus’ words with the wealthy young man who came to him earnestly seeking the way to eternal life? Then there was the nighttime exchange with Nicodemus, who only grew more and more confused as Jesus told him of his need to be born from above.

There are at least a couple of conversations, however, that the gospels do not let us in on—conversations that I would very much like to have heard. One of them is the one that took place as the sun was setting on that first Easter Day. It is in Luke’s gospel that we read of the two disciples who were sadly trudging their way home from Jerusalem to Emmaus, a distance of about seven miles. As they walked, a stranger came up and began to walk with them. He asked them what was engaging them in such deep and agitated discussion. When they informed him that it was about Jesus, who had been put to death just days before and about whom there were now rumors that he had been seen alive, he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” “Then,” Luke continues, “beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the Scriptures” (Luke 24:25-27).

Every time I read that passage (and it is one of my favorites in all the Bible) I find myself asking with puzzlement and not a little frustration, “What were those truths that the prophets declared?” “What were ‘the things about himself’ in the Scriptures that Jesus interpreted to them?”

The Cross

The same question crops up when we read this morning’s passage from 1 Corinthians. What we have read this morning are the two earliest written accounts of Jesus’ resurrection. Mark likely composed his gospel around the year 65 AD. But 1 Corinthians comes to us from a decade or more before that, around 55 AD—so within less than a generation of the actual events that the gospels portray. There we read the apostle Paul writing, “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures…”

Most of you will recognize Paul’s words from what we recite Sunday by Sunday in the Nicene Creed: “He suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures.” It is highly probable, that just as we recite the creed (many of us from memory), so Paul too was reciting a formula that was already well known to his fellow believers in Corinth. Aside from the events themselves, what is significant about that statement is the repeated phrase “according to the Scriptures”—that both Jesus’ death on the cross and his resurrection from the grave were all laid out centuries before in the pages of the Old Testament.

We can certainly see that in the case of Jesus’ death. The sublime poetry of Isaiah 53 bears eloquent witness to it. Let me read it to you from a contemporary Jewish translation:

He was despised, shunned by men,
A man of suffering, familiar with disease.
As one who hid his face from us,
He was despised, we held him of no account.
Yet it was our sickness that he was bearing,
Our suffering that he endured.
We accounted him plagued,
Smitten and afflicted by God;
But he was wounded because of our sins,
Crushed because of our iniquities.
He bore the chastisement that made us whole,
And by his bruises we are healed.[1]

Or think also of the plaintive cry of Psalm 22:

My God, my God, why have You abandoned me? …
All who see me mock me, they curl their lips, they shake their heads.
‘Let him commit himself to the Lord; let Him rescue him,
let Him save him, if he is pleased with Him.” …
My life ebbs away: all my bones are disjointed;
my heart is like wax, melting within me;
my vigor dries up like a shard; my tongue cleaves to my palate;
You commit me to the dust of death…
I take the count of all my bones while they look on and gloat.
They divide my clothes among themselves, casting lots for my garments…

We do not have time to examine the whole sacrificial system of ancient Israel or the numerous other passages in the Psalms and the Prophets that portend the cross. No, we have no difficulty in affirming with Paul and the creed that “Christ died … in accordance with the Scriptures”.

The Grave

No, the challenge comes with the second half of the statement, that “he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures”. Where do we find this in the Old Testament? In actual fact, if you look at the Old Testament, its perspective on death is bleak at best. By and large for the writers and singers of the Old Testament death is the end of the road. That message comes through loud and clear in verses such as these:

The dead do not praise the Lord, nor do any that go down into silence. (Psalm 115:17)

In death there is no remembrance of you; in the grave who can give you praise? (Psalm 6:5)

Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the shades rise up to praise you? Is your steadfast love declared in the grave, or your faithfulness in the place of destruction? Are your wonders known in the darkness, or your saving help in the land of forgetfulness? (Psalm 88:10-12)

A living dog is better than a dead lion. The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost. Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in the grave, to which you are going. (Ecclesiastes 9:4,5,10)

You can see from passages like these (and there are plenty more) that by and large the Old Testament’s perspective on death was grim indeed. The best you might hope for after you died was to be fondly remembered by your descendants and perhaps in some sense live on in them. This was the position held by the Sadducees in Jesus’ day. More than once they are described as “those who say there is no resurrection”. And they held that position not because they were agnostics or trying to be radical, but because they believed that were being true to the witness of the Scriptures.

The Resurrection

How then, if this was the case, could Paul and the Corinthians confidently profess that Jesus “was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures”? What did Jesus share as he walked along the road to Emmaus with those two disciples? To find the answer we need to take our Old Testaments once again; and if we read them carefully we will begin to see amidst the gloom and the darkness some tiny pinpricks of light.

Beneath the sadness of the Psalms surrounding death for example, there is a quiet but unflagging confidence that what we see from this side of the grave is not the whole picture, that there is more.

My heart is glad, and my soul rejoices; my body also rests secure. For you do not give me up to the realm of the dead, or let your faithful one see the Pit. You show me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy; in your right hand are pleasures forevermore. (Psalm 16:9-11)

I am continually with you; you hold my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me with honor. Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. (Psalm 73:23-26)

Those few tiny hints, that almost imperceptible adumbration, that we find in the Psalms, begins to become a rising chorus as we move into the prophets. From Isaiah we read,

The Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food… And he will destroy … the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. (Isaiah 25:6-8a)

Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise. O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a radiant dew, and the earth will give birth to those long dead. (Isaiah 26:19)

Then there are these words from Daniel:

Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever. (Daniel 12:2-3)

And perhaps clearest of all from Hosea we read,

Come, let us return to the Lord; for it is he who has torn, and he will heal us; he has struck down, and he will bind us up. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him. Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord; his appearing is as sure as the dawn; he will come to us like the showers, like the spring rains that water the earth. (Hosea 6:1-3)

But to my own thinking, some of the most amazing words were spoken by Job. In the midst of his unutterable suffering we find that beneath all his self-pity there is an unshakeable conviction, which he expresses in those profound and moving words,

I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. (Job 19:25-27)

Although those words came from deep within his heart and he could hear them coming from his mouth, Job still found them almost impossible to believe—too good to be true. “My heart faints within me!” he cried. It seems to me that that was the same reaction of the two disciples in Emmaus. They stared back and forth at each other across the dinner table and said to each other in amazement, “Did not our hearts burn within us while … he opened the Scriptures to us?” It was the reaction of the women who first came to the sepulcher that morning. They ran from the tomb, seized by terror and amazement. The men refused to believe them, accusing them of spreading idle tales. And then there was Thomas, who would not believe until he had put his fingers into where the nails had pierced Jesus’ hands.

Yet what they would discover was that suddenly with Jesus’ resurrection all those tiny points of light sprinkled through the Scriptures had come together to form a single blazing sunrise lighting up the whole sky with its brilliance. In a few moments’ time we will have an opportunity to affirm once again our own faith that Jesus has risen. May it not be for us just a matter of words. Rather, may it be with that same sense of amazement, of overwhelming, as those who first heard the news.

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, this God has prepared for those who love him.” “Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Corinthians 2:9; 15:57).

Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

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[1]     Tanakh, The Holy Scriptures, The Jewish Publication Society, 1985

Bible Study: Martha, Mary & Lazarus (John 11:1-44)

Getting started

What hymns and Bible passages would you like included at your funeral? Why these in particular?

Exploring God’s word

1    Read John 11:1-16. What is the state of affairs as the passage opens? How does Jesus respond to the sisters’ message? Why do you suppose he chose not to go and see Lazarus immediately?

2    Move on to verses 17 to 27. What had happened when Jesus arrived at Bethany? With what plea does Martha approach Jesus? What reply does Jesus give her in verse 23? How does Martha understand these words? What do you think Jesus meant by his answer?

3    What does Jesus reveal about himself in verses 25 and 26? How does this address Martha’s statement in verse 24? How does Martha’s declaration of faith compare with Jesus’ own words about himself? What do you think he wanted her to grasp?

4    Continue with John 11:28-44. How does Jesus react when he comes to Lazarus’ grave? What would you say was the cause of these tears? Compare Mary’s meeting with Jesus with that of Martha. What response does this prompt in him?

5    What does Jesus do as he stands at the entrance to Lazarus’ tomb? What does Martha have to say about this? What would you have done in these circumstances? What was the final outcome?

For further thought and action

What important lessons may we learn about Jesus—particularly about aspects of his divine and human nature—from this passage?