An enduring hope

When we are young, we don’t bother to think much about our eventual demise, assuming that a good half century or more stretches before us, if God is willing. During my own youth, I was more likely to worry about what I would fill those future years with so as not to waste the gifts God had given me. When I began writing this column, I was all of 35 years old, with most of my academic career still lying ahead.

But now that I approach the biblical three score years and ten, my vantage point has shifted. Over the past five years, I have lost both of my parents and both of my parents-in-law. A close friend of mine – younger than I by a good ten years or so – recently lost his wife and his father-in-law in short order. And now we have received the news that my father’s sister-in-law in Cyprus has departed this life.

The specifics of immortality

I find it easier now to recognize that my years are limited, which has made me appreciate Easter to a greater degree than in the past. Easter is the culmination of the church calendar, which runs from Advent to Advent. So much of the Bible is packed into our celebrations of Holy Week and Easter. We read through the events recorded in the gospels surrounding Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, his last supper with his disciples, his trial under Pontius Pilate, his crucifixion and burial, and his resurrection from the dead.

God’s people of the old covenant seem not to have looked forward to a personal resurrection, but to a shadowy sub-existence in Sheol, the abode of the dead (e.g., Job 7:9). The pagan Athenians listening to Paul at the Areopagus laughed at his mention of Jesus’ resurrection (Acts 17:32) but likely understood Plato’s doctrine of the immortality of the soul, a pseudo-hope that has seeped into far too many Christian funerals in some traditions. Then we had the modernist 20th-century theologians, most notably Rudolf Bultmann, who downgraded Christ’s resurrection to a mere myth.

But the apostle Paul will have none of that: “if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:13-14).

Sure promises

We can take comfort in Jesus’ resurrection, which is the basis for an enduring hope that we too shall be raised from the dead in God’s good time. From our current limited perspective, we cannot easily make sense of this. Nothing in our experience provides a precedent on which to draw. Except, of course, that Jesus himself was raised and that, as his redeemed ones still seeing through a glass darkly, we can believe the sure promises of God.