Easter Sunday 2010
April 2010
The greatest desire and need of every living creature is to continue to live.
This is particularly true of human beings.
Long before Christianity or any other of the presently existing religions existed, archaeologists and anthropologists have found plenty of evidence to support this.
The further you go back in history the more you find that ancient structures and monuments are primarily concerned with the fact of death and the desire or hope or belief in a continued existence after death.
Easter; the highpoint of Christian celebrations, is also about death and our hope and belief that we continue to exist after death.
There are plenty of people who deny the existence of God and of life after death. They call themselves atheists.
There are plenty of people who hold that you cannot know or prove that God exists or not. They call themselves agnostics.
I, and most of us here are very aware that you cannot prove (in any existential way) that God exists or does not exist but we still believe in God’s existence and in our continued existence after death. This latter we call faith. We believe that faith is a free gift from God. We would also find the very idea that our life and existence ends with death strange and unacceptable. We would regard life that ends with death as pointless.
Even if it does seem to be self delusion, living with the conviction. and even the hope, that all our relationships and bonds of love do not abruptly end with death is better than facing the black hole of nothingness.
This belief does not necessarily mean that we are better people or live better lives that people who do not believe. This belief is very often a great motivator to becoming better people and living better lives but this is not universally the case. Many believers struggle with living in accordance with their beliefs and often or continually fail, but part of belief is trust in the total goodness of our God and a hope that in some way God will intervene and gather us into His Presence.
This is at the core of our Easter celebrations. Our God, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, willingly took the form of a slave, and taking on the pain, joy, suffering and death, which are part and parcel of my daily life, brought it all into the presence of my God who transformed the whole bundle into Eternal Life. Then He returned to me, risen from death and glorified by my God, to tell me that this is what awaits me also.
So let us rejoice and be glad.