The anaesthetist murmured something to me as he hovered over my bed in the small operating theatre. My eyelids closed for a minute and when they fluttered open again he appeared to have morphed into three nurses grinning at me to tell me “it was all over” and that I “had come through”. I asked them where their wings were before they had me wheeled through the narrow corridors, where passers-by were almost pinned to the walls, back to my room where I had time to contemplate before the surgeon (now unmasked) returned to examine his handiwork. I thanked him for taking me to the theatre but apologised for falling asleep during the performance.
This all happened to me last December when I had my
catheter attached to me for dialysis. I thought of what would have happened if
I hadn’t woken up again. Would I have known I hadn’t awoken? Would that have
mattered? Questions kept tickling my mind. It would have been a peaceful way to
have gone back to God and somehow that wouldn’t have bothered me.
With Easter coming upon us, those contemplations
return to me but with the added reminder that Jesus’ own going back to God was
anything but peaceful. The Gospels tell us how he had reminded his disciples
after Caesarea Philippi what his fate would be once he entered Jerusalem but
that he would rise after the third day.
Mind you, these Gospels were written at least a
generation after the event so it is hard to tell how much editorial had crept
in before then. I am sure that this reassuring afterthought wasn’t in the front
of Jesus’ mind on that fateful Friday morning and certainly wasn’t recorded in
any of his sayings from the cross.
But Easter is a package, both the Friday and the
Sunday. One doesn’t make sense without the other. Paul’s account of
resurrection in 1 Cor 15 was written before the Gospel accounts. He couples
Jesus’ death and resurrection with our death and resurrection. Paul does this because
he had been a Pharisee and, unlike the Sadducees, believed in resurrection
according to the last verse in the Book of Daniel.
This was something for me to contemplate having then just
come out of surgery. Have you had this experience? This is not something we
normally chat about over our morning cuppas but I would be surprised if it
hasn’t crossed our minds sometime. Did you, like I did, engage in animated
discussions in your youth groups, as I also did in theological college?
One thing we do know is that is difficult to find
anyone with genuine experience of having come “back from the other side”. No, seances
don’t count.
Yet, right
throughout our New Testament is that hope that once we go to God we are in his
hands and that can be OK. What’s left of our body may be, as we say, “pushing
up daisies”, continuing the recycling of our molecules right through from the
day of the Big Bang far into the unknowable future. But we are more than body
and recycled molecules. What’s left of us somehow remains in the hands of God
and whom better can we trust?
The stories of Jesus, the Risen
Christ, that we read reassure us of that trust even though like the first
disciples we may not always “get it” in the beginning. But these accounts have
kept generations upon generations of disciples going in faith right down to us.
These have kept disciples going when the journey is hard and challenging
because always at the end we have that promise of being forever with God and we
know it took the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ, now risen in us, to open our
eyes to this promise.
Dare to travel through the blackness
of Good Friday into the dawn of Easter hope.
