“COMING THROUGH EASTER ”

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.